Patch Notes

[Merusk]

Interesting that they're looking at making armoring and barrels on purples removable again.  Hooray for not catering to the exclusive raid scene.  Who cares if you can farm the first few mobs to kit-out.  If folks aren't interested in going further it's a design fail from a story or encounter standpoint; not a customer fail.

Ed: I think he meant purple-color (like red, green, blue) not quality.

[Lantyssa]

I hope so.  I'd happily use a level 1 purple colored crystal if I had the option.

[Threash]

Interesting that they're looking at making armoring and barrels on purples removable again.  Hooray for not catering to the exclusive raid scene.  Who cares if you can farm the first few mobs to kit-out.  If folks aren't interested in going further it's a design fail from a story or encounter standpoint; not a customer fail.

Ed: I think he meant purple-color (like red, green, blue) not quality.

But you can't farm the first few mobs and kit out if they make the mods slot based like they say.  The only thing that changes is that raiders and pvpers don't have to look goofy, so in a way they ARE catering to them.  Nobody benefits from being able to mod raid gear except raiders.

[Ingmar]

They're not removable though and are Empire-side only (currently) - the Republic PVP sabers have cyan crystals.

[Simond]

You're talking about two different dev teams.

Trion is made up of devs that have worked on various MMOs since the genre's inception into the industry.  They've all been around the block once or twice (in a few cases several times), and they have a pretty good idea of what to expect and what the community expects from a MMO and a dev team these days.

BW on the other hand is basically in the same boat as Blizzard, just a few years removed.  While they can learn all they want from watching how other games have done it (much as Blizzard did when developing WoW), there's only so much they can do before they put there product out there and start cutting their teeth into a genre they've never dealt with before.

Once you remember that half of the team is made up of Mythic devs, and then remember how Mythic was infamous for it's "It's hardcoded and we can't change it until another, newer MMO comes out with the feature and we actually start to loose customers because of it", this really isn't all that surprising, IMO. 

Consistency is a wonderful thing. 

[luckton]

Shup u.   

[ajax34i]

Very interesting thread about how the second swtor.exe process could be assets DRM, and causing the game responsiveness issues that have been observed thus far.

[Mrbloodworth]

Very interesting thread about how the second swtor.exe process could be assets DRM, and causing the game responsiveness issues that have been observed thus far.

Mostly filled with incorrect info, or a very bad use of terms.

I can tell you right now why the High sized textures are used only in cut scenes.  They are not needed in normal game play ( Personal opinion not withstanding ), and the memory overhead ( Considering many are layered, composite images made in the buffer for customization reasons ) the overhead is not worth it. Except in the case of cut scenes, where non-participating assets are removed from he scene, and closeups are common. With future optimizations, this may change to be optional.

Its one of the oldest guidelines in the book for 3d asset management and creation. You put the detail where its needed, and you remove it where its not noticed. I personally thought it was a very smart move. MMO's are not FPS, while FPS are using more and more streaming textures and pageing. The shear variety of things that can POSSIBLY be on the screen in a MMO has always required a hefty asset management system.


TLDR; Smart asset use.

[luckton]

Very interesting thread about how the second swtor.exe process could be assets DRM, and causing the game responsiveness issues that have been observed thus far.

Mostly filled with incorrect info, or a very bad use of terms.

I can tell you right now why the High sized textures are used only in cut scenes.  They are not needed in normal game play ( Personal opinion not withstanding ), and the memory overhead ( Considering many are layered, composite images made in the buffer for customization reasons ) the overhead is not worth it. Except in the case of cut scenes, where non-participating assets are removed from he scene, and closeups are common. With future optimizations, this may change to be optional.

Its one of the oldest guidelines in the book for 3d asset management and creation. You put the detail where its needed, and you remove it where its not noticed. I personally thought it was a very smart move. MMO's are not FPS, while FPS are using more and more streaming textures and pageing. The shear variety of things that can POSSIBLY be on the screen in a MMO has always required a hefty asset management system.

