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

[ToonPhil]

Unfortunately textures aren't the only problem. Look at these shadows. Seriously?!

http://imageshack.us/f/534/swtorpoorshadows.png/

[Improv-]

Dear Bioware:

 

Your "we intended this all along" game looks like garbage. These textures are inexcusable (yes, even in the MMO genre) for a late 2011 launch title. You have single-handedly ignored the last 5+ (being very generous by saying 5) years of advancement in texture fidelity in the genre. No other "modern" Pay-to-Play game has texture quality this abysmal. Hell, I'm fairly certain that a large number of "not modern" and F2P games have better texture detail.

 

Worse, you advertised your game as if it looked fabulous.

 

I'll be back when your game looks like it's worth at least 20$, let alone the 60$+monthly you have the balls to charge for it.

 

Dear Forumers:

 

What are the odds of a class-action for false advertisement on this?

 

*sigh* All that's on everyones mind is suing someone/something.

 

EVERY game company does this. Bullshots are a misleading and common practice in the industry. No court is going to care.

 

Even the games with amazing visuals do this. Go look at the official screenshots of BF3. While the actual game looks amazing the official screens from EA/DICE are jaw droppingly beautiful and better than game settings set to Ultra.

 

Honestly, the only company who hasn't shown bullshots of their game is CD Projekt for the Witcher 2 because you can actually have the game look as clean as those shots with Uber Sampling.

 

Trust me I want nicer textures and shadows as much as you.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Improv-

[Caonimah]

I imagine if the allowed high res textures in game, the number of people having performance issues would be MUCH higher than 5%, and then they couldn't state "Well its mostly people with horrible computers heh"

[starschwar]

Since there is no impact to the server side, whether or not we have high resolution textures enabled, we should at least be given a choice. It's our machine, it's our game experience, and if we don't mind lower frame rates, we should at least have the freedom to choose.

 

 

My thoughts, exactly.

[bkpiazza]

Unfortunately textures aren't the only problem. Look at these shadows. Seriously?!

http://imageshack.us/f/534/swtorpoorshadows.png/

 

haha like your character is built out of legos.

[Redorbz]

Thanks for the thorough reply Stephen. Please keep up the awesome job!

 

However, why not just leave this choice up to the individual? Thats what all this comes down to. Nothing more or less than that IMO.

 

If things are bad enough, the player can ,and will, choose to turn down their settings themselves. Why not let them have that choice? I for one, based part of my decision to subscribe to this service based on what I saw in beta, which was gorgeous. Now I feel like I had a bit of a bait and switch pulled on me. The graphics on the current high setting do not satisfy my personal taste. The gear on my characters in Rift, Lotro and Wow all look much more detailed, and not fuzzed out. I mean head and shoulders above my current characters gear in swtor. Its very disappointing, and whats worse is that the decision COULD be mine, but someone thought they would take that choice away from me.

 

If I paid someone to service my home and paint it dark grey, but they thought it would be better to be light grey, what would happen? Would it be smarter for the painter in question to ask the customer first, and point out why they think the customer may prefer light grey instead? Or is it better for the painter to just go ahead and change the color without consulting their employer? I know not all decisions in MMos can be simplified in these terms, but I feel this one can.

 

I feel that, whoever made this decision made an error in judgement. Its a sign to me, that they do not understand their customer. That decision should be reversed immediatly and the choice of how our graphics are displayed should be given to those of us who fund their pay.

 

For example, there are many players who will never pvp, and avoid populated areas. Soloers, or teams even, who prefer to stay out in the wilds. If I understand you, those people will not be affected by this issue. For example, I have an alt permanantly docked in fleet to handle GTN transactions. He sits in fleet next to a mailbox and the GTN, thats all he does. So , fps or performance dont matter at all to that character, period. I currently never go there myself so it doesnt affect me either. Then there are the full time raiders, pvpers and others who will be affected greatly.

 

Rather than making a blanket decision the team could choose to respect that many players have been involved in gaming before, and understand a little about PC performance and gameplay. Then, let them choose themselves. Not to mention giving respect to the artists who designed the items which currently do not display the way they were designed to.

 

Ive said this in other posts but I will mention it again. It seems the team is looking at swtor as product, not a service. Consequently it appears that many of the decisons they make are from this perspective. This decision is a prime example of that. But, this is a software service you guys are selling, not a product. Understanding the difference is important.

 

A product is bought, paid for, and owned for life. I bought Skyrim, and I can play it until the day I die. I dont pay for access to a server or a community or a team of server admins who keep things running smoothly or developers to add new content. I bought it, it works, end of story. A service is something which only lasts as long as I pay for it. Like Swtor or any pay to play MMO.

