Why is there a copy protection system in the graphics, and is it crippling the game?

[Cioffaz]

Hi res texture in beta? Very true.

[ObiWonCanolli]

So this is whats killing my framerate? this copy protection system is just absurd, bioware can always sue anyone who copies their 3D models.

 

Oh great, the "tin foil hat" theorists just got a heavy diet to feed their performance bashing.

 

Folks, it's all speculation. Connecting a research paper at Standford to being used in game is an HUGE and BLIND leap.

[Tiron_Raptor]

The RemoteRender is the HeroEngine render. It runs as a separate process and is therefore 'remote' to the main process. I think in earlier versions of the game the DLL was actually named 'HeroEngine'.

 

I am intrigued by your statements and wish to subscribe to your newsletter, so that I might learn more of this.

[tmsolberg]

This is really interesting. I need to follow this thread.

[miliways]

the remoterender is the heroengine render. It runs as a separate process and is therefore 'remote' to the main process. I think in earlier versions of the game the dll was actually named 'heroengine'.

 

quoted for truth

[Enico]

/subscribed

[rourich]

If animations are indeed uploaded/downloaded wouldn't this affect the user's ISP cap if one had a limit? Would the second process be Bioware's way of using multiple cores? Just my

two cents.

[Granrick]

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy - you shoot a bunch of bullets into a wall without doing much aiming. Then you go and paint a bulls-eye over the spot where most of the bullets hit and it looks like you're a good shot.

 

As it relates to SWTOR, you see a bunch of issues people are having with the game. You find a pdf on the web that could be stretched to cover several issues. Suddenly, a lot of people think this must be the cause.

 

I mean no disrespect. Just pointing out what I'm seeing going on.

[Flowerslayer]

We need a blue response to this. Edited January 11, 2012 by Flowerslayer

[Hingster]

im not playing this game anymore but for the time i did play it was stressfull on my rig , like when you run a 3D benchtest. hopefully it hasnt taken to much life off my hardware

[Ossos]

We need a blue response to this.

 

They did. http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/01/10/bioware-responds-to-the-old-republic-performance-issues/

 

It's not them, it's you.

 

F2P by 2013

[miliways]

An interesting, well thought out post with a lot of detailed information, thankyou.

 

I understand that no one really has any answers for this at the moment but if this was the method in which Bioware were rendering some of the 3D models, this would cause a significant strain on bandwidth, correct?

 

Now hopefully I'm not coming across as "one of those guys" here but my brother who isn't really an online gamer but loves StarWars is playing this with me on a fairly equally specced system but using a budget option 2mb internet line whereas I'm using 50mb. Our computers pretty much handle the game identically - would this theory not suggest that he would have more issues than I do due to his line speed being significantly slower?

 

Secondly, and in the same vein. SWTOR opens up US and EU servers for anyone who wants to play on them despite them being physically located in different parts of the world. I'm from the EU but my gameplay experience (minus a slight hitch in latency) is no different when I opt to play on a US server - wouldn't such a system have a harder time downloading and the rendering the data from the other side of the Atlantic?

 

Just thoughts. Keep up the discussion!

 

Some extremely logical doubts. Every point you made is perfectly valid and continues to show why this is ludicrous.

[daMarek]

Give us an explanation BioWare!

[Jonlinar]

I have no consern about it "hitting the web", I dont care if it is or isnt streaming anything. I care that its running on only one core and its running so hard that my comp wants to shutdown. I want to know what SWTOR.exe number 2 is. and why its not multi core optimized. why it cant seem to play nice with anything.

 

I also want to know if it is responsible for the GPU fan to be running at 100% constantly, and barely being able to keep up. When neither heat issues pop up in anything else... Games, Video rendering with the GPU... nothing runs this hot... Id like to know why.

 

Im thankful you are hear to keep the thread from running of to crazy land. and i know you can only speek to the issues you know. I trust you are correct on the network/remote rendering issue. But who cares when the game is frying eggs.

 

If you're having heating issues and issues with your computer shutting down, that has nothing to do with the fact that one of your cores is pegged out. A processor can only ever run at it's clock speed. You can't make it run hotter by simply asking it to do more. It will just run at max and nothing more.

 

If any machine would be shutting down due to heat, I would expect it to be the computer I run the game on, a laptop. However, I do my standard "take the back plate off and run a small desk fan to keep airflow going" trick and it runs fine like any other game. I suspect your computer is shutting down due to overheating, as many motherboards have sensors built in to protect from the type of overheating that would melt your chips and start fires. If all you have is stock fans in your rig, or your case is not designed to handle a lot of airflow well, then you will overheat.

 

That said, you may not have issues elsewhere because the client is asking the GPU to do something it can't do well and may require a patch from the manufacturer or BW implementing a patch to be more GPU friendly. However, I would suspect such an issue to have come out in beta as well unless they did some lat-minute touch ups related to graphics before launch that, for whatever reason, were considered minor enough to not warrant a thorough vetting during beta.

[Xanadoo]

/subscribed

 

Keep the responses coming and they'll be forced to respond.

[Marcus_Cade]

This sounds like a complete joke to me. The only reason i can see for doing it like this is because Lucas Arts demanded that all assets are copy protected and EA/Bioware was forced to comply.

 

Or this is some kind of weird research project they are toying around with.

 

Would be my guess.

[Tiron_Raptor]

No, it doesn't! See, you're still drawing lots of conclusions without knowing enough of what you're talking about, so that leads to all kinds of misconceptions.

 

A "remote rendering" system was not added in the last second. There's no way in hell they changed the base rendering for the game in the last week of development, that would take months of redesign. Not to mention, as I've pointed out, this game runs on a 3rd party engine, the Hero Engine. Please go research it.

