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PGR3...Nedders Am Cry...

N

Ned Flanders

Banned
So the game came bundled with the 360, and it's a hell of a showpiece. Th visuals are very impressive and I like the controls and the sharp front end. The polish really evokes a "next gen" feel.

I played the game considerably yesterday, but it was primarily through split-screen games with my brother and a couple of single-race warmups. While playing him yesterday, I mentioned offhand that this would be a game that I could see myself playing through considerably in the career mode, unlocking new cars and tracks. It seemed worthy of my toil, and I couldn't wait to see what some of the hidden concept cars were.



So tonight I started career mode, and chose medium difficulty speed challenge on one of the beginner levels. I was pumped about making some initial progress and maybe getting a car or two. Well, upon failing the 10 second attempt, I'm forced to retry, and met with...a loading screen. Oh shit, I think. 20~ish seconds later (maybe more), I'm back at the starting gate, but this time I'm prepared in the event that, if my speed isn't fast enough close to the cutoff line, I could pause and retry mid-race to presumably avoid the load time. Well I'm too slow again, but I pause the game before crossing the speed line, go to restart the race, and I get ANOTHER FUCKING LOAD SCREEN.

I'm thinking to myself..the track is clearly stored in RAM, and only a mere segment of the track at that. Why does the goddamn game have to re-load in the event of every challenge restart? I know for a fact that with similar challenges on other games I've played (License Tests in GT etc), as long as you don't complete the race and do a pause-menu restart, your car just gets instantaneously repositioned at the start block and bang, you're back on the track. It makes sense because you shouldn't have to re-load something thats currently stored in RAM.


So now, the game I was all pumped for, I'm likely only going to play in 2 player mode, because the sheer amount of tedium involved in watching load screen after load screen (as my noob ass fails challenge after challenge) would probably drive me fucking crazy. I simply cannot understand how the game could be formatted in such a way. I even noticed that after two-player races, a) you don't have the option to repeat the race without going back to the main menu, and b) you can save your replay, but you can't watch it immediately after the race to get a preview of whether it was save-worthy or not. Are these not basic, standard facets of every racing game now? Didn't Formula 1 and GT back on the Playstation establish these norms YEARS AGO?? How the fuck can this happen? You've got a superb title that is magnificently engineered in the gameplay department and stunning to look at, but rather than streamline it so that you spend most of your time looking at those gorgeous graphics and engaging in that mezmerizing gameplay, you're forced to look at load screen after load screen, seemingly with no valid explination as to why (unless the track just bleeds out of RAM as you progress).

I'm so fucking disappointed. If I could get some codes to unlock the extras I would (which will never happen anymore with so much emphasis on accountability and achievement with XBL) just so I could race all the tracks and cars in two player, because there's no way I'm plodding through all that loading for minimal results. I don't mind trial-and-error gameplay, as long as my "trial" doesn't get postponed after every session. This sucks.
 
Let alone storing in the RAM I have a 20GB harddisk for cry out loud!!!


It is sad though, that is the only big problem with the game but because of it I don't want to replay it to try and improve my gold medals with platinum ones.
 
mxz said:
Dude. Loading has always been there. It's a non-issue.
Click to expand...

I've got no problems with loading-screens. But I've got a big problem with the amount of them in PGR3, and the time it takes to finsih loading.
 
mxz said:
Dude. Loading has always been there. It's a non-issue.
Click to expand...

Fuck that. On numerous racers I have played over the past decade, if you restart the race/challenge mid-race from a pause menu, you get an instant restart, no loads, because the damn track and cars are already in RAM. It's inexcusable. And if you'd read the post, I wasn't talking about the pre-race loads or any other conventional, expected loading. I'm talking about loading that seems entirely unnecessary from a technological standpoint, and that doesn't seem to serve any other purpose than to slow down the game session.
 
I find RR6 waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more enjoyable. People are sleeping on that one.
 
mxz said:
Dude. Loading has always been there. It's a non-issue.
Click to expand...
Loading when you restart a race IS an issue. There are so many regressions between PGR2 and PGR3 (like no going back to lobby once a race is started, WTF?) it's not even funny.
Honestly, except for the graphics I'd rather go back to playing PGR2 most of the time. PGR3 is still a great game, but PGR2 was a more enjoyable experience overall, thanks to the interface polish and especially thanks to the great cities like Edimburg.
 
Ned Flanders said:
I'm thinking to myself..the track is clearly stored in RAM, and only a mere segment of the track at that. Why does the goddamn game have to re-load in the event of every challenge restart? I know for a fact that with similar challenges on other games I've played (License Tests in GT etc), as long as you don't complete the race and do a pause-menu restart, your car just gets instantaneously repositioned at the start block and bang, you're back on the track. It makes sense because you shouldn't have to re-load something thats currently stored in RAM.
Click to expand...

