shananigan Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 (edited) So.... swtor.exe PID 6772 (27 threads) waits for another process swtor.exe 2156 (16 threads)... Say what you want the two process communicate with one another. Look at the wait chains or fire up wireshark and do the math. Client side performance will take a hit regardless of settings because they are talking to one another. Who knows, and maybe it doesn't matter, but the end result is that there are two *.exe's running and they do communicate. It is a hop regardless of what happens and therefore a hit. Yea, that is a developer debugger, it should not even be there. Edited January 11, 2012 by shananigan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shivetya Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Nice read. I'd like to get an answer, but maybe the issue is too technical... Material whose copyright is owned by Lucas and under a distribution and management restriction? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VorpalK Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 I'm going to ask the development team to look into this, but I'd ask you to pull back on some of the more extreme speculation. Posts like this do not help us to have rational informed discussions about the issues that we are facing. There is, to my knowledge, no single DLL that's responsible for a multitude of problems across the game. For example, our 'ability delay' issue is being addressed by the development team right now, and I've been told there are dozens of fixes potentially being looked at to help improve things. There's no single magic fix (although some fixes may have more of an effect than others). I'll also say right now that we're not 'remotely rendering' textures and sending to your client via your internet connection; that would be some impressive technology and if we were doing it, is likely something we'd have talked about before now. I'll seek developer comment on this, but I just want to caution anyone from overreacting. Cool. Thanks for responding to this. Good enough for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grammarye Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 In short, lack of technical knowledge strikes again, speculation runs rampant, and worse, the OP edits the post as though the original speculation is truth and the responses in dark blue, very hard to read, are just extra bits of info. Essentially Bioware is guilty until proven innocent, and whilst I desire as much technical info as possible as well, I dislike this approach. True investigative research is done objectively. All that said, this is what happens when developers forget to properly name their DLLs and components. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tiron_Raptor Posted January 11, 2012 Author Share Posted January 11, 2012 Yea, that is a developer debugger, it should not even be there. But it could very well answer everything in one swift stroke, answering everything that IS going on here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Incendergel Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 ^^ Yeah - so far all I saw was the one PID swtor.exe 6772 doing a lot of reads but I'm only at the character creation screen though. At least two threads munging on program files (x86)\electronic arts\bioware\star wars - the old republic\assets\swtor_main_bnk_streamed_b_1.tor Once I log in then it spawns several threads pulling in the main art pieces. Vehicle, area, global, art, etc. The "streamed" piece is interesting though but could be anything. I don't see the other pid accessing files though at all. But damn the 6772 client process ID is spooling some serious disk reads Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarthSublimitas Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Jesus, what ever happened to playing a game normally??? No strange download this, send strange coded messages to company servers that. I have such a headache from all of this... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Incendergel Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Side note to the person who mentioned developer debugger. I uninstalled the beta client and removed the directory. This is a digital download from early head start. Not sure if you implied that I did something or it is something else or that is what it is. Just saying I notice two processes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ApesAmongUs Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 White man created AIDS Tupac got killed by Illuminati There was no moon landing etc *** are you talking about. It sounds like you are accusing him of being a conspiracy theorist. That would be an odd thing to do given that the part you quoted was about people investigating things. Did you mean to quote another post or are you just naturally confused like that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dovahkien Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 To StephenReid........ and well everyone else who has been participating in this thread since the start The reason why people think there is more to what you are saying comes down to performance you have high end machines that are struggling with low res textures, other mmo's run fine, high end games i.e. battlefield 3 run fine. swtor struggles in fleets and in open world. the game chugs like its loading assets (paging issue it seems) and as a result you are down to 20fps. Most people can't fathom how the game could be released when it runs so bad. Some (myself included) could let this slide if it was running high res textures and that's what was causing low performance (as per your 1st post/explanation on textures) The fact is, the game is running low res textures, looks ugly, and is bringing down rigs with 12-16gigs of ram running i-7's and high end videocards in sli/xfire to its knee's This is normal? Then you or someone else from bioware on a joystix interview say that its our rigs that are the problem. This is why we think there is wayyyy more to the story then you and bioware are saying. There are too many holes in your story. Don't get me wrong, i love swtor but my god the engine runs terrible Bioware.. we are not console gamers, we aren't sheep. We are pc gamers. We are smart and will find problems and call you out on them.... Not sure what game your playing, last i checked graphics are defaulted to medium...And if your getting 20 frames your pc is a pos. