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Half- Life 2 Stutter Solved

Posted by Zonk on from the texture-loads-lead-to-grumpy-gamers dept.

As a followup to the story on Saturday about the HL2 stutter bug, Voodoo Extreme has news that a patch is on the way, with an ETA of tomorrow. "A patch will be coming for this issue that will load all of the required textures into video memory on level load, rather than doing it during game play."

6 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. So the fix... by llevity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Will make the loading times even longer? Great!

    1. Re:So the fix... by SuperRob · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I don't know entirely why this was modded as funny, but I suppose it's because there is no way to mod a post as "Bingo!". I'd bet this will do nothing but make the already atrocious loading times even more ... atrocious.

  2. Great (sarcasm) by NeMon'ess · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Now the level load times will be longer. More important, someone explain why there's any video memory to spare? I'm presuming the main point was to free up space and swap textures out when entering a new area that didn't need those anymore. If all level textures are loaded at once, some aren't going to fit, right?

  3. Re:hmm? by vhold · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If its only intermittent and only for a few seconds, you might have the auto-save stutter. The game has auto save points sprinkled about rather liberally that are the only cause of quite a few peoples' stutter. I don't know what part of suddenly writting out 8 megs to disk in the middle of gameplay seemed like a good idea at the time, with no way of turning it off.

    I'm worried that even after this fix, that problem might still remain.

  4. Re:Optimization gone awry? by cgenman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    By loading all textures on level load, they remove the attempted optimization, and solve the problem.

    And probably introduced the problem of much slower loading times. This screams of "stopgap" to me, and I wouldn't be surprised to see dynamic loading reintroduced at a future date without the associated, relatively minor problem.

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    The ______ Agenda
  5. Response Time by aliens · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I just want to note that this game has a great team behind it to be so quick with a fix. I mean nothing coming out the door is perfect. Unless you've ever developed anything more complicated than "Hello World" you know this. Doom 3 I think was extremely polished, but HL2 is an example of a developer wanting to make sure everyone gets a great playing experience.

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    -- taking over the world, we are.