unloaded textures, how come?

[b00tsy 27]

Hiya,

I am having issues on occasion with unloaded (white) textures and half loaded meshes. Now I know this not new, more people have that problem. For me it happens the most with air missions where I cover a lot of land fast, the textures loading do not seem to keep up with the flight speed.

What I wondering about though is why do the textures have to reload from scratch everytime? Arent those textures already loaded in the cache?

I have a bit of experience with virtual platforms and there when a texture is loaded, it is loaded from cache permanently on any object it renders, same for loading meshes. With arma the textures seems to reload from scratch on every bush and tree you pass again and again. There are maybe a dozen of bush and tree types in arma, you would think that when the trees and bushes have been rendered once, they would not need to reload again from scratch? Or does texture loading work totally different in pc games?

Just curious how that works in arma as I never have those texutre problems in any other pc game.

[no use for a name 0]

I'm not 100% on this, but figured since no one replied it's the best explanation ;)

Most other games have a relatively small playing area and are linear, so it's easy for the devs to "plan your path" and make everything that they KNOW you'll see pretty. In Arma, there is no linear routes/paths so the game puts you in a 360 deg 'bubble' of sorts, where you can see objects out to a certain point (decided by your view distance). Because of this, each object needs several LOD's (not sure how many there are for each object); and each LOD requires it's own texture. So say you have a distant, near, and close LOD for a tree. That's three separate textures+models that have to be loaded into memory. Even if there's 10 of the same exact tree in a line out to 1KM, they can't all use the same model/texture so the game has to constantly unload/load them when you're moving. To load everything into memory on a 225sq. KM island would take a LOT of memory!

Now to your problem...

what are your PC specs and game settings? Sometimes a slow HDD can cause this, or low VRAM.

Oh, and there's a lot more than "maybe a dozen" different vegetation types lol (~42 to be exact)

Edited October 6, 2010 by No Use For A Name

[[frl]myke 14]

Because of this, each object needs several LOD's (not sure how many there are for each object); and each LOD requires it's own texture. So say you have a distant, near, and close LOD for a tree. That's three separate textures+models that have to be loaded into memory.

Sorry but this is incorrect. Although there are several LOD's per object and it is surely possible to have separate texture for each LOD, usually they use all the same texture. Wouldn't make sense since it would probably preload all textures of the different LOD's so switching would go faster. But this would also mean that there is more memory needed than with only a single texture.

But i agree that it is probably a problem with data transfer rates. Possible solutions are: faster HD (WD Velociraptor), SSD, Ramdisk or RAID 0. There are threads about it, use the search function to find it.