/signed

Not necessarily, it reduces the work of the driver, if the driver is not the bottleneck, then it changes nothing.

If i remember correctly, did bw announced that a 'same gender romance option companion' should be part of makeb in the first place?! That was the fuzz about the new 'gay planet' expansion complaint.

And this is just sad, that such simple things are obviously done wrong.

Chat bubbles can be done by extending the unit nameplates ... but even such simple things like unit nameplates are for some people a major performance problem...

Don't be naive, cartel market generates revenue, rewriting stuff 'that works' does not. And with the current trend of the released content, revenue is more important than a good product and happy costumers.

Won't happen, optimizing and/or rewriting the engine wont generate revenue, so its against the ea cash grab doctrine... On release of SWTOR a Dx11 version was 'considered' (proof here http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,767634/Star-Wars-The-Old-Republic-Bioware-considering-Direct-X-11-in-the-future/News/ some stuff in that interview is also not true, like multicore stuff and support for a broad space of hw configs), but after the massive fail, not a single word about it ... (btw a dx11 version would not help with the poor performance, the root of problem is a poor core design).

To make it clear what they use for the UI: scaleform / flash ( its listed here http://gameware.autodesk.com/usage/games/?show=scaleform ).

/sign

The current implementation is even less secure than previous one, each pw email contains the account name. So if the email account gets hacked, the hacker will get the login name and can access the account w/o any problems. So nice one bw...

/sign

He didn't say that at all. He also don't mention, that swtor bases on a very early version of the hero engine, with no updates from the hero guys since then (read http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/ ). And for example, if you start to dig in the running process with some debug tools, you will see that the rendering backend stuff starts with a 'bwa' (BioWareAustin?) namespace (prefix), and that indicates that large parts of the (client) side is different from the original hero engine. So you cant compare the 'hero engine' with the 'swtor engine' which bases of the very early hero engine, its like you blame quake 1 and quake 2 engines for problems of the half life 1 engine. And it is the engine, the first indicator is the second process that handles the rendering, no one does that, and for good reasons. An other indicator is the massive memory usage, that constantly crash the game on 32 bit systems, because the os runs out of memory. I believe the main problem is that the game is too script driven (or the scripting engine is not optimized well), and that's the reason of the massive memory and cpu usage on the main process.

You should take a look at the launcher log. My play button didn't worked after os reinstall. In my case the launcher was unable to download the dx9 redist, but only reported this on the log. And after i found the cause at the log, the fix was easy, installed the dx9 redist manually and the launcher stopped trying to load the dx9 redist and the play button worked again.

Using Win 8 here too, swtor runs slightly better on it (no wired height cpu consumption, in contrast to vista were some scenes are cpu bound...). As for Win 8, the 'New UI' / 'Metro' is crap, it may work on smartphones and tablets but for an PC it's just inconvenient. But under the hood, lots of optimizations were done to lower the resource consumption, so everything gets faster.

"What is holding back SWTOR the most?" Simple answer, the devs. They talk too much and say nothing. The talk too much and do nothing. So they should shut up and start to work.

Quoted for common nonsense, there is no dx9 emulation, even if you not install the newest dx update.

+1 Blizzard tried that with Karazhan (spider stuff at the basement), nobody liked it...

Yes, Microsoft Security Essentials does the job very well.

Switching from 32Bit to 64Bit is the same as switching to DX11, the perf.gain depends (on some cases it can degrade perf.). Depending on the software design, it is more expensive to port it to 64 bit then just start optimize the engine it self, if you want to switch from 32 bit to 64bit, it comes with a load of problems the affect all the code, not only the rendering backend part. The current rendering backend is a cpu hog, most of the time its unable to send the scene fast enough to the gpu driver, to fully utilize the gpu. On some scenes the gpu usage is at 10%, the frame rate at 15 and the cpu-core usage of the rendering thread is 100%. A switch to dx11 wont help much, also switching to 64bit wont help, there is something fundamentally wrong.

No its not fixed ....

This is way to complex, it would help if they add clickable nameplates like them in World of Warcraft.

This will change nothing, because the os will detect the number of cores available and this setting only affects the boot process, later on the os will use all cores. this setting only exists for testing.

No it can't. The OS may shuffle the thread around, but it does not increases the effective usage at all, because one thread can only run on only one core at a time.

If you look at software in general, 60% is more likely (even web browsers are multithreaded). And for games, since xbox 360 and ps3, multithreaded is common and not an exception.

SWTOR only uses effectively 2 Cores. It looks like more, because the os shuffles the threads from core to core. Its easy to prove, if you use advanced tools to monitor app behavior ( eg processexplorer ). If you look at both processes 'swtor.exe', each process has one thread that does the heavy lifting, witch consumes its full cpu cycles most of the time, the other threads remain almost idle.