I'm willing to bet that such is the case when they release their long-awaited article on the subject, hopefully today.

[Wolf]

It's more "why does this game run like shit and loads for an eternity on my rig that runs battlefield 3 and skyrim maxed out?", than "where are the high quality textures?". Is there even a remote chance that any of this is possible or is it just and the optimization is shit? :)

[Mrbloodworth]

The second EXE is likely part of the tool system. Hero engine has built in the ability to edit in a collaborative fashion ( A corner stone feature of the tool set ), this does include streaming assets from the server, but is highly unlikely to be used during live.

This is also one of the reason I believe we will see content at a high rate. The entire world is modular, more so than most ( Puts LOTRO Bree to shame ). Its more of a tile system than a set building system they way they have it designed. All those steel plates on the floor, they are tiles/Instances of the same asset. Even "Dungeons" are mostly tile constructed. This is much more flexible than say, Wows dungeons that are all one piece ( Not including decoration items ), hence repetition. Nar Shadda is comprised mostly of small square plates.

[Mrbloodworth]

It's more "why does this game run like shit and loads for an eternity on my rig that runs battlefield 3 and skyrim maxed out?", than "where are the high quality textures?". Is there even a remote chance that any of this is possible or is it just and the optimization is shit? :)

Battlefield and Skyrm are highly known quantities as far as any given view. It also does not hurt that Skyrm is single player. The highest possibility for players on screen is capped, its a known number. Every view and its contents are also controlled and known. Coupled with the small amount of unique meshes and textures used. Its likely all front loaded for most things. MMO's are highly dynamic, have a ton of swappable assets at any given moment, you must also account for players and leave yourself a large margin of error. BF and Skyrm are much closer tot he line as there is no situation where you would go over. IE: A dwarf protest.

If you compare to a production, and engine like wow, extremely large assets are 512 x 512, rare are 1024 x 1024, majority are 256 or less. Most are small images buffered to create composite images ( Like belts ). SWOTR goes beyond just layering textures, and uses at minimum, 3 per surface ( Diffuse, Spec, normal ), compared to Wows 2 ( Defuse, spec and i'm not even sure all items use spec, they didn't used to ). There is also a huge difference in the number of post and shader processes. I'm only aware of a few in wow, water notably, its also all fixed function.

EDIT: I Should state, this is all from observation, and some research.

[Zetor]

Having a specular map for a surface doesn't really explain why I'm getting 5 FPS on my top-of-the-line rig in a 16-man battleground (where I only see 5-6 at a time) and all those graphical lightbeam glitches all over the place. The game really doesn't look that much better than WOW (imo).

And there are the responsiveness issues, which is just... yeah.

[Mrbloodworth]

Its does.

There is a ton more going on, and is much more modern in a host of areas. Even on low, SWTOR has a higher fidelity than wow does at high. Personal opinion on aesthetics not withstanding.

EDIT: I see your edit, its not just specular. Its 3 textures x # of surfaces send to, hopefully a batch process. + Shaders and a more advanced lighting/per pixels/texel system. Per toon. Compared to wows MAYBE 2 x # surfaces. and a mostly fake/ambient/vertex lighting system.

SWTOR seems have at least 2 times the verts/polys and likely 4 times the amount of transform data from animations.

[Wolf]

WoW runs at 40 frames on ultra at hero pull 25m ulraxion, which means the boss is on screen and everyone else is on screen and is pressing the buttons that make them glow and shine the most. I know this is considered a relatively tough spot, as I have guildies that have complained they've had to drop settings to get consistently good fps on that pull. I can sit in SW's main AH browsing stuff with 100+ characters on screen and not drop FPS.

SW:TOR gets choppy in fleet with maybe 20-30 characters just idling on screen. Not even mentiong the load times that are at times up to 3-4 minutes.

The game is not that prettier, in fact at times it looks worse than wow on ultra. It's either ass optimization, or there's something else going on behind the scenes.