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tiron_Raptor Posted January 11, 2012 Author Share Posted January 11, 2012 In short, lack of technical knowledge strikes again, speculation runs rampant, and worse, the OP edits the post as though the original speculation is truth and the responses in dark blue, very hard to read, are just extra bits of info. Essentially Bioware is guilty until proven innocent, and whilst I desire as much technical info as possible as well, I dislike this approach. True investigative research is done objectively. All that said, this is what happens when developers forget to properly name their DLLs and components. Well I got yellow used to announce the dev posts, for obvious reasons. Red to try to get people to see the big huge caveat. What color to use to differentiate the rest then, neon green? And technically it's just 'blue' per the forums...I can go lighten it up a bit maybe. And actually I've been editing the post to try to clarify things to keep people from misunderstanding and jumping to quite so many false conclusions, so that newcomers reading it get a better idea of what's going on. Also adding in whatever plausible bits of explanation I can come up with, but without modifying the text or locking it off until it's confirmed. Things that are pretty well conclusively proven wrong are closed off in spoiler tags and labeled to that effect within them as well. I'd use strikethrough instead but that doesn't seem to be an option, at least not that I can find. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Klondeikbar Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Jesus, what ever happened to playing a game normally??? No strange download this, send strange coded messages to company servers that. I have such a headache from all of this... All that died when publishers decided that mediocre products couldn't possibly be the reason for falling revenue, it had to be pirates. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Incendergel Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Oh - and I might as well add: SWTOR.exe PID 6772 (they main pid I think that is doing all the disk reads, etc) is: 935.220 MB memory / 900,488 private SWTOR.exe PID 2156 (the secondary process the above guy is doing something with) is: 292,824 MB memory / 197,776 private That is a heafty primary process, huh? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarthSublimitas Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 All that died when publishers decided that mediocre products couldn't possibly be the reason for falling revenue, it had to be pirates. Agreed But I just want to play a game that actually works. Turn it on, log in, and go kill something. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Klondeikbar Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 (edited) Agreed But I just want to play a game that actually works. Turn it on, log in, and go kill something. Then go pirate it. That's the delicious irony of DRM. No matter how much we want to actually pay for a game, the pirated DRM free version is almost always higher quality. THANKS FOR THAT UBISOFT! Edited January 11, 2012 by Klondeikbar Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nonforma Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Based on my logs: The secondary process is only accessing registry information about the entire system, no TCP communication either with local or remote servers. The only asset it did access was the shaders.bin file. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chaffery Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Side note to the person who mentioned developer debugger. I uninstalled the beta client and removed the directory. This is a digital download from early head start. Not sure if you implied that I did something or it is something else or that is what it is. Just saying I notice two processes. Should be same for everyone, I'm using retail DVD version, never participated to beta test. Got 2 32Bit swtor.exe's running, one is taking 270K and other bit over 1Gb RAM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tiron_Raptor Posted January 11, 2012 Author Share Posted January 11, 2012 (edited) ^^ Yeah - so far all I saw was the one PID swtor.exe 6772 doing a lot of reads but I'm only at the character creation screen though. At least two threads munging on program files (x86)\electronic arts\bioware\star wars - the old republic\assets\swtor_main_bnk_streamed_b_1.tor Once I log in then it spawns several threads pulling in the main art pieces. Vehicle, area, global, art, etc. The "streamed" piece is interesting though but could be anything. I don't see the other pid accessing files though at all. But damn the 6772 client process ID is spooling some serious disk reads the 'bnk' in there reminds me of the bink video/audio codecs you used to see being used for cinematics on games all the time. Other than that your guess is as good as mine. Based on my logs: The secondary process is only accessing registry information about the entire system, no TCP communication either with local or remote servers. The only asset it did access was the shaders.bin file. Just scanning the registry? Could very well be our 'warden' if that's the case. Edited January 11, 2012 by Tiron_Raptor Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tiron_Raptor Posted January 11, 2012 Author Share Posted January 11, 2012 (edited) I still type too fast. -.0 Edited January 11, 2012 by Tiron_Raptor Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grammarye Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 (edited) Well I got yellow used to announce the dev posts, for obvious reasons. Red to try to get people to see the big huge caveat. What color to use to differentiate the rest then, neon green? And technically it's just 'blue' per the forums...I can go lighten it up a bit maybe. And actually I've been editing the post to try to clarify things to keep people from misunderstanding and jumping to quite so many false conclusions, so that newcomers reading it get a better idea of what's going on. Also adding in whatever plausible bits