[Official High Resolution Textures Post] Can we get a clarification on this?

[mcfabulous]

GUYS.

GUYS!

 

Lets beg for a response for 80 pages.

then call him a spin doctor the second they give us a response.

 

I swear for a bunch of (assumed) 20-30 year olds, you act like children.

 

Why would you want him to give an uninformed response that is basically as good as any assumption thats been made thus far in the thread about why its not working.

 

He wants to say WHY.

Not a yes or a no.

You should be happy.

I guess thats asking for too much though..

[Gulo-Latrans]

What we have on our hands is a bit of an "Oh Crap" moment.

 

TPTB chose HeroEngine for the project because despite it not being either a mature nor proven engine it offered the holy grail of developer collaboration when it came to adding items to the world. Unfortunately (and this can be verified through a number of interviews on the web) the engine wasn't really designed for 80+ developers trying to simultaneously add content to the world. Very quickly the main driving reason behind choosing this engine (along with the, frankly, unjustified praise it got at the awards) meant that it became a noose around the dev's neck.

 

I can't speak for the engine as it stands but everything I'm seeing smacks of poor optimisation and a lack of fundamental understanding on the part of the engine developers when it came to the responsiveness expected by the playerbase and required for PvP.

 

The Highres textures are not in the game, they are not in the game because they were removed during beta for one reason or another. However, you don't remove something because it's working. They are either breaking something on their own or exacerbating an already existing problem. If we were seeing lots of reports of otherwise decent hardware having issues I'd give credence to the latter....oh wait...

 

My money is on this. BW have an albatross around their neck called HeroEngine. It's currently being stretched to the very limit of what works and anything further added simply breaks it, regardless of the spec of your machine. A developer doesn't remove options they have spent time making because they feel like it; something, somewhere, is broken.

 

Don't expect to get an answer confirming the above; BW and EA are both beholden to shareholders who will get very jumpy if this big investment turns into a white elephant. However there is something fundamentally wrong here.

 

This most likely the truth ..

[Khuobol]

Hopefully they are getting the educated opinion of the brain trust that used an image of North and South America at night (city lights) for the night map of Tatooine. (yeah, go check, it is really NA/SA at night)

 

That is the quality of people they have working on this issue, I am sure.

 

Anyway, if you are really as upset about this as I am, you will put your money where your mouth is. Nothing motivates people like bad PR and loss of revenue -

Edited January 11, 2012 by Khuobol

[Norbix]

What we have on our hands is a bit of an "Oh Crap" moment.

 

TPTB chose HeroEngine for the project because despite it not being either a mature nor proven engine it offered the holy grail of developer collaboration when it came to adding items to the world. Unfortunately (and this can be verified through a number of interviews on the web) the engine wasn't really designed for 80+ developers trying to simultaneously add content to the world. Very quickly the main driving reason behind choosing this engine (along with the, frankly, unjustified praise it got at the awards) meant that it became a noose around the dev's neck.

 

I can't speak for the engine as it stands but everything I'm seeing smacks of poor optimisation and a lack of fundamental understanding on the part of the engine developers when it came to the responsiveness expected by the playerbase and required for PvP.

 

The Highres textures are not in the game, they are not in the game because they were removed during beta for one reason or another. However, you don't remove something because it's working. They are either breaking something on their own or exacerbating an already existing problem. If we were seeing lots of reports of otherwise decent hardware having issues I'd give credence to the latter....oh wait...

 

My money is on this. BW have an albatross around their neck called HeroEngine. It's currently being stretched to the very limit of what works and anything further added simply breaks it, regardless of the spec of your machine. A developer doesn't remove options they have spent time making because they feel like it; something, somewhere, is broken.

 

Don't expect to get an answer confirming the above; BW and EA are both beholden to shareholders who will get very jumpy if this big investment turns into a white elephant. However there is something fundamentally wrong here.

 

There's a lot of assumption in this post. AFAIK they licensed hero engine at an early stage and Bioware used their own engineers to modify the engine heavily to its needs. Either way, none of us in this thread have any experience with game engines anyway so any speculation on the matter is pointless. And the high res texture are actually in the game, that's been proven over 180 pages of thread.

[Ommm]

Nvm me. Edited January 11, 2012 by Ommm

[Tiron_Raptor]

I really hope that the graphics are upgraded. I am loving the gameplay in Star Wars at the moment but the graphics are decidedly average for a 2011/2012 game, especially compared to World of Warcraft, a game that is 7 years old. The armour models in particular look dreadful, again compared to WoW where they are quite detailed and crisp.

