255 réponses à ce sujet

[JackDresden]

Dark83 wrote...

Andreas Papathanasis wrote...

There's no known memory leak as far as I know.

I haven't followed this thread, but I caught this when I glanced at it out of curiosity.
I hope you're simply out of the loop of the team making patches, because it'll be a punch in the gut for a lot of us to be told Bioware isn't even aware of the massive loading slowdowns over time. If you just go back and forth between three areas repeatedly (trying to collect random encounters, for example), it's very noticable - especially on map travel.

The difference of 5 seconds per transistion to 5 minutes.

I have never had any loading slowdown after playing the game for up to 9 hours at a time, I suggest the leak might be in one of your drivers that the game uses. You sometimes forget how many absracted drivers a modern game runs on.

Also from a developer point of view there is a big difference between a known and identified memory leak and some players saying load screens slow down over time must be a memory leak. Doesn't mean there isn't one just that there isn't one that is currently identified.

[NewYears1978]

Xaltar81 wrote...

etherhonky wrote...

i know nothing of texture work. from what little i pretend to know, an artist creates the assets for a given item, for example "boulder_1" or "dungeon_wall_2" etc... wouldnt increasing the resolution of that given item help its res out in and of itself, and then repackaging them?

In a word no. Basicly all you will be doing is scaling the existing texture. Say a 256x256 "upresed" to 512x512 still only contains the detail of a 256x256 only now its blurred and crap looking. What most amatures do then is throw massive ammounts sharpening on the image to make it look sharp again. This does not look good nor is it a high res texture.

To truly upres a texture you have 2 choices:

1. Most common, make it from scratch with a new source image being sure it tiles correctly and looks close enough to the original that it does not conflict with the existing assets.

2. Not as applicable to environment work, up the resolution of the existing texture to the size desired and then basicly paint in the details again with pixel brushes and the like or, use overlays to add detail to the texture that looks good.

As you can see, both of these options are time consuming. Bioware might well release a higher res version of the game in years to come, maybe a GOTY enhanced edition or the like but you have to understand that its not cost effective to simply release it as a patch or DLC.

I hope this makes a few things clearer for those of you that don't know much about the guts of game design. I say again, the mods will come and DAO will get a facelift, just give it time.

I am actually quite aware of all of this..the thing is..the textures should never have had to be that bad in the first place.  In fact..we have very old screenshots of early development where they DIDN'T look this bad.  It was clearly an issue with crashes and performance issues so they had to dumb down the environment textures...thus making the game look much worse.

There were quite a few comparison topics about this over at the old forum..with pics and links...and they were pretty clear in my eyes.

I honestly think the engine is poor..and while I am not a programmer by any means..have read some things (not that that means they are true) indicating that the engine is the fault..

Claiming that the reason for the low textures if ro better cross performance on all video cards is ludicrous though...that's the purpose of the "low" "medium" "high" textures and graphic settings.  So if it was truly only an issue of performance across platforms they wouldnt have been dumbed down for the "high" setting..only the low or medium... so really to me..it just makes no sense.  There seems to be more underlying problems that aren't wanting to be admitted...that's how it feels to me anyways.

I have moved on now..I had hoped to play DA:O for awhile, make mods and play mods..and let it consume much of my time..but all the negativity and lack of support and issues have just really turned me off (not that anyone here cares..and I am aware..just speaking my mind and frustration)

[JackDresden]

yoda23 wrote...

Why doesn't Bioware simply sell a higher texture pack as a down-loadable add-in? Personally, I am running 4GB of VRAM (GTX285 FTW in Sli & a GTS 250 Running Physx) and would shell out a few bucks to really make the game scream. Don't get me wrong, the art is wonderful as is, but could be so much crisper on a higher end system. No sense dumbing down the art for legacy systems when I would wager there are several high end pc users out there you could probably make a buck off of... imho.

It's mostly a production cost to potential market decision I imagine, I mean I have a GTX 295 so could use it too. But the problem is we are a very small segment of the overall market and redoing all the background textures for a game of this size is not trivial in terms of time and cost. I think they'd rather spend those resources on DLC that could sell to a much larger potential market.