 

I do not own SWTOR. I cant play it unless I employ the service of the servers and the team who maintains the service. I do not have it for life, only for as long as I pay a subscription. Its value to me as a consumer becomes zero as soon as my subscription to the Service ends or is cancelled. Like cable TV or a lawn service. Treating this game as a service (which it inarguably is), rather than a product changes everything for the better. Better for bioware and better for the customer of the service.

 

I know you must already understand this. I also know that you cant give everyone the service they want or everyone would be a billionaire with all the latest raid gear, and their class would be OP. But, I feel its still worth considering, and maybe having a internal meeting to discuss this topic for the long term benefit to you at Bioware, and us the players.

 

Again, thank you, and I look forward to the future of swtor!

Edited January 11, 2012 by Redorbz

[they]

I am simply pointing out how silly this sounds. They're basically not allowing us to have the high/ultra settings, because they're afraid we'll complain about it.

 

Because people will. Probably not you exactly, per say, but there would be a whole heap of people that say something along the lines of "My x-teen hundred dollar gaming rig can't even run the game with max textures, *** bioware, learn to code?!"

 

Limiting choice to guarantee performance is an elegant solution. Sure, they -could- have left an option in there for people who think they could run it, but the issue is the people who think they should be able to run it.

 

Textures are large, and take lots of memory. Especially when mipmapped (over 30% more memory!) Texture swaps are expensive functions. Graphics hardware does great for rendering triangles and filling them, but it doesn't like to be told to draw with a different crayon. The amount of time it takes to swap textures is monumental compared to what it takes to just draw (Hence atlasing.)

 

Now, you and I understand that. But, average Joe-blow thinks his videocard should be able to take everything he throws at it, because it was the most expensive one at best buy. When it can't, not only is he likely to, he will complain.

[CalvinDu]

An article on Massively about this now.

 

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/01/11/swtor-senior-community-manager-responds-to-high-res-texture-conc/

 

So that article basically said that this game just simply cannot support the higher resolution textures that Bioware falsely advertised to us?

 

How can a game like World of Warcraft have higher resolution textures on armor etc. compared to a game released in 2011 by a developer such as Bioware is COMPLETELY beyond me.

 

I have lost so much respect for EA and Bioware after this release.

 

 

That's the God honest truth.

[Ninyania]

Some excellent suggestions here - and all things that the development team are actively looking at. There's no guarantee they'll all happen, but they're options on the table, as I understand it.

 

To reiterate, we're looking at ways to improve the visual quality of the game in non-cinematic gameplay as best we can. We understand people's concerns and desires and we'll continue to address them wherever possible.

 

You're going to have to address this, and quick. Frankly, I'm not at all impressed with the fidelity and level of detail of the graphics in this game. It is, visually, about as appealing as World of ThatOtherGame.

[AuroraKet]

Because you can't force AA with Nvidia unless you use Inspector and go through a few steps which maybe he doesn't want/know how to do.

 

He wouldn't be the only one. Any chance you could post where to get the official version of Inspector, and how to set it up?

[Vlacke]

Did you look at your ini fle lately ?

//--------------------------------------------------------------------------//

// WARNING: ** DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE ** //

// Making any changes to this document will result in the corruption of //

// your install and will require the use of the repair utility. //

//--------------------------------------------------------------------------//

[Renderer]

Width=1152

Height=864

WindowX=-1

WindowY=-1

FullScreen=true

doShadows=true

[Repository]

BaseResourceFileName=..\..\Assets\swtor_

So you understand that your not supposed to edit this file. and that

Anti aliasing = 4

adding that to your current ini does absloutely nothing to your ingame settings as everything else that works in conjunction with AA is not present. you realize the option was removed because AA does not work for some systems period even if you force it?

You understand that the reason this is happening is because they are trying to retrofit their hero engine that has not seen an update since 2007. Look it is what it is the cut features to make a release . Lets get honest now and give the community a straight answer of we are working on it we realise the graphics are not matching the marketed screens. We will have this fixed in X amount of time. dont defend the non defensible.

 

My ini file doesn't look anything like that and it doesn't have those warning, guess why??

Because you are looking at the WRONG ini file Mr. Expert, the ini i am talking about is not located in the game directory itself, it is located inside user/name/appdata/local/swtor directory and IT CAN be modified, there is also a little box called READ ONLY which you have to check so that the main ini file you have presented cannot overwrite it every time you start the client.

[ToonPhil]

Good, this finally reached the media. Are voices need to be heard! I hope it also reaches other sites. Edited January 11, 2012 by ToonPhil

[drdog]

*sigh* All that's on everyones mind is suing someone/something.