[Mrbloodworth]

I personally never said optimization is not a factor. It clearly is. Now that the client is out to millions of configurations, the real work on that front can happen. However, I'm just trying to place some perspective. Those people Demanding high-rez textures no not what they ask for. IMO. Comparing it to wow's engine is like comparing Apollo space craft to the shuttle. Some shared components, but light years apart.

Individual assets compared one to one will show a huge difference in overhead. Looked up that dragon you mention, the overhead for that is likely lower than the budget as a speeder bike in SW. 2-4k with a single texture. VS. 4-8k with three, and per-pixel shading. Player models are incredibly more complex.

[Wolf]

You mean how one is with a simpler design but takes you 350,000km and back, while the other is state of the art engineering and goes up 250km and then down 250km. I can live with that metaphor :)

[Mrbloodworth]

You mean how one is with a simpler design but takes you 350,000km and back, while the other is state of the art engineering and goes up 250km and then down 250km. I can live with that metaphor :)

Yes, but one can't do 1/100's of the tasks as the other.

It's not even state of the art. We are still in the 2-5 year MMO lag here.

[01101010]

Seems that sounds sometimes will bog my computer down. Granted, I use the on-mobo audigy stuff, but running 8 gig of memory - this should not be an issue. The slowest loads I get are going to three zones: Fleet, Alderaan, and Tattooine. Everything else is well within my tolerances... but those zones take forever to load. I get to the load screen and the bar stops at about 20% and hangs for a bit. Then it climbs a bit more to 30%-40% and I hear all the sounds, then the bar fills up pretty quickly after that. *shrug

[Mrbloodworth]

That's likely just items coming online as you are sent the entities. Even sounds are streamed from the disk.

People in the OF are using the lack of mouth movement as proof that assets are rendered and streamed from the server ( as if. You can't render a single asset and "send" it to a client. ). Its more likely the audio to animation component is catching up/loading up.

[Amaron]

TLDR; Smart asset use.

From a technical standpoint maybe.  From a players perspective they had performance issues due to sloppy code and they tried to band aid it with "smart" console style texture popping.  Much to nobody's surprise that doesn't fly on a HD monitor sitting a few feet from the face.    

My video card alone has four times the memory of an entire console so they better have an option that says "load that shit on high 24/7" that works.

[Mrbloodworth]

Yes, I get the perception angle. Everyone feels its a lack somewhere that is the reason for no-high rez textures. It may partly be ( Hence no option yet, no reason not to let users decide. Other than an attempt to lower client issues and CS calls for launch. Imagine the rage when people get OOM errors. ). I'm 99% sure its a design choice. Despite what reason they may publicly state.

[Wolf]

You mean how one is with a simpler design but takes you 350,000km and back, while the other is state of the art engineering and goes up 250km and then down 250km. I can live with that metaphor :)

Yes, but one can't do 1/100's of the tasks as the other.

The thing that does the less stuff GOES TO THE FUCKING MOON. The thing that does 100 times more stuff is a glorified LEO hauler.

I dont care about the poly-mesh-vertex-picmip if it gives me ability lag and ends up looking worse. I'll take the sprite belts, since the only time I see them is when I'm panning my camera around and zooming really hard to check out my new staff and while I play the game it doesn't interfere with me playing the game.

[Mrbloodworth]

I'm not debating your valuation. Simply discussing the differences.


Personally, I can't agree with "It looks just as good as wow". I feel people need an eye exam. That, or they are confusing the stylization. Many of the art styles follow similar techniques, but one is higher fidelity.

[ajax34i]

I get lots of stutter whenever stuff loads from the hard drive.  Sound included.  It seems (can't verify) that if you turn the volume slider down to 0 for Music or for Environmental, it does NOT load those things, but I've managed to reduce the stuttering a little bit.  Still have to load Alderaan scenery every second step, and on an XP system I'm page faulting a lot.

Speaking of which, trying to exit out of the game results in 30-60s of page faults.  CTRL-ALT-Del and kill both swtor.exe processes results in an immediate stop to the page faulting and hard drive activity.  Why oh why does it have to page-fault to exit, I don't know.  I'm thinking of making a button to kill -f swtor.exe just to exit "gracefully."