[ThePeregrinati]

Dark83 wrote...

Andreas Papathanasis wrote...

There's no known memory leak as far as I know.

I haven't followed this thread, but I caught this when I glanced at it out of curiosity.
I hope you're simply out of the loop of the team making patches, because it'll be a punch in the gut for a lot of us to be told Bioware isn't even aware of the massive loading slowdowns over time. If you just go back and forth between three areas repeatedly (trying to collect random encounters, for example), it's very noticable - especially on map travel.

The difference of 5 seconds per transistion to 5 minutes.

I can't reproduce that. I played for 6 hours straight yesterday and didn't notice any slowdown at all.

[bjdbwea]

Andreas Papathanasis wrote...

There's no known memory leak as far as I know.

Then what else is the reason for the loading times bug?

Modifié par bjdbwea, 21 décembre 2009 - 09:49 .

[Destructo-Bot]

According to the Steam Hardware Survey, ~70% of PCs have 512MB or greater VRAM. 15% being at 1GB, 256MB at 20% , and 512MB at 40%.

Modifié par Destructo-Bot, 21 décembre 2009 - 10:25 .

[CoS Sarah Jinstar]

NewYears1978 wrote...

CoS Sarah Jinstar wrote...

NewYears1978 wrote...

Would be nice to at least get official word from devs on it..not all hush or brushed off.
Because of this I have completely uninstalled DA:O and moved on. Yes I got a good 85 hours out of it and loved the game. It was amazing..don't get me wrong. But I have been severely turned off to BioWare now and have decided not to even buy Mass Effect 2 which I was previously very pumped about.

Your hang up over some not so high res texturing is the game is nothing short of astounding. You put 85 hours into the game and enjoyed it yet you're writting off the entire studio due to some low res textures? Thats an interesting form of logic there New.

Might sound silly..but there's logic to it in my mind.  It's not about the enjoyment I did have with the game but about the trust issues I have with the company over the shoddy-ness and bad support that has been plaguing this game..

Anyone in their right mind who looks at those 256x256 textures such as the wagon..and say they look fine..is simply crazy.  It's clear there is a flaw in the engine if it can't handle at least some average textures on the environments...

Too late to really debate it..but I have my reasons and they are valid..I'm not the best debater..but I know what I am thinking.

Simple fact is some textures are even MISSING.  Take for instance the one under the logs in a campfire..it's missing from the pack.  Then you have the 256x256 ones such as the wagon, many wood textures..etc that are clearly being overstretched,blurry and poor.    Then I have a devway back who admitted there was missing textures and that there seemed to be a problem with the textures that were released..who then went hush hush after that (because was probably instructed to do so and because the textures thing wasn't a concern)..

Anyways..Im typing incoherently..it's really too late..but yes, I have good reason...my enjoyment of the game was severely damaged due to the memory issues and the textures and there's really no reason for it in a game in production for 5 years.

To be honest I didn't personally go out of my way to look for low res textures and rather just enjoyed the characters, story, and a pretty epic game. Take into consideration the game was 5+ years in development, was built on tech that was no where near state of the art at the time of release, and at one or more points during its dev cycle was put on the back burner due to other projects going on within Bioware.

Its fine to say "hey I'm a graphics **** and the game sucks because it didn't have Crysis type of visuals" but thats not really what you're saying.

[Clammo]

Andreas Papathanasis wrote...


There's no known memory leak as far as I know...

I can only hope you're a little out of the loop with regard to known problems with this game and that's not an official stance from Bioware? The ever increasing loading times the more areas are transitioned/duration of playtime is just about the most commonly complained about technical problem with the game.

[J.O.G]

And you think this is actually caused by chunks of memory that aren't properly unasigned, and unclean base level programming that leaves variables cluttering the stack? Couldn't it maybe be a problem with a HD-cache that tries to keep a lot of stuff in memory, for your loading-speed convenience, but fails when you repeatedly reload the same areas?

Modifié par J.O.G, 21 décembre 2009 - 10:48 .

