Patch Notes

[Mrbloodworth]

Not if they are using atlasing, no. Its more likely to do with your view angle, and whats also in the scene.

[kildorn]

I adore the "oops, having a medium was a bug" thing.

[rattran]

Tl;DR Version:

Our game looks crappy on purpose, WAI.

[tmp]

Not if they are using atlasing, no. Its more likely to do with your view angle, and whats also in the scene.

Is there some specific knowledge that makes you say "no, they can't possibly have a bug like that in their code", or is it simply a belief that it's something that shouldn't happen in professional environment?

[Mrbloodworth]

Both. Atlas is used specifically to lower draw calls. Its near imposable. Its a trade off. One large texture servicing 20 items, while it will take longer to load from disk, is less calls than 20 discrete textures, that may load faster. All down sampling/Miping and pixel smoothing is done after its already loaded. IIRCC. Low and High are not ( Unless some magic happened in the past 10 years ) two sets of files.

But I mean sure, it could have a bug in it. I guess. But I would imagine this "extreme" lowering you are seeing would be way more common.

[tmp]

Both. Atlas is used specifically to lower draw calls. Its near imposable. Its a trade off. One large texture servicing 20 items, while it will take longer to load, is less calls than 20 discrete textures, that may load faster. All down sampling/Miping and pixel smoothing is done after its already loaded. IIRCC.

Yes, and my point was what if the call to build the atlas texture is executed more often than it should, either as result of the bug or bad logic govenring caching of the created textures?

Incidentally, this thread made me play with the texture resolution switch and at this point i'm not sure if that setting actually affects anything but the textures for static assets (environments and such)  The atlas textues on the characters appear very much the same in either setting.

[Mrbloodworth]

Atlas is Pre-built. They are akin to what is known as a "sprite sheet" in 8-bit games. Minecraft uses them, for example. That's not a run time thing. I would be amazed if it was.

When I said composite textures, and example would be your face. There is the base defuse ( Color ), and the "freckles" ( Color + Alpha ), with the base normal map ( RGB ) and a bit of "scars" in the normal map ( RGBA ). All that is built in the buffer, and displayed before rendering. It equals your final face textures, and is replicated by "recipe" on other clients. All elements would be sampled from different atlases already in mem.


EDIT: This is just from what I know of like systems. I do not have first hand time with the hero engine.

[tmp]

Atlas is Pre-built. They are akin to what is known as a "sprite sheet" in 8-bit games. Minecraft uses them, for example. That's not a run time thing. I would be amazed if it was.

... as i understand it, these are composites of multiple textures put together to reduce amount of draw calls per character -- e.g. the gloves diffuse texture + upper body diffuse texture + lower body diffuse texture + boots diffuse texture, each scaled down and arranged as part of one image. As a result, i fully expect them to be created at runtime, because textures utilized by individual character will depend on what equipment they're wearing, and that is going to be near infinite amount of combinations. Having pre-built sheets would do very little to help with optimization here -- it'd instead ensure you have your entire texture set loaded at any given time, more likely.

Also, having played further with the texture quality setting i'm now pretty much convinced it doesn't affect resolution of these atlas textures, consequently doing nothing to quality of character appearances. Which is having me switch between a and

edit: ah i see what you meant. I think their "atlas" textures work more like i described, which means it's actually my bad for using "composite" in this context.

[Lantyssa]

Here's what I know:

Guild Wars uses low textures that look tons better than what SWG does.  They also recently enabled it so party members use their higher quality textures, but outside models don't, which only improves the situation using a balanced solution.

In TOR I run up to the bank and the texture looks like it's a 16x16 icon stretched across the box.  Over 30 seconds it cleans up a little, but it's still not that high a resolution.  As an example, the holo dancers look terrible.  One quest had a holo dancer in it and it actually looked awesome at high resolution.

Item previews with the lowest textures?  Silly.

Remove one of the texture maps if it causes that much of a problem.  I'd rather 'poor' lighting on quality textures than amazing lighting on shit textures.

[Mrbloodworth]

... as i understand it, these are composites of multiple textures put together to reduce amount of draw calls per character -- e.g. the gloves diffuse texture + upper body diffuse texture + lower body diffuse texture + boots diffuse texture, each scaled down and arranged as part of one image. As a result, i fully expect them to be created at runtime, because textures utilized by individual character will depend on what equipment they're wearing, and that is going to be near infinite amount of combinations. Having pre-built sheets would do very little to help with optimization here -- it'd instead ensure you have your entire texture set loaded at any given time, more likely.

You have a point. Id have to dig into the Hero engine docs. It also could be a custom Implementation.

