Though we have an interview with the guys from United Front Games coming soon that specifically touches upon the much-maligned loading times encountered in the beta, we thought you’d appreciate knowing right now that one of the first ModNation Racers’ patches will decrease these waiting periods considerably.
Speaking to IGN, producer Dan Sochan said:
“We’ve seen some comments about the load times, which is something we’re aware of. It’s something we’re working on. It wasn’t an oversight on our part at all. The way that our technology was built we were able to keep file sizes really, really small for transfer times of less than a second or a second and a half. We didn’t want it to be so that you and I go online and you want to try a track I’ve built that’s 50MB and then have you have wait five minutes to download it. That immediately became an obstacle in sharing so we created a file system where everything is built dynamically and on the fly.
Everything is essentially a series of coordinates to things that are saved. The challenge with that is we’re building an entire world, an entire character, an entire kart, and 12 characters online, all on the fly. There’s a lot of compositing that happens with the stickers and all the different parts. Because of that, there are longer load times, but that’s something we’re working on for one of our first patches, to improve that and get that down significantly.”
It’s official, a superb game just got superb…eh….er.
Check back early next week for our extensive chat with the Mod guys.
Source: IGN