[Statue]

I'm not very clued up on how texture packs are made, but I do grab them whenever I can. Quarl's Texture Pack (I think it was called that) made Oblivion look so much better, and I'd certainly instant-grab anything as wonderful as that if a clever texturey modder made it.

The thing I'm not sure I'm understanding is this: what is there about the textures in DAO that means they couldn't be improved by modders in the same way the Oblivion ones were? Am I understanding the issue correctly in thinking a) it would take *more* work because of starting off with half of the textures at lower-res than the others and that that is frustrating because there are signs that BW have some textures that aren't so low-res'd, which if they were made available for modders would speed up and ease the texture reworking for a high-res mod?

Just so I can understand the issue better

Modifié par Statue, 21 décembre 2009 - 10:46 .

[blaalindorm]

bjdbwea wrote...

Andreas Papathanasis wrote...

There's no known memory leak as far as I know.

Then what else is the reason for the loading times bug?

Indeed.  Loading times get worse as time goes on.  Loading times are slow enough as it is as well.

Though, I don't really care anymore, stopped playing DAO half-way through and moved onto more modern games.

[Allen63]

The low resolution textures are in keeping with the lack of detail in the 3D landscapes and dungeons. And, possibly, Bioware thought detail was not needed because players would be using a very high up 3d person view to play.



Anyhow, I like to see things in close -- so, more detail in textures and items would be a nice thing to have.



Meanwhile, DA plays fine on max settings on my system.

[ToJKa1]

No memory leak? So the ever increasing loading times are a feature then? It is a nicer feature than Bethesda's assured-crahs-on-exit-and-whenever-it-feels-like-it, but i could do without.

Of course, this is a handy tool to manage playing time, play dragon age until the loading times become unbearable, and then Oblivion until it crashes

Modifié par ToJKa1, 21 décembre 2009 - 01:31 .

[enderandrew]

ToJKa1 wrote...

No memory leak? So the ever increasing loading times are a feature then? It is a nicer feature than Bethesda's assured-crahs-on-exit-and-whenever-it-feels-like-it, but i could do without.

Of course, this is a handy tool to manage playing time, play dragon age until the loading times become unbearable, and then Oblivion until it crashes

I played through the entirety of the game without long load times or memory spiking. I played hours at a time.

If there is a "leak", I fear it is a conflict with a driver, or a specific version of a library. It isn't affecting everyone.

I've also never once had a crash with Oblivion.

I seem to have quite a bit of stability when playing games. That may be partially to having a nice gaming case (Antec 900) that is nice and cool. It may be because I make sure there are no viruses, etc. on my computer, and I don't have any unncessary background processes running that could interfere with the game.

[ToJKa1]

Well, my bethesda games propably crash due to the quite extensive mod load order (nearly 200 for Oblivion ), but last night when i stopped playing, it took atleast three minutes for the game to load the Carta hideout. I also have a less than a week old Windows 7 install with all the latest drivers, sure it could be my system's problem, but everything else works fine.



Well, like with the textures, i can live with it.

[Xaltar81]

Wagon fix

Not the greatest but better than it was.

[Darth_Shizz]

Xaltar81 wrote...

Wagon fix
Not the greatest but better than it was.

Good stuff. Only one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight textures to go man! 

Modifié par Darth_Shizz, 21 décembre 2009 - 02:40 .

[EJ42]

CoS Sarah Jinstar wrote...

NewYears1978 wrote...

Would be nice to at least get official word from devs on it..not all hush or brushed off.
Because of this I have completely uninstalled DA:O and moved on. Yes I got a good 85 hours out of it and loved the game. It was amazing..don't get me wrong. But I have been severely turned off to BioWare now and have decided not to even buy Mass Effect 2 which I was previously very pumped about.

Your hang up over some not so high res texturing is the game is nothing short of astounding. You put 85 hours into the game and enjoyed it yet you're writting off the entire studio due to some low res textures? Thats an interesting form of logic there New.

Yes!

It's exactly that level of crazy that makes me worry that these people are allowed to walk freely on the streets.

[EJ42]

CoS Sarah Jinstar wrote...