 

I wish that more of the budget was spent on graphics and less on the voice overs for quests, which most people space bar through anyway.

 

95% of statistics are made up on the spot to try to lend weight to a point, much like your 'most people' estimation. I don't spacebar through them unless I esc'd out and am trying different options, frequently because the option I picked didn't come out how I'd expected.

 

I'm wondering right now if the textures thing doesn't have to do with the fact that it's exclusively an x86(32 bit) program: one of the primary effects of using higher quality textures is increased memory usage, but particularly Video Memory. My client is generally around 1.5-2gb on 1920x1080, with everything at maximum and AA *not* forced. (using the 'medium' textures).

 

I had an instance earlier where it acted like it was paging extensively on the republic fleet, as well.

 

The high-res textures are going to use a lot of memory: it could be that they use so much that a 32 bit program isn't capable of addressing it all and has to page some of it out, which just kills performance. If that's the case, they'd be all but unusable unless a 64 bit client was released.

 

I've got 8GB of RAM and 1GB of VRAM, you'd think that'd be enough. Unless those are some monstrous textures. I do remember when Doom3 came out hearing them say they'd had to lock out the maximum texture quality option unless you had 256MB of VRAM, at the time all but unheard of, because the max quality ones used just a little bit over 128mb of VRAM.

 

Could be something similar, but if it is it'd have to be purely VRAM based (system memory already exceeds the limits of a 32 bit program like SWTOR on a semi-regular basis). It may not have an auto-detection system though, they might've just decided to turn it off for the time being, current hardware being what it is.

 

It could even be an interaction between the two: on a 32bit system, the address space is shared with all the memory on the system, INCLUDING the VRAM. How this affects 32bit programs in a 64 bit environment I'm not sure, but it is entirely possible that there's some kind of interaction between the two, and that the high res textures mess it up or prevent some kludge being implemented to work around it, to the point that there aren't enough addresses to go around. Which would also need a 64 bit client to fix.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Tiron_Raptor

[fredspekvet]

There's a lot of assumption in this post. AFAIK they licensed hero engine at an early stage and Bioware used their own engineers to modify the engine heavily to its needs. Either way, none of us in this thread have any experience with game engines anyway so any speculation on the matter is pointless. And the high res texture are actually in the game, that's been proven over 180 pages of thread.

 

Agreed to some point , however , *we* are the ones stuck with it.

 

If you order a beer at a bar , and you get only half a glass of beer.. would you accept it ? if you buy a Porsche 911, test drive it only to figure out it pulls to the left and wont go past 110 mph, would you accept it?

 

I've paid 60 euro's for this game + 13 euro's or so montly sub.. that's a lot of money for a product that's buggy and incomplete on some points.. Now, bugs i can live with. Bioware did fix some serious issues and i'm sure they will continu to do so, but major issues (the high resolution textures, fps issues etc, engine related stuff) was known long before this , and they have not fixed it. they haven't even given us a idea of when to expect a fix, in fact, the possible good outcome is getting further and further away.

 

The thing is , I honestly do not understand why a developer such as Bioware would choose the Hero Engine for their "first, highly anticipated MMO project". If i was a developer, I would want to have 100% control over my engine, from start to finish. that means , building it up from the ground and having full control over every step of the process. this may take more time, yes. more funds, possibly. if it's the first , that's no problem. the second.. if you do not have the cash, dont start such a project in the first place.

 

I'm not a programmer or a game engine expert, but this is how I (and more customers i'm sure) see it, and that has nothing to do with us not understanding things, it has to do with Bioware's communication to us , the customer.

 

Fact is, it's a wonderful, fresh, well playing game with some major flaws and issues that need to be adressed.

[Ommm]

All this make me think, we need to give it a voice in the media.

Why are sites not having articles up about this?

I certainly would have waited with my purchase knowing there are such issues.

But lets see what the reply brings.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Ommm

[Tiron_Raptor]

Agreed to some point , however , *we* are the ones stuck with it.

 

If you order a beer at a bar , and you get only half a glass of beer.. would you accept it ? if you buy a Porsche 911, test drive it only to figure out it pulls to the left and wont go past 110 mph, would you accept it?

 

I've paid 60 euro's for this game + 13 euro's or so montly sub.. that's a lot of money for a product that's buggy and incomplete on some points.. Now, bugs i can live with. Bioware did fix some serious issues and i'm sure they will continu to do so, but major issues (the high resolution textures, fps issues etc, engine related stuff) was known long before this , and they have not fixed it. they haven't even given us a idea of when to expect a fix, in fact, the possible good outcome is getting further and further away.