EDIT: Or I could be just wrong, and it looks like I am. I suppose I am confused by some hacky things I have worked on before. + 10 points to you sir.

[Miasma]

Both. Atlas is used specifically to lower draw calls. Its near imposable. Its a trade off. One large texture servicing 20 items, while it will take longer to load, is less calls than 20 discrete textures, that may load faster. All down sampling/Miping and pixel smoothing is done after its already loaded. IIRCC.

Yes, and my point was what if the call to build the atlas texture is executed more often than it should, either as result of the bug or bad logic govenring caching of the created textures?

Incidentally, this thread made me play with the texture resolution switch and at this point i'm not sure if that setting actually affects anything but the textures for static assets (environments and such)  The atlas textues on the characters appear very much the same in either setting.

The medium to high switch doesn't do anything, they are calling it a bug that there were three settings at all, they are changing it to just be low and high, with high being medium.  You can see the difference in cutscenes or for a few seconds of after you click your ship's holo terminal.  Or just visit that statement's link, the op there is crazy serious about this and has links to screenshots and videos showing it.

[Fordel]

GuildWars also cheats a lot, like entire buildings are just flat boxes and shit. Which isn't to say they don't cheat WELL, GuildWars has always looked amazing and run on some really low end machines. It's easy to forget HOW DAMN OLD GuildWars is! It's a pretty pretty fucking game, no doubt.

[Mrbloodworth]

It's not cheating!  ( <-- Artists and designers )
 
Its intelligent use of assets and design.

[Fordel]

It's totally cheating! Because it's just backdrop and scenery, not a building I can interact with at all.

[Miasma]

GuildWars also cheats a lot, like entire buildings are just flat boxes and shit. Which isn't to say they don't cheat WELL, GuildWars has always looked amazing and run on some really low end machines. It's easy to forget HOW DAMN OLD GuildWars is! It's a pretty pretty fucking game, no doubt.

I can't get over how GuildWars2 looks, I'm going to play that just because it's so beautiful, like moving through art.

[Mrbloodworth]

It's totally cheating! Because it's just backdrop and scenery, not a building I can interact with at all.

No its not!

 





 

[tmp]

The medium to high switch doesn't do anything, they are calling it a bug that there were three settings at all, they are changing it to just be low and high, with high being medium.

Yes, i'm talking about something else, though -- going from "high" to "low" doesn't do anything for quality of character textures outside of cutscenes, it only affects quality of textures of the environments. Which i think is a large part why game looks mediocre -- if going from "low" to "high" actually increased the size of their "atlas textures" assigned to characters, i suspect they could look quite better than they do at the moment.

(unless they're already using something like 2048x2048 textures for these with the current settings... but it really doesn't look like they do)

[Amaron]

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

I haven't once seen any kind of shuddering.   My fps is very high always.   There's frankly no way turning on high res textures on characters is going to cause my computer a problem.   2gb video ram and 8gb system memory means I can handle it.   If they think most computers can't handle it then they should restrict the setting.

You are sort of skirting the issue though.   They did this by design because their resource management is just flat out horrible.   I'll give them kudos for making sure it "works" but that doesn't excuse them.

[Mrbloodworth]

The medium to high switch doesn't do anything, they are calling it a bug that there were three settings at all, they are changing it to just be low and high, with high being medium.

Yes, i'm talking about something else, though -- going from "high" to "low" doesn't do anything for quality of character textures outside of cutscenes, it only affects quality of textures of the environments. Which i think is a large part why game looks mediocre -- if going from "low" to "high" actually increased the size of their "atlas textures" assigned to characters, i suspect they could look quite better than they do at the moment.

(unless they're already using something like 2048x2048 textures for these with the current settings... but it really doesn't look like they do)

It may indeed only apply to environments. Player models are always the most hefty thing in a scene.

[luckton]

Don't suppose we can get a mod to rip the last few pages out of this thread and put them in their own thread?

[kildorn]

Don't suppose we can get a mod to rip the last few pages out of this thread and put them in their own thread?

There are no mods in SWTOR! 

[Simond]

Tl;DR Version:

Our game looks crappy on purpose, WAI.

Nah, tl;dr is "Texture resolution is working as intended".
And that's not even hyperbole.  

[Kitsune]

In TOR I run up to the bank and the texture looks like it's a 16x16 icon stretched across the box.

This is my beef.  The muddy, shitty blurry texture blobs on everything.  Check out this guy's screenshot:



The face is fine, the respirator mask thing is fine, the belt's okay, but the robes look like they're from Everquest.  Guy doesn't have to look like he's been rendered for a cinematic, but god damn, the textures should at least approximately fit the model!

