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

[carnac_fett]

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.

 

It's great that you're happy with the Medium texture setting, but a lot of people want to see the High texture setting work.

[RogenJaxx]

Every word he says on this subject is going to be parsed with a microscope by the community so I understand why they are taking their time.

 

Given how much effort Bioware is taking to craft a response means not only are they afraid of the response but they even seem to be in a CYA mode. I have a really bad feeling will be getting news that freaks peeps out.

 

I am fine with the graphics as they are today but would like to know that at some point I can have High Textures. Too bad this is coming to a head just before many folks will decide if they renew subs on the 20th.

 

Bioware look at MMORPG.com game ratings and review the graphics score that players have posted about the game if you don't think you have a problem, you do. The game is getting dinged pretty hard on the graphics being subpar!

[biggerthatthesun]

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.

 

Hahahahahahahahahaha!

 

No, seriously, hahahahahahahahahaha!

[mArchangel]

50 + pages of QQ.

 

Its irritating yes, but I'd rather them fix hard modes and nerf ops/smugglers first.

 

NO!!!!!!!!!!! Basics first dude! Are you joking?

[Mystais]

Hahahahahahahahahaha!

 

No, seriously, hahahahahahahahahaha!

 

Wow so you folks are just overly anal. Got it. Take care.

[carnac_fett]

Wow so you folks are just overly anal. Got it. Take care.

 

Peace.

 

Enjoy your http://img542.imageshack.us/img542/1111/swtor2012010722193674.png

[Cathgarr]

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

 

there is a mod reply to this in a post on the forum that stated one was for the launcher and one for the game. I'll try and find it but without search it's more difficult.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Cathgarr

[BeeblesTV]

Was there a response today?

[carnac_fett]

Was there a response today?

 

Stephen Reid came by to tell us that Bioware is carefully creating a response. Once every department involved gives it the green light tomorrow, Mr. Reid will let us know what Bioware's official stance on the matter is.

[Mackuss]

Ofcourse you're aware of the issue, Bioware - you're the one cheating us.

[Oddzball]

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.

 

Ive got experience with game engines. Lots.

 

I work professionally in the software develoment field.

 

America's Army

VBS2

Unreal 3 Engine

Plus years and years of mods and tinkering before i got through college.

 

I can make lots of speculations, and have.

 

My opinion? THey disabled them on purpose in beta due to performance issues, and now they may not re-enable them because they fear folks machines wont be up to snuff. At least not till they optimize some other things first.

 

Ive seen a lot of discussion about the Hero engine and Level of detail/texture problems, so this doesnt really suprise me.

[CyberdeckVIII]

. 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.

 

Faxion Online was built using the Hero Engine.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeroEngine

[mArchangel]

Go check your ini dude they completely disabled the options in the file. As well as a message telling you not to change the file. Aa is onlu part of the problem. The textures are nintendo 64 the problem

 

Rubbish! nVidia has to enable AA in ini and in driver settings. ATI can just override and force AA via Catalyst Control Center. We run both types of cards here and this is 100% correct info. AA is NOT an issue the lowres textures are!

 

Oh and the ini you are talking about you DO NOT want to edit. It's located in C:\Users\Username\Appdata\Local\SWTOR\

 

not the one in your game install directory. Jeez.

[biggerthatthesun]

Faxion Online was built using the Hero Engine.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeroEngine

 

Take that, nay-sayers! Faxion ftw!

http://www.mmocrunch.com/wp-content/gallery/faxion-online-first-images/faxion_ascedia_peaks.jpg

 

Oh...

[mArchangel]

What i meant to say;

 

Anisotropic filteringCan help with textures.(My bad, fixed)

 

But it basically takes samples (of which you can change the multipliter) of pixels and aggregates colour values to smooth them out.

 

High levels of AF can make things look very blurry.

 

So with AF enabled your bad textures will just look like blurry bad textures.

 

 

 

Sorta right, sorta wrong. The engine only supports MultiSampling AA if at all. However not natively. If you opt for supersampling to improve the AA quality you end up with two problems: 1. blurryness all over 2. due to a lack of support in the code your GPU will eventually overheat.

 

THAT ladies and gents is the reason the AA was removed as they feared 100s of consumer hardware burns out. Any idea what that would mean to the game? Death before birth. Keep it MultiSampling and no issues whatsoever.

 

Oh and high levels of AF NEVER make anything blurry - that is just plain nonsense.

[Tahana]

Rift

Rift

&

Rift

(Seriously, this game flies in the face of every fanboy who repeats that MMOs are supposed to have big problems at launch. Rift stepped on the scene like a pro from day one. Too bad the storyline is meh.)

 

lulz.. Rift has had all kinds of performance issues and you sitting here making it sound like they didn't is anything but genuine. I played that game from beta until November of last year. I guess you weren't there for the opening of GSB huh? or the severe FPS issues that people have to this day during zone events? Oh and did I mention the more than lack luster spell details and still have performance issues during zone events? Or how about their master user database getting hacked with all of their players personal information.. No? Ok so how about the exploit where you didn't even need someones logon credentials to get into their game account.. All you needed was there user number that was available by purely viewing their forum account information. Is that enough? No? Ok so how about their FoTM issues and the inability of their Dev team to be able to use a calculator in figuring out how much damage a specific skill should do in order to create some kind of balance within the game?