NewYears1978 wrote...

CoS Sarah Jinstar wrote...

NewYears1978 wrote...

Would be nice to at least get official word from devs on it..not all hush or brushed off.
Because of this I have completely uninstalled DA:O and moved on. Yes I got a good 85 hours out of it and loved the game. It was amazing..don't get me wrong. But I have been severely turned off to BioWare now and have decided not to even buy Mass Effect 2 which I was previously very pumped about.

Your hang up over some not so high res texturing is the game is nothing short of astounding. You put 85 hours into the game and enjoyed it yet you're writting off the entire studio due to some low res textures? Thats an interesting form of logic there New.

Might sound silly..but there's logic to it in my mind.  It's not about the enjoyment I did have with the game but about the trust issues I have with the company over the shoddy-ness and bad support that has been plaguing this game..

Anyone in their right mind who looks at those 256x256 textures such as the wagon..and say they look fine..is simply crazy.  It's clear there is a flaw in the engine if it can't handle at least some average textures on the environments...

Too late to really debate it..but I have my reasons and they are valid..I'm not the best debater..but I know what I am thinking.

Simple fact is some textures are even MISSING.  Take for instance the one under the logs in a campfire..it's missing from the pack.  Then you have the 256x256 ones such as the wagon, many wood textures..etc that are clearly being overstretched,blurry and poor.    Then I have a devway back who admitted there was missing textures and that there seemed to be a problem with the textures that were released..who then went hush hush after that (because was probably instructed to do so and because the textures thing wasn't a concern)..

Anyways..Im typing incoherently..it's really too late..but yes, I have good reason...my enjoyment of the game was severely damaged due to the memory issues and the textures and there's really no reason for it in a game in production for 5 years.

To be honest I didn't personally go out of my way to look for low res textures and rather just enjoyed the characters, story, and a pretty epic game. Take into consideration the game was 5+ years in development, was built on tech that was no where near state of the art at the time of release, and at one or more points during its dev cycle was put on the back burner due to other projects going on within Bioware.

Its fine to say "hey I'm a graphics **** and the game sucks because it didn't have Crysis type of visuals" but thats not really what you're saying.

It's people like NewYears1978 who make games suck ass.

Studios become so consumed with how their game is going to look that they completely forget that it's actually supposed to include meaningful gameplay.

Games like Zork, the original Space Quest, and even Asteroids and Pac-Man continue to be very good games.  I suppose NewYears1978 would say that a movie sucks just because he/she saw it on DVD instead of Blu-Ray.

I hate people like that.

Modifié par EJ42, 21 décembre 2009 - 03:07 .

[ZeroMystic]

I see again as usual people here are using a thread as an excuse to bash someone who posts up something negative about Dragon Age instead of having any form of inelligent discussion because far be it for anyone to have a negative opinion. Seriously pretty much every single reply in here says the TC sucks or has issues and for what purpose.

I really didn't read even read through all of this thread due to everyone constantly bashing the OP with un-neccessary comments

Anyway staying on topic I myself have never had problems with missing textures or not having good graphics, but then again I do not care, if the game is playable then that is what matters to me.

Just a quick question to the OP are you using ATI instead of Nvidia because that does cause a problem on some games. Risen had this happen to it.

Modifié par ZeroMystic, 21 décembre 2009 - 03:24 .

[Darth_Shizz]

EJ42 wrote...
It's people like NewYears1978 who make games suck ass.

Studios become so consumed with how their game is going to look that they completely forget that it's actually supposed to include meaningful gameplay.

Games like Zork, the original Space Quest, and even Asteroids and Pac-Man continue to be very good games.  I suppose NewYears1978 would say that a movie sucks just because he/she saw it on DVD instead of Blu-Ray.

I hate people like that.

Except that's not what he's saying...not really. Come down off that high-horse.

his problem is more to do with issues not being addressed. Weeks back, another dev mentioned a problem with the correct textures not being included at shipping (at least a great number of people have affirmed this). This indicated that something was not working as intended...due to either oversight or bug. Everything then went silent for weeks, despite dedicated modders such as 4aces only actually requesting answers, rather than making demands for high-res textures. Now, we've had another biowarian state in this thread that this was all implemented intentionally, and that everything is working as intended (even just skimming through the tech support forums for 5 minutes, you'll find plenty to contradict this statement).