 

The thing is , I honestly do not understand why a developer such as Bioware would choose the Hero Engine for their "first, highly anticipated MMO project". If i was a developer, I would want to have 100% control over my engine, from start to finish. that means , building it up from the ground and having full control over every step of the process. this may take more time, yes. more funds, possibly. if it's the first , that's no problem. the second.. if you do not have the cash, dont start such a project in the first place.

 

I'm not a programmer or a game engine expert, but this is how I (and more customers i'm sure) see it, and that has nothing to do with us not understanding things, it has to do with Bioware's communication to us , the customer.

 

Fact is, it's a wonderful, fresh, well playing game with some major flaws and issues that need to be adressed.

 

It wouldn't just cost more to build an entirely new engine, it would also take longer. Much longer. Because you can't even start development of the actual game itself pretty much until the engine's done. and tested. and fixed. and tested again.

 

It makes sense if you're planning on using the engine for multiple things yourself, or licensing it to other people, otherwise it's a lot of time an expense that's hard to justify.

 

And frankly, we don't know how much of the 'hero engine' is actually in there anymore: they had their own guys working on it, and how do we tell how much it's been modified?

 

I mean, both KotOR games ran on a modified version of NWN's Aurora engine. A very highly modified version. To the point they actually renamed it the 'Odyssey Engine'. In-game the similarities are hard to detect in many cases.

[Norbix]

I'm not a programmer or a game engine expert, but this is how I (and more customers i'm sure) see it, and that has nothing to do with us not understanding things, it has to do with Bioware's communication to us , the customer.

 

Bioware is doing an EXCELLENT job of communicating. Pretty much all high priority issues have been responded to (ability delay, this, class imbalances like smug/op, customization) and are being dealt with. You can't expect a response as soon as you want one with MMORPG's. Stephen Reid is doing what he can I feel. Clearly this is a complex issue, so even the community manager has to get his facts straight when handling the community.

[Zombull]

Hmm. Getting multiple approvals for the response. Sure sounds like we're not going to like what it says.

[Jemfisto]

Glad to see a good reply incoming. No point of whining about it folks, it will come.

[Tiron_Raptor]

Hmm. Getting multiple approvals for the response. Sure sounds like we're not going to like what it says.

 

I'm guessing it's either going to be 'you need more vram', 'the high res textures take too much memory for a 32 bit program to handle', or a combination of the two, and they've consequently disabled them.

 

The big questions as I've said are what they intend to do about it in the future: will it detect if you have enough vram and unlock the option? Will they think about unlocking it later when more people have enough vram? Do they need to release a 64 bit client in order to use them properly, and if so, are they going to? If they are going to release a 64 bit client, approximately when? Will we need to completely reinstall to use it?(Probably would, I'm suspecting)

Edited January 11, 2012 by Tiron_Raptor

[Proto]

That is one of the most ridiculous responses I have ever seen. Telling us hes circulating his response around the departments to make sure hes put the right "spin" on things...good god.

 

No kidding. This company is a joke. I used to actually respect Bioware until I saw their customer service, lack of communication, and failure to respond to things in a timely manner. It all adds up to huge resentment that I doubt a lot of people can let go and forget.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Proto

[Tiron_Raptor]

No kidding. This company is a joke. I used to actually respect Bioware until I saw their customer service, lack of communication, and failure to respond to things in a timely manner. It all adds up to huge resentment that I doubt a lot of people can let go and forget.

 

Actually the way he phrased it sounded more like he was circulating it to make sure he'd explained the technical issues correctly, which would suggest he's not 100% sure he understands it and wants to make sure he gets it right. And he doesn't want the guys in charge of the technical bits getting smeared for it if he gets it wrong.

 

Which is actually a good thing if that's the case.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Tiron_Raptor

[Bloodscorn]

I'm guessing it's either going to be 'you need more vram', 'the high res textures take too much memory for a 32 bit program to handle', or a combination of the two, and they've consequently disabled them.

 

The big questions as I've said are what they intend to do about it in the future: will it detect if you have enough vram and unlock the option? Will they think about unlocking it later when more people have enough vram? Do they need to release a 64 bit client in order to use them properly, and if so, are they going to? If they are going to release a 64 bit client, approximately when? Will we need to completely reinstall to use it?(Probably would, I'm suspecting)

 

The client is already 64bit.

[Tiron_Raptor]

The client is already 64bit.

 

Not unless you got a different client than I do. Mine is oh-so-clearly 32 bit. I haven't seen or heard anything about a separate 64 bit client either.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Tiron_Raptor

[Bloodscorn]

Not unless you got a different client than I do. Mine is oh-so-clearly 32 bit.