Re: smart asset management, I agree it's smart.  But if it's the cause of the animation delays or the stuttering, then it is NOT smart at all, it's idiotic.  Any system that sounds smart on paper but results in ragequits is idiotic imo.

[Zetor]

That's what I was getting at, as well. I don't really care if your awesome engine can do global illumination in real time if it is as clunky and janky like the HeroEngine seems to be. And I'm not just talking about graphics quality (which I admit is all personal preference and I am probably Doing It Wrong), but rather responsiveness (!!!), performance, crazy long load times, random graphical glitches, etc.

ed: I was agreeing with Wolf's post... this thread moves fast! Anyway, I can sort of appreciate the shiny graphics when standing around in coruscant or running down a corridor in the Esseles, but getting good responsiveness from the game is a bit more important to me.

[Mrbloodworth]

MMO's typically cause insane hard drive activity. This is the asset streaming ( Nothing to do with net ). The amount/time is directly tied to the size of the assets. Faster/Less fragmented hard drives can compensate. Better prediction of asset management can also help.

My Girls computer also gets the paging issues. Its clearly a bug on some systems. Shes running Vista.

[Amaron]

I'm 99% sure its a design choice. Despite what reason they may publicly state.

It was definitely originally a design choice.   It was simply a bad one and needs to have been fixed by now.

[Mrbloodworth]

That's so easy to say. If you think shuddering is bad now. Turn on full size textures.

Just going to leave this here.

[tmp]

Its one of the oldest guidelines in the book for 3d asset management and creation. You put the detail where its needed, and you remove it where its not noticed. I personally thought it was a very smart move.

Personally i find SWTOR implementation awful if for one simple reason -- the way their engine removes the detail is painfully obvious and anything but 'not noticed' -- stupid game routinely manages to switch to low res textures on characters which stand literally 10 metres from the camera. I actually have to wonder if this waffling back and forth doesn't cost them more performance overall than simple sticking to fixed size and letting the graphics card do that work, the way they're designed to do it, would.

And srsly, the "but it's three textures not two' argument could have some merit 10+ years ago. But normal maps has been part of the industry standard for last 5-7 or so. WoW being a (popular) aberration here rather than part of that standard.

[Mrbloodworth]

I only know of a handful of MMO's that use them ( Normal maps ) that are released. Mostly because of the dynamic nature, and the 3-5 year lag MMO's always have to meet that low machine spec.  I believe I can count them on one hand. As far as your noticeable down sampling, that can be so many factors. It can simply be your machines capabilities, or where you are and whats going on.  10m isn't a good metric, as its pixel height that normally does it, combined with how much stuff is in view or being sent to the render.

I do not notice any "popping" during game play. I'm sure others do.

EDIT: Your point about "waffling". Its True, sometimes a LOD system is not optimal and can hinder ( Because most are CPU bound. AFAIK, its only be a few generations of video card with it as a fixed function. IE: Griding ). Consider Wow, for years was solid state, no LOD systems. But that can happen when your assets are extremely low weight. But LOD is not disk streaming, the full size image is always loaded. Typically in DTX compression, the mips are part of the image file, increasing its disk size.

[tmp]

As far as your noticeable down sampling, that can be so many factors. It can simply be your machines capabilities, or where you are and whats going on. 10m isn't a good metric, as its pixel height that normally does it, combined with how much stuff is in view or being sent to the render.

gtx 550, 1 gb video memory, 8 gb ram. I don't think this is really down to machine capabilities. Not to pixel height, as it's done to characters which pretty much fill the view.

The engine simply appears stupidly aggressive about the detail reduction, rather than being smart --or even competent-- about it. I don't feel it merits a defense here, much like there's little point in defending their UI implementation.

[Mrbloodworth]

I can't really comment on your issue. But like I said, not that the client is in the hands of millions of system configurations, it will get sorted.

