Texture/layer delay?

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007

CAGiversary!
Alright, so I finally got around to picking up a 360 last Monday. Thus far, I've beaten Lost Planet, BioShock, and just started Mass Effect about 3 hours ago.

My question is... is it normal for textures to have a delay on showing up? For instance, in Mass Effect, there was a scene of Nihilus hiding behind a crate, but the white on his face didn't fully appear right away. It's only something like a second or less, but it's still noticeable. It happens with clothes, walls, etc. Sometimes it will only be one layer, sometimes more. I noticed it a bit in BioShock, too, though not nearly as much.

So, basically, is that normal, and simply a consequence of the hardware pushing the graphics, or not?

Regardless, Mass Effect is great. So, so great.
 
I've played a bit of Bioshock, but not the other games, but I' haven't expeirenced anything like that on the other games I have nor Bioshock
 
New texture technology... I think I saw it first in Chronicles of Riddick...

I forget what its called, but its loaded after the polys.

Halo 2 and Mass Effect are the worst I've ever seen.
 
Ah... ok. As long as it wasn't just me. I admit, this was really a question about Mass Effect, since the BioShock stuff wasn't all the time, just when there seemed to be a lot going on.

It's such a shame with ME, too, since it's such a beautiful game. Seeing the layers pop up one at a time on the characters does detract from it a bit.

Thanks!
 
I believe this was covered in the Mass Effect thread and it turned out to be the Unreal Engine. :whistle2:k I'm not 100% positive though hehe.

Edit: The same thing happened to me in Mass Effect too.
 
Its called bump mapping. The reason why you see the bump mapping textures randomly load as your playing is because your going into the next section of the level, they can't just have bump mapping already loaded in the whole level while your playing. Xbox 360 was originally going to have 256mb of ram, but than Epic games convinced microsoft to add another 256mb for future games and specifically Gears of War to address this issue.

Its the current limitations of the Unreal 3 engine, and will probably be tweaked better on future games, or until the next mapping system comes out.
 
I keep seeing it in Forza, myself. Sometimes the pre-drawn skid marks take a little while to appear.
 
The problem is pronounced with Mass Effect. Regrettably, you have to live with the issue. I have read that it is due to Mass Effect not using the hard drive to cache textures.
 
It's the trade off you face when developers can't use the hard drive to cache expensive game data like textures.

UE3's texture streaming system is actually pretty nifty. Sadly when these games have to constantly fetch textures from a disc, it creates delays. Developers can either make you stare at a loading screen till enough of the texture data is loaded into RAM, or just shoot you off into the world while it continues to fetch data.
 
I have the same issues in both Bioshock and Mass Effect as well as small amounts in a few other games. I have pretty much gotten used to the situation by this point.

It generally takes anywhere for 5 - 10 seconds in Mass Effect for the textures to catch up. Bioshock was a different story. For me, some of the textures never popped in or only popped in after several minutes.
 
I think the reason it's so noticeable in Mass Effect is because of how pronunced it is in the 'cutscenes'. I understand that they're done real-time, but I would've thought that, as a developer, you'd maybe want to at least try and fix it there.

If it only happened during actual gameplay, it wouldn't be nearly as distracting.

Either way, thanks for the info. :)
 
Call MS and bitch to them about making the core system. That's why the HDD can't be used to cache data to the extent needed.
 
[quote name='Kaijufan']Sadly texture pop in seems to be one of the major problems with the Unreal 3 engine.[/quote]

Honestly though, I'd rather have that issue than chronic slowdown or environment size limitations. Pop-in is pretty minor on the annoyances list.
 
If textures didnt load after the fact, your 360 would either freeze up, or the textures would not load at all.

Its a needed feature to help ease the loading process.
 
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