 

I could go on and on and on about how poorly that game was implemented and the continued issues to this day.. If any game is going to be F2P soon it is going to be that one.

[aEtherEater]

Personally, I'd rather wait on fixing the graphic issues vs getting the mechanics working smoothly.

 

I'd be polishing a gem of a game rather than polishing a turd any day of the week.

And yes, i know Mythbusters proved you can polish a turd.

[Solthar]

Hey all, I am here to apologize again... the good news is we have a draft of our response (you might be able to guess it's not a sentence or two) but I am circulating it internally to ensure my technical details are correct.

 

To give you an insight into our process here... as the Community team does with most big replies, I tracked down a variety of people on our client and art teams to get the facts on how the game works before putting the post together. As I'm representing those teams publicly, I want to ensure they're happy with what I'm saying on their behalf before I post it. They're busy people, so I'm just waiting on their sign-off right now.

 

I appreciate your patience and assuming we have sign-off this evening, you'll get our response tomorrow. If not, I accept the incoming rotten eggs.

 

 

This is the exactly response I would give if what I was going to release was rather inflammatory towards the target audience and wanted to make absolutely sure that I wouldn't be catching any flack from the ensuing flaming crapstorm. Combine the above response with their previous actions of renaming medium quality graphics to high and one should not need an official reply to see their stance on the issue. Their actions have stated it quite clearly.

 

What I clearly see, after following this issue quite closely, is a definitive trend towards disallowing cut-scene quality (Aka 'High' Quality) texture resolution during actual gameplay. I also foresee that tomorrows press release will contain a lot of flowery prose that dances around the issue while summing up the reply as "due to technical limitations, cut-scene quality textures cannot be used during normal gameplay at this time.".

 

Joy.

[mufutiz]

I only browed through some pages of comments, there is nobody actually enjoying the high setting textures at the moment, correct?

 

I felt like some textures looked a little odd today so I played with the settings and noticed medium-high didn't trigger a reload screen. I hope there will be higher res textures soon!

Edited January 11, 2012 by mufutiz

[Tiron_Raptor]

Oh and high levels of AF NEVER make anything blurry - that is just plain nonsense.

 

That's exactly how ANY kind of filtering works, however: by averaging multiple samples, likely from different texels, together to determine the final output to the pixel. By definition that's 'blurring', as you're combining adjacent samples into a single result. Using higher sample counts (higher levels of filtering) disguises/reduces the effect by making the results more granular and more accurate, which the main reason high filtering levels produce a better result.

 

Tom's hardware did a pretty good writeup of the various filtering methods and how they work many years back during a kerfluffle over filtering optimizations. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ati,819.html is where's it at, but the most pertinent bits come in the form of a couple screenshots from oldschool call of duty.

 

http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2004/06/03/ati/pic05.jpg demonstrates pure, non-mipmapped point sampling versus mipmapped point sampling. You'll also note that the non-mipmapped one looks sharper except for the distant road, which is a noisy mess (even worse in motion, and not just far away). The mipmapping eliminates the noise but adds very visible quality stepdowns and blur. You'll note the closest section of road is essentially identical to the non-mipmapped one. What you can't see is that there's still a lot of noise in motion, combined with a very visible 'bow wave' effect, as the quality stepdowns move with you. The blurring is mostly by scaling: the base texture has to be scaled down for each mip-map level ( http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2004/06/03/ati/pic03.jpg illustrates this). This has a similar effect to anti-aliasing the texture (you'll note, no jaggies on the road texture!). The rest of what causes the blur is the same thing that causes the noise in the unfiltered image: the reduction in the number of pixels available to show the same pattern taking up the same area ( Illustrated by http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2004/06/03/ati/pic04.jpg ). The scaling causes this to show up as blurring instead of noise: without filtering, there are gaps between the sample points, the contents of which aren't represented in the final image in any way. Because of this, a chessboard if sampled just the right way could show up as all white or all black at distance.

 

http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2004/06/03/ati/pic10.jpg compares unfiltered mipmapping again to 16x AF (a fairly high setting even now). The distant road looks MUCH better: the anisotropy and the increased sample count have compensated for the scaling and angle aliasing. You'll note there's not nearly so much difference in the sides of the buildings in the distance: they're at a relatively high angle and don't get messed up so badly. Again though, you'll note that the nearest section of road is very similar on both... but not QUITE identical. This is the high sample count at work, as this section isn't really angled enough to benefit from the anisotropy much.

 

With a lower sample count, the blurring effect is MUCH more visible. Bi/Trilinear filtering use a mere four samples per pixel: full 16x AF uses around 128 samples per pixel.

