GeOW and R6:V - UE3.0 Problem?

[rounin]

I was reading the review of Rainbow Six Vegas on Hard Console and found they discovered some pretty glaring technical issues :

This problem has reared its ugly head again with Rainbow Six: Vegas leading us to believe it is a specific issue with the Unreal Engine 3.0. The problem is almost identical to the Gears Of War issue, except that sometimes the textures will fail to load altogether and stay that way until you reload the map. Sometimes you will even need to restart your game to resolve the issue.

This missing texture issue happened, at various points in the game, on all the Xbox 360s we have here.

To prove their point, they provided 3 screenshots and here are 2 of them:



It reminded me of the issues I brought up with the game Gears of War back when it was released. Back then, some people wouldn't accept that there were problems with the game's textures and I received quite some bad feedback for my criticism (I'll find out who you are eventually .... ) while some others accepted that there were problems. Here is an example of one of them



Here are some examples provided by H-Console :



This is what they had to say on the issue in their review.

There are times in the game where it can take 15 – 30 seconds for textures to appear in various parts of the game. It only happens when a level is first loading but it is pretty annoying and looks awful. We are fairly certain this is not an isolated incident because the problem popped up on all three consoles we played on.

The question is, what is the problem thats causing this to happen? Is it as HardOCP speculated, and is a bug within the UE3.0 (I'm not sure if this happens in other UE3.0 games that are out?)?

 

[Farid]

It's not a "bug", per see, it's just that the developers are pushing the LOD and the texture streaming capabilities of the engine too far.
It requires fine tuning, and the use of clever tricks to hide the load times (streaming textures), more than anything.

 

[scooby_dooby]

It's not a "bug", per see, it's just that the developers are pushing the LOD and the texture streaming capabilities of the engine too far.
It requires fine tuning, and the use of clever tricks to hide the load times (streaming textures), more than anything.

Well it seems like a bug to me. If working properly, the game should not leave the load screen until the textures have loaded. This isn't something that happens when moving through a level, only when loading a previous save or checkpoint (at least in gears).

I saw it in GoW, but for me it never lasted anywhere near 10-15 seconds, more like 2-3. I think I saw it about 3-4 times throughout the SP campaign.

 

[Turok]

Yep, it just seems like a delay in the texture streaming. Halo 2 and Chronicles of Riddick had it too.

 

[AlNom]

It's just an issue with any aggressive streaming. See Halo 2, which was much worse than Gears as far as LOD loading goes. I don't see why such attention is warranted; it's nothing new. Of course, it wouldn't be such a terrible idea to introduce a conditional statement in their streaming method for "revert to saved checkpoint" or "dying and reverting to saved checkpoint".

Even then, I haven't seen that issue very often in the single player campaign. Splitscreen is where I see it more often (between level switching). There just needs to be more data redundancy to reduce seek times.

Or maybe MS needs dvd roms with multiple lasers for reading.

 

[Rainbow Man]

I personally haven't seen this happen..

Then again first time I popped in the disc my 360 wanted to download a patch. Maybe it was to fix this?

Peace.

 

[AlNom]

Perhaps your DVD drive is better? Halo 2's streaming issues were worse on earlier Xbox units compared to later ones and even on 360.

 

[V3]

This problem is very minimal, probably can be solved with fast HDD.

 

[almighty]

Its the same LOD pop-in issue that Killzone on PS2 has aswel.

 

[_phil_]

in GeOW ,it happened very often when reloading a checkpoint.It looks like the engine is streaming mipmaps by the smaller end (the last one first) .

 

[Graham]

Yup.
The game initially just loads very low detail textures for all surfaces, then gradually streams in higher res versions of those that are closest to you. It will also dump highest level textures as you move away from them. You can see it happen in multiplayer, when switching camera.
Given textures are the biggest asset, I think it's a reasonable tradeoff. I'd much rather be playing a low detail version of the game for the first 10 seconds than to have it still at a loading screen during that time.