The tracks are streamed in memory. Apparently the game can't seem to fit all the entities in memory at once, so they use a streaming technology.

You can prove this by starting a race and driving for a bit and then retrying. The loading screen is back, and it takes a while to load.

Now try restarting a race right off the bat, don't even move an inch. The loading screen is very quick this time, because pretty much all the entities are already in memory and don't need to be re-loaded.

You are just going to have to live with it. It's how the game is, and there probably was no good way of having all of the entities on a map loaded into memory at once.
 
I miss Edinburg. Heck I miss San Francisco and Chicago. I won't derial the thread any further.

I would haveto agree that the loading for this game does seem a bit excessive, great experience, but I too like the overall polish of PGR2 better (And people SLEPT on that game).
 
ARGH. Christ, i'm not even Scottish, and you guys are pissing me off.

IT'S SPELT EDINBURGH, YOU MASSIVE SPASTICS.

</not-entirely-serious brit angst>

And yeah, the loading is annoying, but probably unavoidable due to the streaming :( (well, no doubt they could have improved it with a few more months to work on it, but meh, launch games are never the most polished things in the world, are they?)

And while we're bitching about what cities we miss, i too miss San Francisco, it was great fun to race around, with all the hills and jumps and stuff. Same with Edinburgh, lots of hills = fun racing. All the PGR3 cities are too flat =/
 
arhra said:
ARGH. Christ, i'm not even Scottish, and you guys are pissing me off.

IT'S SPELT EDINBURGH, YOU MASSIVE SPASTICS.

</not-entirely-serious brit angst>
Click to expand...

... and it pronounced EDING - BOROUGH.
 
arhra said:
ARGH. Christ, i'm not even Scottish, and you guys are pissing me off.

IT'S SPELT EDINBURGH, YOU MASSIVE SPASTICS.
Click to expand...
It's Edimbourg in french, so for me it's very confusing :D
 
bah, first, you greatly exagerate the loading. its quite lengthy on the initial load, but i dont even then its 20 seconds. when you restart, its much quicker then that.

but yeah, the restart a race loads suck and i cant explain why'd they would be there.

but pgr3 is such a fantastic game. much better then even 2, which was awesome in its own right. the only major thing i'll give pgr2 to 3 is the track variety due to the huge number of cities... however, its a moot point, as pretty much every city in pgr3 is really great and there wereonly a few in pgr2 worth racing. oh, and one last thing, las vegas stomps the living shit out of every other pgr city to date.
 
the bad thing about the restarts is playing on hardcore , you tank a spot and you have to restart so you end up playing for like 20 secs and sitting for 20 waiting
 
The load screens are there and are a necessity because the game uses an extreme amount of streaming. As soon as you are around the first bend of any track it has probably dumped all the hi res textures, lightmaps, and high poly versions of the nearby buildings from where you started.

This is essentially the same thing Burnout Revenge has to do in Crash mode when it first shows you where you start and then where the major crash is going to happen...then has to pull the camera all the way back to where it started from.

You can see evidence of the streaming in PGR 3 when you first drop into a track, all of the textures from the lowest LOD to the nearest draw within 1 second. Pretty damn fast actually compared to something like GTA which sometimes has to wait until you are right beside something before it comes on in (and sometimes can't bring it in fast enough to the point where you are driving on thin air).

RR6 may have instant reloads but that just goes to show that they are not getting the most of of the system and out of the streaming technology. They are just loading and building the game brute force style. That isn't a problem but it does go to show that there is plenty of tricks left in the system to pull out even more impressive graphics and larger levels.
 
Like Warm and I are saying. Memory couldn't fit all that data all at once for the entire track, so it couldn't be there when you went to restart the race.

Memory is finite. Gonna have to live with it.
 
PGR3 is a very unpolished game in many ways.

- The loading times and amounts, as already mentioned.

- Why the heck are the game showing how many kudos I got when I've finshed a race in Time Attack. TIME Attack, god damnit.

- Why can't I see my personal best on a track when I'm choosing it (and racing it?)?
 
Nander said:
PGR3 is a very unpolished game in many ways.

- The loading times and amounts, as already mentioned.

- Why the heck are the game showing how many kudos I got when I've finshed a race in Time Attack. TIME Attack, god damnit.

- Why can't I see my personal best on a track when I'm choosing it (and racing it?)?
Click to expand...


So you can try to beat your last laps' kudos while still trying to get a better lap time?

The loading thing is inescapeable until we have enough ram to hold something as detailed as that environment...but when that happens developers will just fill it up again with more detail and rely on streaming to the same proportion they do now.
 
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