 

Then it is at least large address aware as it shows up that way in a program I can use to check that.

[Toweleeeie]

Indeed.. I'm sure they think its quite the joke. and i'm betting we're not going to get the answer we want , if we get an answer at all. I'm sure it's all on purpose and "insert technical babble here" and we'll just have to wait and see if it's ever going to get fixed, just like the junk engine the game is built on (my next char will be named Darth Framedrop or Darth Stutterfps).

 

Anyway , lets hope for the best.. because this game DOES have the potential to be great . everyone can see it , lets hope the dev's do too.

 

Yeah name your toon something f***ing stupid, that will show them!!! /s

 

I wish i could punch you through the internet

[Tiron_Raptor]

Then it is at least large address aware as it shows up that way in a program I can use to check that.

 

I know WOW64 by default allocates only 2GB of RAM to programs it runs, but can be set to allow them 4GB if a flag is set. Could be that, perhaps?

 

I've seen it balloon as high as 3.8 GB (which crashed it) under the influence of memory leaks, so that pretty much has to be set.

 

You can easily check the 64 or 32 bit status of a program running on 64 bit windows by using the task manager: Hit ctrl+shift+esc to bring it up (bypasses the screen that pops up on ctrl+alt+del and opens it directly), then hit the processes tab. 32Bit processes have a '*32' next to their name. With SWTOR running, you should see two 'swtor.exe *32' processes running, one of which is using a lot more memory than the other (why there's two, I have no idea, but killing either one closes the game).

 

An additional confirmation is that 64 bit Windows has two program files folders: ..\program files\ and ..\program files (x86)\ . the (x86) is for 32 bit programs and is where SWTOR gets stashed by default.

 

This does have me wondering what this mysterious second process is for...

Edited January 11, 2012 by Tiron_Raptor

[Vehlin]

There's a lot of assumption in this post. AFAIK they licensed hero engine at an early stage and Bioware used their own engineers to modify the engine heavily to its needs. Either way, none of us in this thread have any experience with game engines anyway so any speculation on the matter is pointless. And the high res texture are actually in the game, that's been proven over 180 pages of thread.

 

I didn't put words in your mouth so I 'd kindly as the same courtesy. With regards to engines I know a reasonable amount. When I tell you that HE has never been used in a released game I'm not speculating, it hasnt other than SWTOR. I don't care how good BW's developers are, you don't just pick up something as complicated as a game engine and 'make it work' with a few mods.

 

High res textures are indeed in the game, in two very tightly controlled environments where there is only yourself, your companion and the NPC present. My point is valid, you don't pull something that works. If it worked it would be in, if there were a short term fix they'd both have removed the options on PTR. The issue is LIKELY (note assumption) with either the engine or a problem with the 32bit address limit.

 

Yes I am speculating, I am however; speculating from a considered standpoint. This is an issue I care about, I've stopped playing Skyrim until either we get a highres release or the modders finish their task. Current SWTOR textures look worse than WOW I've got a side by side comparison of the Jedi robes next to some top end WOW ones to compare if you don't believe me.

 

I might look at a cloudy sky and say it'll likely rain. I'm speculating, but you'll still be just as wet if I'm right.

[Cathgarr]

One is the launcher and one is the game.

[harpuax]

It's too bad. Someone at Bioware spent allot of hours creating some really nice textures and currently their work is all for nothing, since all we see is a muddy mess (mostly on gear). Kinda feel bad for these artists.

 

Anyway my solution is to look for gear that is solid colors and has the least amount of texturing on them, just so my char looks good. I know it's only cosmetic but I see this char for hours every time I play, I don't want him/her to be an eye sore.

 

I expect Bioware to come up with some wordy technical response that ends with the phrase "we want to do it right". In the end If we were going to see a fix anytime soon they would have said so by now.

[Mystais]

Not sure what you all are doing but I followed a few fixes I read about it the customer service forum and my textures look pretty good.

 

http://i78.photobucket.com/albums/j93/Mystais/pic.jpg

 

This is cropped down to reduce the image size.

 

 

 

Just put the game's exe ( .../swtor/retailclient/swtor.exe ) in compatibility mode for XP Svc Pck 3 and also gave it admin priv.

Also in prefs I lowered textures to low and applied then back to high and applied and textures look fine on my end.

[Tiron_Raptor]

One is the launcher and one is the game.

 

The launcher is Launcher.exe, not Swtor.exe . When you start the game, two SWTOR.exe processes start and the launcher closes.