30 seconds for a textures to load?!!!
Don't they test these games out before they sell it?
A thread/article a while ago quoted a dev from Just Cause saying you can expect 10mb/sec best from the 360s drive. I questioned this when I first read it.. it sounds too low. But think about it. Assume 2x compression, and it will take at least 25 seconds to fill up 500mb of ram. Given gears drops highest res textures when you move away from them, you can assume it's hitting that limit pretty much as soon as you spawn. 25 seconds is a very, very long time when your staring at a loading screen, yet the map transitions in Gears multiplayer are sometimes as little as 2 or 3 seconds - which is a remarkable achievement - you just don't get the full detail right away.
So it is entirely reasonable.
As for the 'white wall' effect with no textures at all, I actually got that today in vegas. As soon as the map loaded I changed the camera to follow a player on the other side of the map - hence no textures had been loaded for there yet.
I can't believe sh** like this didn't get picked-up in QA..
That's quite embarrasing..
Unfortunately for vegas that was a minor bug. The original release, to me, is one of the buggiest console releases in my memory. Everything from lockups during the game or loading, AI simply 'turning off', the cover system entirely not working. And the *horrible* repeating gun bug - where a gun would keep making firing sounds when someone was dead, at full volume, audible throughout the map. This last bug has only *just* been fixed in the last few days. Also blatantly dumb things, like spectators getting kills/points, voice chat not working... Even single player, the final mission it's possible (in more than one way) to bypass trigger points so the enemies don't spawn. There are two paths to the rocket, but only one path will trigger the countdown (!). I had to reload several times during the campaign because something didn't script correctly. The list really does go on and on, I can already think of a number others - but are harder to explain... The game was horribly rushed.
Before the first patch I found I could play about 3-4 matches online before I had to restart the game. It was a joke.
The one that sums it up for me was that dedicated servers showed an extra player. So somewhere in the code, they had meant to say 'players -= 1' when the host was dedicated, but it ended up as 'players += 1' instead. So a 10 player game was listed as 12. How on earth this *possibly* got past QA I don't know. You still see matches listed in the wrong category, wrong player counts, 10/4 players, unknown map, etc.
The first patch
fix list (I think there are a lot more though, eg the AI/cover issues I mentioned got fixed in this patch). There have been two patches since.
