What's going right/wrong with launch...

[01101010]

Bounty Hunter items are terrible too.  I could not find one good looking chest item up to level 41.  I had the orange one from Tatooine that I've been using and it look's awful on the "average" or #2 body model for females.

Only one I really sorta liked was the quest reward from Friends of Old in DK. Then again, I only managed to get to 38 on my BH in beta.

Of course, my Vanguard companion looks like a pinata with a green helm, yellow splashed chest piece, red gloves, red belt, and greenish boots. While I tend to refer to him as Lt.Dan, I am going to have to start calling him skittles.

[Zetor]

The best thing about trooper armor is playing the Flags Of The World game while leveling up: try to combine your chestpiece/belt/leggings/boots in a way that the colors resemble those of a country's flag! Spain / France / Netherlands / Russia / Hungary / other 3-color-stripe flags are easy, then it gets trickier.

Poland is cheating.

[VainEldritch]

Oh dear.

There's a colossal rage-storm brewing on the official forums. SR just posted BW's explanation for the shitty texture quality... working as intended. The new meme is that they used the "high res" version of the game for journalists and publicist then foisted the low-res version on the release client because their customer base PC's couldn’t handle it.   

This has more holes than a colander and look forward to days of incandescent nerd-fury over this.

 

[Threash]

Level 20 and 40 bounty hunter pvp armor is boss.  So is the chest from bt.  If you want a full mandalorian type set you have to wait until the bonus series from taris to get one.

[Tyrnan]

Oh wow, this should be interesting 

But didn't they already say towards the end of beta that high-res textures would be making a return? Or at least a lot of the angst posts that I've seen have claimed they did, not sure if they ever actually said it.

[Fordel]

The best thing about trooper armor is playing the Flags Of The World game while leveling up: try to combine your chestpiece/belt/leggings/boots in a way that the colors resemble those of a country's flag! Spain / France / Netherlands / Russia / Hungary / other 3-color-stripe flags are easy, then it gets trickier.

Poland is cheating.

I just farmed a level 40 pvp suit for Dorne and Myself and haven't looked back. You can't really see it, but we have level 42 pvp weapons as well, the rifle sounds very Star Wars. That's something that I find kinda funny, going through orange rifles trying to find one that not only looks good, but sounds 'right'. A lot of them sound really weird.

Also got M1-4X a customization kit on the Illum sec key vendor

[Paelos]

Oh dear.

There's a colossal rage-storm brewing on the official forums. SR just posted BW's explanation for the shitty texture quality... working as intended. The new meme is that they used the "high res" version of the game for journalists and publicist then foisted the low-res version on the release client because their customer base PC's couldn’t handle it.   

This has more holes than a colander and look forward to days of incandescent nerd-fury over this.

 

Can you clear up why people are mad about the low-res thing?

[Mrbloodworth]

This has more holes than a colander

No, no it doesn't. I suppose it does if you think making games is simple though.

[proudft]

They think they're missing out on something glorious, I imagine.  

Antialiasing should really help smooth things out (har har) once that is finally in.  I will definitely be using that, hopefully the font isn't further blurred by it (man that is a blurry font in the chat window).  Fordel's screenshots are jaggy central, especially the robut.  

[Fordel]

People want pretty things mostly.


The difference in quality between the 'Hi-Res' textures from dialogues and the 'Normal' textures from regular play is very noticeable. So people feel like they are getting ripped off or whatever. Bloodworth is going into details about it in the patch-notes thread.

-edit-
Here is a picture of the same armor in a talky scene.


I have like 90% of the graphic settings set to low and my computer is far from some super gaming beast. The difference is VERY noticeable and the game would indeed look a shit load better if we could have those textures all the time.

Is that actually possible? Apparently not right now.

[Mrbloodworth]

I was, but very rarely does rational thought trump perception. LOTRO did the same thing BTW. Later they added a high rez client pack as an optional download. Quite sure it will happen here. Had the High/Med/Low option been there, I wonder if people would still be up in arms. Granted, I am quite sure the majority of players did not notice, or care.

I'm sure it will be on Kotaku shortly.

[Merusk]

It should, and soon.  The game looks "ok" on my rig and it's getting 100fps on avg with everything maxed and forcing 8xaa via the Nvidia panel.  The shots Fordel posted look like a different game to me.

[Mrbloodworth]

Considering they are just adding AA, and still tweaking shadows. I would not hold your breath. It also likely lowered CS calls by millions.

[Fordel]

Shadows is my biggest performance hit, I can't have them on, just those little fake blob shadows, or I drop down to like 10 FPS. 

[Mrbloodworth]

Shadows are ALWAYS the biggest performance hit.    Also, technically a texture.

[Miasma]

LOTRO did the same thing BTW. Later they added a high rez client pack as an optional download. Quite sure it will happen here.

I think the problem here is more that there are already high rez textures included with the client, that you can see in cutscenes compounded with the fact that they had a "high" option for textures in the preferences that didn't work.  It being the internet this led to all sorts of conspiracy theories, bioware not commenting on the whole thing for a good while didn't help either.

I can understand them having to make graphic versus performance decisions but the way they went about it was pretty badly done.

I hope they change the system such that at least my and my companion can be shown in the high rez at all times.  I don't really care about the other fifty people sitting at the gtn kiosk with me.

[Fordel]

I'll grab a screen shot of what Dorne herself looks like in normal gameplay compared to the talky cutscenes. That's a pretty glaring difference too.

