Texture pop-in: is this a bug or an engine feature?

[recursivelyenumerable]

I haven't actually played any games that use UE3 or whatever, so maybe I'm not understanding what is meant by texture pop-in, but I'm curious.  People call this a flaw in the engine but it sounds like something that would have to have been designed and intentionally programmed in, presumably to decrease load times.  Apparently people find the visible pop-in worse than longer load times, so I guess it's a misfeature?

[demi]

um... no, its a shitty engine

[brawndolicious]

maybe shitty level design?  texture pop in isn't really a problem in Mirror's Edge but it's a huge issue in Mass Effect.

[maxy]

Its a feature,for decreasing loading times.That said,its getting misused sometimes...
Mass Effect devs said that they are thinking of increasing loading times for couple seconds,ME2 related.

I don't care about it,hate loading times more than it.

[brawndolicious]

Now that installing is available, they need to get rid of the elevators.

I played about half of ME with the regular HDD cache space but for the other half of the game, I had it installed on the hard drive.  Installing made the non-elevator load times about 1/4 or 1/3 as long plus there was a huge reduction in lag and texture pop in.  The game really, really runs better with an installation.

Of course, they have to figure out some way to make the "long" load times tolerable for players who don't install but I'm hoping they think of some sort of load screen trick.

[Bildi]

I only saw textures loading right in front of me in Bioshock for a couple of seconds after loading a save sometimes.  Never noticed it in other UE3 games as far as I recall.

I never played Mass Effect but I suspect shortcomings were more to do with Bioware being a crappy developer nowadays.

[Darunia]

there were times in resistance 2 where i entered certain areas and thought the textures still had to load

[Sho Nuff]

Feature. Used well, texture pop shouldn't be a problem (Lost Odyssey, Bioshock, Gears). To do it right you have to have an intimate understanding of how Unreal works with its package files and where your data's physically stored on the disc.

[chronovore]

Isn't that just the MIPstreaming thing?