[Mrbloodworth]

RE: High Rez textures:

Hey everyone, thanks for bearing with us as we investigated the concerns raised here.

After investigation, it seems that the confusion here is a combination of a UI issue that's been resolved and a feature that's working as intended, but the reason why it's 'working as intended' needs explanation.

First, the UI issue. The preferences menu as it is seen on the Public Test Server for version 1.1 of the game is correct - there are only supposed to be two texture choices, 'Low' and 'High'. This replaces the original three-choice preference of Low/Medium/High because in reality, there was never supposed to be a 'Medium' choice - that was a bug.

Here's where we need to explain. As many of you have noted, your character in the game world is rendered using lower resolution textures than inside of cinematic conversation scenes. This was a deliberate decision by the development team. To understand why this was done, I have to briefly talk about MMOs and their engines.

In comparison to single player games and other genres of multiplayer online games, MMOs have much higher variability in the number of characters that can be potentially rendered on-screen at the same time. In MMOs, even though most of the time you'll see a relatively small number of characters on screen, there are certain situations in which many more characters will be seen. Some examples of these situations include popular gathering places in-game (in our case, the two fleets), Operations with large teams, and Warzones. In those scenarios the client (and your PC) has to work hard to show off a lot of characters on-screen.

During development and testing of The Old Republic, our priorities were to ensure the game looked great and performed well. In testing, we discovered that using our 'maximum resolution' textures on in-game characters during normal gameplay could cause severe performance issues, even on powerful PCs. There were a variety of possible options to help improve performance, but one that was explored and ultimately implemented used what is known as a 'texture atlas'.

To understand that I've got to get technical for a minute. When a character in the game is 'seen' by another character - ie, gets close to your field of view - the client has to 'draw' that character for you to see. As the character is 'drawn' for you there are a number of what are known as 'draw calls' where the client pulls information from the repository it has on your hard disk, including textures, and then renders the character. Every draw call that is made is a demand on your PC, so keeping that number of draw calls low per character is important. With our 'maximum resolution' textures a large number of draw calls are made per character, but that wasn't practical for normal gameplay, especially when a large number of characters were in one place; the number of draw calls made on your client would multiply very quickly. The solution was to 'texture atlas' - essentially to put a number of smaller textures together into one larger texture. This reduces the number of draw calls dramatically and allows the client to render characters quicker, which improves performance dramatically.

When it comes to cinematic scenes, however, characters are rendered using the higher number of draw calls and maximum resolution textures. This is because in those scenes, we have control over exactly how many characters are rendered and can ensure that the game performs well. The transition between 'atlas textured' characters (out of cinematics) and 'maximum resolution' textures (in cinematics) is mostly hidden by the transition between those two states (when the screen goes black), but obviously it's clear if you pay close attention.

In summary; yes, we had a small UI bug that unfortunately caused confusion over how the game is intended to work. The textures you're seeing in the course of normal gameplay are optimized for that mode of play. The textures you're seeing during cinematics are also optimized for that mode of play. They are higher resolution, but that's because we're able to control cinematic scenes to ensure good performance in a way we can't during normal gameplay.

We understand the passion and desire for people to see the same textures you see in our cinematic scenes in the main game. Because of the performance issues that would cause for the client, that's not an immediate and easy fix; we need to ensure we're making choices that the majority of our players will be able to benefit from. Having 'atlassed textures' helps performance overall, and that's a very important goal for us.

With that said, we've heard your feedback here loud and clear. The development team is exploring options to improve the fidelity of the game, particularly for those of you with high-spec PCs. It will be a significant piece of development work and it won't be an overnight change, but we're listening and we're committed to reacting to your feedback.

Linky.

[tmp]

That post combined with the downsampling i've seen makes me wonder if their "performance issues" are actually caused by the texture sizes alone, or if they have some sort of bugged code that keeps rebuilding the composite textures more times than needed, vs keeping them cached.

The "medium setting choice was never intended and is a bug" is hillarious, though.