of explanation I can come up with, but without modifying the text or locking it off until it's confirmed. Things that are pretty well conclusively proven wrong are closed off in spoiler tags and labeled to that effect within them as well. I'd use strikethrough instead but that doesn't seem to be an option, at least not that I can find. I understand that, but on my reading, there's a heck of a lot of hyberbole & speculation still in the white sections - maybe that's just my reading of it. I just would prefer to see it kept to known facts, and leave the speculation for the thread itself. For an equivalent example, you don't go labelling a process a rootkit until you are very very sure of what it does. Even the thread title assumes and implies a copy protection system in place. A newcomer is very much led down a given path of thinking. You still have statements like: Performance drop in areas with a lot of characters? The DLL Referenced in the textures thread appears, from what I can tell, to be specifically related to character models in particular, so it's logical that the performance hit from the remote rendering would be worst when there are many characters on screen. It makes so much sense, and potentially ties together a large number of the problems people have been reporting. And for what? Copy protecting the models? Seriously? Deliberately crippling the performance and appearance of the game for legitimate, paying customers in order to keep someone from being able to rebuild your 3D models? It has to be one of the most absurd things I've ever heard. Oh - and I might as well add: SWTOR.exe PID 6772 (they main pid I think that is doing all the disk reads, etc) is: 935.220 MB memory / 900,488 private SWTOR.exe PID 2156 (the secondary process the above guy is doing something with) is: 292,824 MB memory / 197,776 private That is a heafty primary process, huh? Seriously, what exactly is the news about TOR having two processes? Out of process communication & proxy processes are pretty commonplace. I've written two in the last year for our product; it enables you to do all sorts of things. Please stop with the utterly unhelpful rampant speculation as to what they do. You don't know unless you've looked at the code. A bunch of numbers is frankly meaningless statistics about activity, not what activity they are doing. Of course those two processes are going to communicate - they wouldn't be there if they weren't. Forgive me if I sound perjorative or terse, but as a software engineer I really would prefer to see some hard facts about the code itself. The Wireshark idea is an interesting one. Has it occurred to anyone at all yet that the words Remote Renderer mean 'remote as in another process' because I'd surely consider calling a remote rendering server that I run next to the main app so as to work around 32-bit address space limitations exactly that. Edited January 11, 2012 by Grammarye Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thaxeus Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 I don't see why Bioware can't just do what Guild wars did. they made your personal avatar's resolution higher than everyone elses. honestly i don't really care what other players look like, i just want to see my avatar in all his high res glory. also, this Stephen reid guy says they can do it in the conversations, with up to 4 player character avatars. so why not make it that i can use the high res textures with just whoever is in my party, again i don't care about everyone else. oh and PLEASE do something about the paper doll textures, they are horrible. when i'm trying to see if a piece of gear i might consider getting looks like a muddy POS i'm not gonna want it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nonforma Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Has it occurred to anyone at all yet that the words Remote Renderer mean 'remote as in another process' because I'd surely consider calling a remote rendering server that I run next to the main app so as to work around 32-bit address space limitations exactly that. It has, and has been on the first post for some time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nisha_Fang Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Think for a moment. Outsourcing rendering for 100.000's of clients. You got to be kidding me I do not think this is even possible and if it is, it is a stupid thing to implement it. There are ways to do this more intelligent and uses less resources. There are certainly issues with rendering and high texture availability. Even though I have a high end machine, in some outdoor areas, the game runs choppy while my fps is still 80 (with AA x8 enabled). Also at off peak hours, while I do have a good internet connection, I usually see 1000+ ms for a second and then it drops to the normal 30ms. On peak hours there is no problem at all, go figure. Above problems never occur in any other game I play! For sure Bioware is doing something which gives a lot a bad performance, but outsourcing rendering can not be the reason. If only Bioware is communicating with their player base as some (Trion for example) does. I support this thread though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarthSublimitas Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Then go pirate it. That's the delicious irony of DRM. No matter how much we want to actually pay for a game, the pirated DRM free version is almost always higher quality. THANKS FOR THAT UBISOFT! lol! The whole reason to play "legally" on BW's servers and not private servers (which I don't think exist - yet...) is the feeling of true "accomplishment." Private servers, of which I've never played, seem like you can do anything you want basically - where's the challenge in that? I like to be challenged and play MMO's properly. But from this whole BW/EA debacle, I don't blame ppl from leaving or finding "alternative" methods of play. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grammarye Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 It has, and has been on the first post for some time. Sorry, I don't see it mentioned; could you quote the bit you mean? If I'm just being blind, then no worries Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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