This isn't functioning as intended. Also, it doesn't do that for me; my companion always reappears upon dismounting (or being knocked off). What it does tend do is fail to summon my companion after taxi rides.

You're saying that the words "Out Of Range" on this are blinding you? What? It doesn't even appear more than once on-screen if you do something impossible repeatedly.

I believe that all their recent iMacs, at least, have no issue running the game. My two-generations-old one certainly doesn't. It even runs acceptably inside a virtual machine, though I have to turn the graphics down for that one.

The capacity for facial animations certainly exists, but I've seen a number of animations where the actual elements of the face didn't behave as expected; this is particularly true for eyebrows. I don't know if it relates to poor rigging, animation, or just general glitchiness, though. The effect was scary in some cases. I confess I have never looked at my face while in combat; I was usually more focused on whatever I was in combat with. Honestly, I was actually surprised by how many of the assorted /emotes came with an attached animation. It's unclear if you refer to technical constraints here or in Second Life. If here, I don't know. There's no particularly good reason that head-pointing would induce lag, though, to answer one question. If in Second Life, I can't tell you anything non-obvious anyway. If you want the obvious: scripted AOs will always suck; use a TPV with a well-written AO (much as it pains me to say it). Above that, animations are not preloaded; the first time you see an animation it will always be delayed as it waits to download.

If you can't play at 20-25 fps, there is no hope for you. I don't think spending $800 makes it a magical super-powered gaming computer, either. Python is awesome.

I don't get the point. At all. Most of those looked fine. Unless you spend all your time toggling the character pane, pauses when toggling the character pane are irrelevant. The majority of those didn't bother turning on the frame rate meter. Taking videos to demonstrate low frame rate is an inherently poor move; recording a 1080p video is going to have a significant impact on your frame rate anyway. 35 fps isn't unplayable. 20fps isn't unplayable either. I'm perfectly happy with 20+ fps. Brief drops to 5fps, as demonstrated in the middle of one of the videos, are a) probably less significant when not recording videos, and b) still not totally unplayable. Though they're certainly an inconvenience. Seriously?

Hi! I'm just responding to break the six-posts-in-a-row chain. I wouldn't object to more control over animations, though most of the current facial animations are questionable and seem to break faces fairly often. As a Linden, this thread amuses me. I don't actually have anything useful to contribute, however.

Mumble! The latency is better, the sound is sometimes better (depending on what codec you had vent using), the UI is better, and it's free! It's also far easier to customise by e.g. making people's portraits show up in the overlay, integrating with a forum login system, or what-have-you. I probably only care about this because I'm a programmer, though.

I support this. It's EA; they could just use Cider as they usually do. Or work with Codeweavers to get it published that way. This would be preferable, since the game already works fine under WINE, aside from its inability to communicate with the servers that appeared right at the end of the beta, for reasons absolutely nobody has a clue about. With Bioware's cooperation I imagine this could be resolved in under a week. This is how many (likely the majority) of "mac native" games work. That way they don't have to rewrite anything, it is still supported and works well, and uses relatively minimal development time on Bioware's part. As for all the people insisting on the use of Boot Camp: rebooting for a single task is not really worth it and is a drastic hit to productivity (and yes, before you point it out, moreso than playing TOR is). I like to multitask heavily (I usually have 40-50 windows open at a time, many of which have a number of tabs); using Windows largely strips me of this ability, and I have to restore my state after booting back into OS X. It is perhaps worth noting that the game runs reasonably well under virtualisation, at least on my machine. Unfortunately, the camera control is almost unusably hyperactive. Yes, I assume someone already said all that, but I confess to not reading all 16 pages. Most of what I did read was "rage macs suck rage", which is counterproductive.

What? I can only assume that's some sort of snide comment directed at the game. I have never had that issue... but then, I also do everything with people who have never done the quest/flashpoint/etc. before. Advantage of the low population server: we're all new (and stuff the twenty level 50 people). ... You should probably take break from that, except if everyone is sitting around or you can do it on the move. It's only for twenty minutes (or an hour or two for flashpoints). The Tattooine bonus series is given by a man who yells about a sandstorm at the exit of the spaceport. I don't remember the Nar Shaddaa one, but I think it's slightly higher level and given at the Fleet. I may well be wrong about that, though.

I spent most of the game with everything two levels above me. Makes it more interesting. The only really tough part was the end of the consular quest on Alderaan (which I eventually managed), which has since been nerfed. I, too, did all the quests, though I confess I tend to avoid combat. It becomes a problem at four levels behind. "Resist, resist, resist, resist" is not helpful.

Ultimately, yes, this is a performance cap (though there is that second process hanging out that lets them cheat - a bit). But it's not that bad - multithreading isn't a requirement for doing things close enough to simultaneously - it's certainly not directly responsible for the input lag, for instance. There are many, many tricks that can be used to speed things up graphically (imposters, dropping LOD, etc), and there is always some degree of optimisation available for the actual calculations involved. It'll likely be worst for those on laptops who have quad-core but sub-2 GHz processors (though most of those should support some means of shutting off cores to boost speed without violating the TDP). I doubt the single-threaded nature of the engine is particularly responsible for the heavy instancing, which I take as being a design decision (of course, I spent my time on a light server that never instances the world anyway). I also confess that I don't know, and haven't investigated, the purpose of the secondary SWTOR process, but that might well be helping. Not as such; even though it could easily be a concern, running texture decoding on its own thread is relatively low-hanging fruit (possibly the lowest). The primary issue there is that there must be some degree of LOD work, and I think they simply don't have any useful code for it yet. It's not an inherent limitation of the system. Multithreading is good, yes, but it's not the dealbreaker many think it is. Disclaimer: I am not a BioWare or EA developer. I am a developer, and I do work on another 3D online world. And worry about threading in it. (...I'm glad that a page and a half of posts appeared while I was typing that.)

.....

And that's why we can filter by location. And yes, we collect it for plenty of people. Collecting the data does not mean we have to have a synchronous store into a database, or that we need to keep all of it, or that we have to keep it indefinitely.

I do not work at Bioware. I do, however, work elsewhere, where we gather FPS, ping time, location, and assorted other similar metrics every minute. We have a good idea of places that cause issues, what sort of hardware they cause issues on, etc. We know the average, minimum and maximum FPS for every graphics card anyone has ever used. We don't have it on a per-user basis; we also don't need it. I can entirely believe (and, indeed, assume) that Bioware does the same.