Perhaps you'd just like to dumb it down to the point where it sounds as if people want pretty baubles (to fuel your own pointless rant no doubt), but really, that's not the case at all. 

Modifié par Darth_Shizz, 21 décembre 2009 - 03:26 .

[ZeroMystic]

Edit and moved below

Modifié par ZeroMystic, 21 décembre 2009 - 04:06 .

[EJ42]

Darth_Shizz wrote...

EJ42 wrote...
It's people like NewYears1978 who make games suck ass.

Studios become so consumed with how their game is going to look that they completely forget that it's actually supposed to include meaningful gameplay.

Games like Zork, the original Space Quest, and even Asteroids and Pac-Man continue to be very good games.  I suppose NewYears1978 would say that a movie sucks just because he/she saw it on DVD instead of Blu-Ray.

I hate people like that.

Except that's not what he's saying...not really. Come down off that high-horse.

his problem is more to do with issues not being addressed. Weeks back, another dev mentioned a problem with the correct textures not being included at shipping (at least a great number of people have affirmed this). This indicated that something was not working as intended...due to either oversight or bug. Everything then went silent for weeks, despite dedicated modders such as 4aces only actually requesting answers, rather than making demands for high-res textures. Now, we've had another biowarian state in this thread that this was all implemented intentionally, and that everything is working as intended (even just skimming through the tech support forums for 5 minutes, you'll find plenty to contradict this statement).

Perhaps you'd just like to dumb it down to the point where it sounds as if people want pretty baubles (to fuel your own pointless rant no doubt), but really, that's not the case at all. 

The thing is that it's actually true in so many cases.  Too many people will complain that a game "sucks" just because it doesn't have all the latest flashy whatever that is the current trend of the week.

I have a friend who complained that an upcoming game was going to "suck ass" (back when Vista was still new) because it was DX9 instead of DX10.  That was his only point of argument about the game.  "If it isn't DX10, then it sucks."

As DA:O goes, there are far more important issues than some simple eye-candy nonsense.  There are critical bugs that cause real gameplay issues.  Those are the things that need developer focus.  (True, the artwork people probably don't handle such things, but there are valid reasons for not including those textures.)

[ZeroMystic]

One thing I want to mention is that anyone who has loading time problems or CLAIMS there is a memory leak, has either

1. Pirated their game
2. Digitally downloaded their game.

The same exact thing that people are complaining about happening with Dragon Age Origins also had reported the same exact issue with Risen and a number of other games.

Well some research proved that it turned out that every single person who reported the quote MEMORY LEAK ISSUE or whatever you want to call it, were either people who digitally downloaded the game, or pirated it.

Co-incidence, I think not.

As it's been proven that if something in fact was wrong with the game itself, then every single person who owns the game would all be having the same exact problems with it because a poll was taken and only the people who digitally downloaded or pirated the game were reporting this problem so the facts come from the people who were actually having the problem. How this was done is very simple, they made a poll of who had bought the game and who had digitally downloaded it, then later on after people forgotten about that poll, another was taken asking who was having memeory leak issues. Then they simply matched the names on the memory leak poll to the ones who had digitally downloaded it, every name matched from the memory leak poll to the digital download match And this pollw as taken on gamefaqs/gamespot, IGN.com and a few other places I cannot think of off the top of my head

One another factor that is very amusing is this:
Before this goes on people usually try to say that the company said something regarding their being a problem, but yet no one ever can seem to provide any OFFICIAL information from the company themselves. When asked it always turns out to be someone posting information or a link to a 2nd or 3rd party site and or source, that says the company said there was a problem, never actually showing/providing a place that the company themselves said that from the companies mouth.

[whtnyte-raernst]

You have no idea what your talking about Zero, and your wrong as usual of course. Leave the technical issues to professionals that have degrees in such matters.