[Tyrnan]

I hope they change the system such that at least my and my companion can be shown in the high rez at all times.  I don't really care about the other fifty people sitting at the gtn kiosk with me.

Guild Wars did this and it seemed to work very well. Not sure if the client still does it given how much more powerful hardware is these days.

[Fordel]

Here compare:



To This:




Same armor, same NPC, same computer/settings etc. That's a *huge* difference, even to me, and I'm far from a stickler about super duper fancy graphics and shit.

Bonus Picutre of my Ship  :

[Morfiend]

I have no where near top of the line PC, but not old ether. Its over18 months old. i7 950, with 8gb ram. Raptor 160gb HD. My graphics card is pretty good but also a year old. A Nvidia 570 GTX.

I can run the game with every setting on high (except V-Sync) at 2500x1600 resolution, and it looks amazing. I notice a huge improvement in the graphic quality going from 1900x1200 to 2500x1600. The main reason I run so high is that I hate the huge UI, and running at a high resolution makes the UI scale down.

I am thinking that the AA will have a big improvement.

[Mrbloodworth]

Hell, I don't have an "i" anything, and seem to get some stunning visuals. That's why I don't get the problem of the lower textures. Its still higher than many MMO's. With possible exception of Rift. ( Rift is really the only comparable MMO on the market that uses even near the same features ).

[Mrbloodworth]

Here compare:



To This:

See, though. The GD in me asks "Yeah, but your second shot is a highly unlikely view. Its not common place. Texture overhead better spend elsewhere". Same line of thinking as to why you don't use your whole UV space on the underside of a table. Just less a guiding force here. Though I bet, if they added high to the preview or paper doll and a zoom, people would also be less likely to attempt this view.

For the record, I'm all for the option to turn them on. But I can't fault them for scaling them back for launch. Especially if the data says it reduced issues across the board. Proprieties trump here.

[kildorn]

That second shot is in the ship. It's a known quantity of possible textures you're going to be busting out (you + companions), and if you're there poking around, you're looking/chatting. It should be treated as cutscene quality even if you're looking at it from a resource budget perspective.

In combat you're not going to be staring at your companion's face. Shit's going down. But in an area with no combat, and a lot of idle character interaction time? My brain doesn't look at that and say "shut the textures down, SHUT THEM ALL DOWN", it says "this is one of the more common times people will actually be checking out their companions"

All that said, it's just kind of standard in PC gaming to let the gamers hang themselves with settings. Remember all the rage about RAGE when it decided rigs weren't beefy enough to run high textures? If I have 15 FPS at crazy resolution, my own damned problem and I can shut some stuff off. But if I'm sitting at 20% system utilization and you have better graphics in your back pocket.. let's stop being coy and render every hair on Aric's fuzzy head.

[Ingmar]

You know where they need to give you the high res textures? On the damn dressing room preview. An image big enough to see with the naked eye would be good, too.

[Paelos]

At no point in the game have I noticed any of this.

[tmp]

You know where they need to give you the high res textures? On the damn dressing room preview. An image big enough to see with the naked eye would be good, too.

And make that window movable while at it. Or heck, just put it somewhere where it doesn't cover the "next page" button in the AH interface

[01101010]

You know where they need to give you the high res textures? On the damn dressing room preview. An image big enough to see with the naked eye would be good, too.

STOP copying!   

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=21761.msg1029087#msg1029087

[ajax34i]

Yup, the thread on the official forums is going strong.  Lawsuits have been threatened (and posts removed), screenshots from several older MMO's have been linked, showing much higher quality character clothing / textures, and there's the typical back and forth between "running fine" people and "looks like shit" people.

[Merusk]

Considering they are just adding AA, and still tweaking shadows. I would not hold your breath. It also likely lowered CS calls by millions.

I wonder just what the shadow issue is.  I imagine my rig is just powering through the problems, but other than the jaggies that the Nvidia tweak can't fix I've had no performance problems with them.

[Mrbloodworth]

Shadows, well anything but light maps, are just notoriously expensive. Its an area in real time rendering that has volumes ( pun ) written about it with no clear "we solved it" yet.

[eldaec]

I run it on a laptop and it is smooth as anything with all settings to 'high'. But the textures are pretty poor on a large screen.

My current helmet looks completely different in the two modes, full of intricate detailing in conversations, plain slab of gold in normal play (when it isn't turned off entirely).

I had understood high res textures worked fine in beta? They can't possibly be causing server load so I assume they were just turned off in another of EA's 'saving players from themselves' cockpunches.

[Rokal]

I could have seen if they didn't include any high res textures to keep the install size friendly, but it seems silly to have them in the game and not give players the option of using them.

Simple solution: a graphics option for "high resolution textures outside of conversations" that defaults to off. If you enable it, you get a small warning dialogue that it may cause stability issues.

Bioware doesn't have to deal with people complaining about stability with default settings, everyone is happy.

[VainEldritch]

Yup, the thread on the official forums is going strong.  Lawsuits have been threatened (and posts removed), screenshots from several older MMO's have been linked, showing much higher quality character clothing / textures, and there's the typical back and forth between "running fine" people and "looks like shit" people.

 

[Mrbloodworth]

Its like a downward spiral of word twisting and self-imposed-created-misunderstanding.

[01101010]

Its like a downward spiral of word twisting and self-imposed-created-misunderstanding.

It's an official forum for a game. That is the beauty of it.