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

 

As others have pointed out, the second process is likely either a WoW Warden style security application to prevent people from running hacks, (think PunkBuster) or it is part of the Hero Engine's ability to run the game on a level which is in progress, edited by artists. Or its just part of the game engine in some other complicated way, maybe they're using some kind of reflection for updates or for who knows what.

 

Software development is just so mind mindbogglingly complicated.

 

There IS a problem with high-resolution textures, and we'll be getting a response. Other threads have discussed it, and the developers are putting together a response. But the problem doesn't have anything to do with streaming animations, nor attempting to keep models or textures secret. Its just infeasible.

 

Yes, there's a lot of conclusions being jumped to. There's so little data available that it's hard to do much else.

 

The second process has been linked in another, unrelated thread, in passing, to the remoterendererserver.ibc file. How they linked it I'm too tired to figure out: I'd guess one of the process lists somewhere had something on it.

 

So what did I do? I formed a hypothesis, put it out there, and waited and hoped someone would give some hard data to indicate one way or the other what was going on.

 

If the data that results indicates I'm wrong, I'll be the first one to admit it. Heck, I'll go back and replace the OP with 'These are not the droids I'm looking for. Move along, move along!'

 

Or maybe edit it to explain what's been learned.

 

That's the key though, the learning.

 

So far I'm yet to hear much in the way of alternate hypotheses...

[Drayzen]

We need a blue response to this.

 

Please do not disgrace the name of a Blizzar "Blue" by comparing them to that of the Bioware "Yellows". Bioware has been told time and time again that their lack of a customer facing approach on the forums is night and day when paired against Blizzard. You are doing Blizzard a dis-service by using the term "Blue" when coming to Bioware's forums. Just sayin'.

[miliways]

Fragmentation on an SSD? Surely, you are joking?

 

Whoops, missed that it was solid-state. My bad, you're totally right.

[serafus]

if its true, than really ..... and i thought blizzard is ignorant 5 starts

[miliways]

Yes, there's a lot of conclusions being jumped to. There's so little data available that it's hard to do much else.

 

The second process has been linked in another, unrelated thread, in passing, to the remoterendererserver.ibc file. How they linked it I'm too tired to figure out: I'd guess one of the process lists somewhere had something on it.

 

So what did I do? I formed a hypothesis, put it out there, and waited and hoped someone would give some hard data to indicate one way or the other what was going on.

 

If the data that results indicates I'm wrong, I'll be the first one to admit it. Heck, I'll go back and replace the OP with 'These are not the droids I'm looking for. Move along, move along!'

 

Or maybe edit it to explain what's been learned.

 

That's the key though, the learning.

 

So far I'm yet to hear much in the way of alternate hypotheses...

 

I can force Antialising. This proves rendering is being done. Performence is the same on a 1mbs as a 20mbs connection. This proves they are not streaming art assets.

 

The performance is the same on US as EU servers. If you were correct, there should be an increase of about 2x the slowdown, as your latency increases dramatically. You can go test this one yourself.

 

Watch your internet traffic. Streaming the video of the game would take Mb/s, but the game is only in the Kb/s range. And again, streaming animation data is impossible, its too large to be done in real-time. Gaikai and OnLive do not stream model or animation data, nobody does. Not even the article you linked. The linked article does what GaiKai and OnLive do, which is to render the entire scene remotely and then display it to the user. This is not being done, for again, the reasons I presented above, which you can test.

 

 

Alternative theories: The second process is a warden like application. The second process has to do with the hero engine's capabilities. The second process has to do with the hero engine's rendering. Those are just off the top of my head, there are plenty of perfectly reasonable reasons there would be an additional process spawned.

 

So there, I give you evidence you can test yourself that your theory is wrong, and I present you with alternatives which are much more viable.

 

I ask you to stay true to your word: edit your first post, these are not the droids you are looking for.

Edited January 11, 2012 by miliways

[Granrick]

They did. http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/01/10/bioware-responds-to-the-old-republic-performance-issues/

 

It's not them, it's you.

 

F2P by 2013

 

It's not a response, it was written before this. It'd have to be a presponse

[Brorim]

/subbed

 

This might indeed explain a few things .

 

Let's hope there is nothing to it .

[Koxi]

I'm thinking BW should be asking this guy to come work for them! haha Great post buddy.

[LexonLightsaber]

No, it doesn't! See, you're still drawing lots of conclusions without knowing enough of what you're talking about, so that leads to all kinds of misconceptions.

 

A "remote rendering" system was not added in the last second. There's no way in hell they changed the base rendering for the game in the last week of development, that would take months of redesign. Not to mention, as I've pointed out, this game runs on a 3rd party engine, the Hero Engine. Please go research it.

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

 

As others have pointed out, the second process is likely either a WoW Warden style security application to prevent people from running hacks, (think PunkBuster) or it is part of the Hero Engine's ability to run the game on a level which is in progress, edited by artists. Or its just part of the game engine in some other complicated way, maybe they're using some kind of reflection for updates or for who knows what.

 

Software development is just so mind mindbogglingly complicated.

 

There IS a problem with high-resolution textures, and we'll be getting a response. Other threads have discussed it, and the developers are putting together a response. But the problem doesn't have anything to do with streaming animations, nor attempting to keep models or textures secret. Its just infeasible.

 

Understanding that all replies are welcome, the op is not suggesting this is a fact. Just using reasoning and sound theory to base an assumption as to a cause many are experiencing. With respect to a rendering engine being built within the last week of development, whose to say that this system was not already built and then integrated within the system. Either way the OP is not stating conclusion or facts, just a statement that many believe should be responded too because of its apparent validity. I personally do no see the same rationale within your responses and would ask that you would use the same reasoning with respect to your replies.