Gears has fantastic load times as it is. Really. It does.

If they say it takes 15-30 seconds for the textures to all load in, well, thats 15-30 seconds less load time. You can't magically transfer ~400mb of data on a whim.

As for textures not loading at all, I've got both vegas and gears, and I've never had that happen. - Although pre-first-patch vegas was horrifically buggy, so it may have happened back then. I did sometimes get the entire *map* not load in.. I'd just spawn and fall.

 

[Gubbi]

As for textures not loading at all, I've got both vegas and gears, and I've never had that happen. -

It helps if you haven't smeared your game DVD with polish sausages.

Halo 2 popin could reduced a lot by cleaning the game DVD once in a while

Cheers

 

[Qroach]

I've seen this happen in gears of war, but it would only last for a second or two after loading a saved game. All the textures would load up as required.

 

[slider]

Can't say I've ever noticed it. Probably cos I was too engrossed in freaking out.

The "problem" obviously exists though. Is it likely to have been a design decision? Like a cost/benefit decision? Or a QA issue? I'd find it being a QA issue hard to believe.

 

[AlNom]

As has been mentioned above, one instigator of the issue is a dirty disc. That will just prevent proper reading/copying of the files so it'd take longer to load the higher resolution textures. With the different DVD drives, it's not unreasonable to see the issue pop up with the 'inferior' drive (just as was the case with Halo 2, IME).

It is certainly a design decision to let the user have control with minimal graphics before the prettier stuff gets loaded. I don't see it as a big problem because you probably wouldn't be fighting immediately upon loading anyway; there'd be some distance to walk in which case there'd be a decent amount of time for the higher resolution textures to load.

The solution is clearly a 150GB Raptor.

 

[archangelmorph]

As for textures not loading at all, I've got both vegas and gears, and I've never had that happen. - Although pre-first-patch vegas was horrifically buggy, so it may have happened back then. I did sometimes get the entire *map* not load in.. I'd just spawn and fall.

I can't believe sh** like this didn't get picked-up in QA..

That's quite embarrasing..

Perfect example of why patches are evil and developers should make sure games work properly before shipping and not relying too much on them (think about all those poor folk without internet connections for pete's sake!!)

 

[Cheezdoodles]

I can't believe sh** like this didn't get picked-up in QA..

That's quite embarrasing..

Perfect example of why patches are evil and developers should make sure games work properly before shipping and not relying too much on them (think about all those poor folk without internet connections for pete's sake!!)

Im actually certain Ubi knew of all the bugs mentioned here, but they wanted to ship before xmas.

 

[Tap In]

Yup.
The game initially just loads very low detail textures for all surfaces, then gradually streams in higher res versions of those that are closest to you. It will also dump highest level textures as you move away from them. You can see it happen in multiplayer, when switching camera.
Given textures are the biggest asset, I think it's a reasonable tradeoff. I'd much rather be playing a low detail version of the game for the first 10 seconds than to have it still at a loading screen during that time.

Gears has fantastic load times as it is. Really. It does.

If they say it takes 15-30 seconds for the textures to all load in, well, thats 15-30 seconds less load time. You can't magically transfer ~400mb of data on a whim.

thanks, makes sense

 

[Johnny_Physics]

This happened to me at the exact same re-spawn point in R6, but that was the only time I saw it happen. I think it looked quite nice and stylish in it's own way when you went further to the left in that section
I also saw some low-res textures streaming in when re-spawning at some points in Gears of War, but I really don't have anything against it if it means I don't have to see any loading screens.

But as everyone else already said, it's obviously just an issue with streaming in the new content.

 

[Gubbi]

Im actually certain Ubi knew of all the bugs mentioned here, but they wanted to ship before xmas.

But they aren't bugs.

As a developer you have the choice of letting people wait until the whole shebang has loaded (loading screen), or load stuff in a particular order and start as soon as possible with degraded graphics.

Since I detest loading screens, I think they made an excellent trade off.

Cheers