[Mrbloodworth]

Yours looks worse than normal. I know that robe model. It does not look like for me.

[Kitsune]

Several textures look that bad for me, and the bitch of it is that it's extremely inconsistent.  I have some gear that looks fine.  It's not cutscene-sharp but it's amply good enough on a six inch tall person on my screen who's moving around.  Then other pieces of gear will just be shit, like that robe.  Lots of pants look bad, and I don't think I've ever seen a force user 'skirt' bottom that didn't look awful.  That's why I believed it was some sort of bug.  It's clearly not an engine-wide thing, it only applies to certain pieces of equipment.  I'm using a quad-core i5 with eight gigs of RAM and a latest-gen Nvidia card with a gig of RAM on it too, a SSD for my OS and a 10,000 RPM velociraptor drive for my program directories; my computer handles every modern game I've thrown at it at 1080p without blinking.

TOR has hallmarks of incompetent coding throughout it, too.  The fact that it always tries to execute with admin privileges unless you force it to run in Windows 2000 compatibility mode is not an encouraging sign for the quality of work involved in its creation.

I've already gotten my legacy name; there's nothing I really need to race for at the moment, so I'm probably going to lapse my subscription for a few months and wait for all this to be fixed.

[Riggswolfe]

The weird things is I experience none of these issues. My loading screens are so fast I usually can't read what is on it. I don't drop FPS, ever. And my textures all look reasonably good though admittedly much better in cutscenes. My machine is good but it's not a beast. Heck my nvidia card was rebooting my computer for awhile when I tried to watch youtube videos. I always have a virus scanner running and such. So, while I think the game has some issues I suspect some of these complaints have to do with something on the player's PC.

[Ingmar]

My load screens are fast, except for Hoth. Hoth is crazy slow to load up.

[Merusk]

Yours looks worse than normal. I know that robe model. It does not look like for me.

I complained in gchat a week or so ago that screenshots were not in any way representative of what I was seeing on the screen.  This looks like an example of that.   Not only did I have lower textures when taking the shot, but jaggies and overall light levels were much worse.  Kitsune's screenshot looks like a prime example of that.

[kildorn]

My load screens are fast, except for Hoth. Hoth is crazy slow to load up.

Tat and Hoth are my bad ones.

[Mrbloodworth]

Did you just ALT + Print screen and paste it in somewhere. Or did you use some in client screenshot key?

[Fordel]

The worst was Taris in beta. It literally took over 5 minutes to load, as in, an actual 5 minutes. Not 'it feels like its taking really long', not 30 seconds, not a minute. Five minutes of loading screen, every time you landed on the planet or zoned into it from say, a warzone or whatever.  


I haven't had a screen longer then maybe 20-30 seconds on live.

[Merusk]

Did you just ALT + Print screen and paste it in somewhere. Or did you use some in client screenshot key?

I used the client screenshot key and was then examining them.  There's a definite degradation there.  I'll get a few shots both ways tonight if I remember.

[Simond]

I adore the "oops, having a medium was a bug" thing.

Didn't TOR actually have the hi-res textures working until the later betas anyway? I.e. until they 'broke' the low/medium/high switch to go low/medium/low?

[tmp]

Yours looks worse than normal. I know that robe model. It does not look like for me.

That looks pretty much like a case of that downsampling bug(?) i've mentioned a page earlier. It may be related to amount of characters nearby and the game pulling some unasked for shit in attempts to cope, as it seems more common around the GTN terminals than anywhere else. But either way would argue is a clear cut case of Doing It Wrong.

edit: the official thread has a screenshot with another case of that by the looks of it, and oddly enough it's on player's ship


I don't think compression can be blamed here, as the issue is selectively affecting character's textures only. And for what's worth, my consular wearing that robe while on the ship doesn't look this bad, either. But obviously, it does happen and affects people, based on undetermined yet factor.

edit 2: oh wait, it does. It's just even more evident on the wider male model.

[tmp]

Dev follow-up regarding the subject

I rounded up the development team once more and had another discussion, and wanted to update you with a better timeline and some more precise details on what we're doing right now.

The first major changes will be in our next major Game Update, which will have the version number of 1.2. Those changes will bring greater visual fidelity to your character and those around you, but will still allow for good performance in situations where a lot of characters are on-screen at once. In other words, for those screenshots of your character in their best gear, you should see a marked improvement.

Other potential changes are being discussed right now – as I said, many of which are similar to changes suggested by many of you. As usual, you’ll see these sorts of changes on our Public Test Server before they make it into the live game. Right now we cannot commit to a live date for the 1.2 Game Update, but it will be within Q1 2012.