 

http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2004/06/03/ati/pic06.jpg illustrates the effect this has quite clearly: in all examples, the bricks on the distant building and the near road are at least somewhat clear, while the bricks on the distant road only are with the anisotropic filtering.(the difference between Bilinear and Trilinear is simply that Trilinear filters across mipmap levels and bilinear does not, so bilinear still has the visible quality stepdowns and bow wave). The effect of the higher sampling count is best seen on the near road: On all the linear sampling levels, it's blurred when compared to the unfiltered or anisotropically filtered images(good lord that unfiltered one is noisy, I wonder if they punched that up somehow). The trick being that anisotropy itself only really helps with surfaces you're looking at from a very oblique angle, so that part of the road is benefiting less from the anisotropy. Similarly with the bricks on the distant building: they're visible in all the images. If you managed to increase the sample count on the trilinear to the same level as the AF, you'd find that stuff you were looking at almost dead-on would look almost the same, but anything at an oblique angle(the distant road) was blurred. This is because anisotropic filtering essentially reduces to isotropic(square) filtering when at a 90 degree angle, just with a much higher sample count than trilinear.

 

Regardless, it's blurred. With high sample counts MUCH less noticeably than lower sample counts, but still measurably blurred. This is way more than offset by the benefits of AF however: No noise, no bow waves, and tremendously better appearance, particularly of oblique surfaces.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Tiron_Raptor

[skepticck]

This is the exactly response I would give if what I was going to release was rather inflammatory towards the target audience and wanted to make absolutely sure that I wouldn't be catching any flack from the ensuing flaming crapstorm. Combine the above response with their previous actions of renaming medium quality graphics to high and one should not need an official reply to see their stance on the issue. Their actions have stated it quite clearly.

 

What I clearly see, after following this issue quite closely, is a definitive trend towards disallowing cut-scene quality (Aka 'High' Quality) texture resolution during actual gameplay. I also foresee that tomorrows press release will contain a lot of flowery prose that dances around the issue while summing up the reply as "due to technical limitations, cut-scene quality textures cannot be used during normal gameplay at this time.".

 

Joy.

 

can't argue with that, this is exactly what i think is gonna happen, unfortunately.

Edited January 11, 2012 by skepticck

[SpeckledHen]

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.

 

Exactly. I work for a government agency that administers technical regulations. In my previous job I used to develop communications products for one particular set of regulations. It was partially my job to "dumb" it down. I always made sure the techies actually agreed with my message. If I screwed it up, and published something that was wrong, everyone would assume the whole Agency was incompetent, and not just one comms writer.

[Tiron_Raptor]

can't argue with that, this is exactly what i think is gonna happen, unfortunately.

 

Pretty much. Cutscenes are predictable, because they have full control of what goes on in them and what shows up in them. This means they can estimate the resource usage quite accurately.

 

You wandering around in the world is NOT predictable, and the resource usage depends entirely on what's on your screen at the moment.

 

The way he phrased it and the fact he's circulating it both suggest that there are technical issues involved: the fact he's circulating it also suggests that they're going to be explained at least somewhat, and not just entirely glossed over. I'd like that a lot, but then I'm all but a computer tech.

 

As I've said a few times, I'm guessing it's probably going to be memory, because that's the main thing larger textures hit really hard, and there's few things that trash performance worse than running out of available memory. The question in that case would be is it that the 'high' level textures take an absurd amount of VRAM, or is it because the client is 32bit and windows won't let it address more than 4GB?

 

I haven't yet found a good writeup on how WOW64 handles VRAM. I know in 32bit win the VRAM shares memory addressing space with the System RAM(and a few other things). If this is the case in WOW64, the more VRAM it needs the fewer addresses are available for the client itself. If this is the case, however, unless there's some way for the client to specify how much VRAM it needs access to, thus freeing up the addresses the extra VRAM would normally use, there wouldn't be much point to disabling high res.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Tiron_Raptor

[Tenceriker]

Pretty much. Cutscenes are predictable, because they have full control of what goes on in them and what shows up in them. This means they can estimate the resource usage quite accurately.

 

You wandering around in the world is NOT predictable, and the resource usage depends entirely on what's on your screen at the moment.

 

The way he phrased it and the fact he's circulating it both suggest that there are technical issues involved: the fact he's circulating it also suggests that they're going to be explained at least somewhat, and not just entirely glossed over. I'd like that a lot, but then I'm all but a computer tech.

 

As I've said a few times, I'm guessing it's probably going to be memory, because that's the main thing larger textures hit really hard, and there's few things that trash performance worse than running out of available memory. The question in that case would be is it that the 'high' level textures take an absurd amount of VRAM, or is it because the client is 32bit and windows won't let it address more than 4GB?

 

Except that it was int the game before with no issue.

[Tiron_Raptor]

Except that it was int the game before with no issue.

 

Not for everyone, anyway. It could be something as dumb as they want to/have implemented VRAM detection that limits what selections you can pick, to keep people from picking a setting that's going to make you lag when you run out.

 

It's all just speculation at this point.