 

 

Not everyone. I didn't get what was promised so I called AMEX and they have refunded me. They asked me why and I told them I felt like the game was falsely advertised and they said expect to see your refund in 2 to 3 business days. I love AMEX.

[Astralll]

No offense anyone but....Did anyone really not get the memo over the last few years that the game would not be geared to high end machines? Did they not see the interviews or read the interviews that stated this. W

[Emberly]

This isn't really what I expected from a top-tier MMO. I mean, really, it is pretty ridiculous to intentionally make the game look worse in play.

[carnac_fett]

No offense anyone but....Did anyone really not get the memo over the last few years that the game would not be geared to high end machines? Did they not see the interviews or read the interviews that stated this. W

 

We were busy seeing the hundreds of screenshots and videos of the game that were all running on high end settings.

Edited January 11, 2012 by carnac_fett

[Edryk]

We understand the passion and desire for people to see the same textures you see in our cinematic scenes in the main game. Because of the performance issues that would cause for the client, that's not an immediate and easy fix; we need to ensure we're making choices that the majority of our players will be able to benefit from. Having 'atlassed textures' helps performance overall, and that's a very important goal for us.

 

With that said, we've heard your feedback here loud and clear. The development team is exploring options to improve the fidelity of the game, particularly for those of you with high-spec PCs. It will be a significant piece of development work and it won't be an overnight change, but we're listening and we're committed to reacting to your feedback.

 

According to many people here, it was fine when enabled in the beta. Why would it require significant development time if it was working in the past?

 

I spend most of my time away from the fleet. I'm fine with changing options when I go there if it means better textures.

 

Also these paragraphs contradict themselves. 'We want to add options most people can use' and 'We will look to add options people with high end PCs can use' is contradictory unless most users have 'high-spec pcs', in which case high res textures should already be an option.

 

Now add to this the performance issues people are having. You've got a lot to fix to make this game ready for release.

Performance

Ability delay

UI bugs and usability

Textures

 

Also have to agree with the false advertising, and flat out lying in your post that others have brought up. This is not instilling confidence in BW as a company I wish to support - not if you treat your customers this way.

[MurphyNox]

Dear Bioware:

 

Your "we intended this all along" game looks like garbage. These textures are inexcusable (yes, even in the MMO genre) for a late 2011 launch title. You have single-handedly ignored the last 5+ (being very generous by saying 5) years of advancement in texture fidelity in the genre. No other "modern" Pay-to-Play game has texture quality this abysmal. Hell, I'm fairly certain that a large number of "not modern" and F2P games have better texture detail.

 

Worse, you advertised your game as if it looked fabulous.

 

I'll be back when your game looks like it's worth at least 20$, let alone the 60$+monthly you have the balls to charge for it.

 

Dear Forumers:

 

What are the odds of a class-action for false advertisement on this?

 

It's good to see that people are actually standing up and taking action. The game is just not simply worth the monthly payment, heck, it's not even worth the Retail price.

 

I honestly think Bioware has just played everyone, there is no chance that you guys are this stupid, to release the game in the current state. The worst part being your so called "Community Managers" giving us shoe-horned responses and "oh, it will probably get fixed in the future" There are so many people here that are just mindless zombies that have no standards at all when it comes to games.

 

Seriously Bioware, what the hell happened in the past 2 years, first Dragon Age 2 and now this?

[CalvinDu]

You're going to have to address this, and quick. Frankly, I'm not at all impressed with the fidelity and level of detail of the graphics in this game. It is, visually, about as appealing as World of ThatOtherGame.

 

I'd say the appeal is less.

 

The quality of the textures on the armor sets in this game is.. appalling.

[Sanxion]

Positive feedback suggestions:

 

1. Allow US to CHOOSE if we want to enable high resolution textures.

2. Employ a team who knows what they are doing when it comes to designing clothing. Have them work closely with the graphics artists who can translate their vision into something that will look good with current game settings.

 

The only reason I can understand for a developer to lock down something which PC users take for granted i.e. CHOICE in what level of graphics the game runs at would be because their main target audience has a universal specification. The only people who have that are console owners. WE are PC's.

 

So unless you've been developing with an eye for the console market in the future why would you remove that choice from your paying customers?

 

The bottom line here is that games such as Lotro have much better far more detailed graphics on your characters armour. Given their age you have to ask yourself why is that?

 

Effectively you are concerned that our top specified PC's simply cannot handle the higher levels of detail when the majority of us already know they can from beta. But again beta or not that's not the point. You have removed the choice we have.

 

It's all well and good giving a technical explanation as to why high resolution textures currently aren't available in open play but the simple sad fact of the matter is that it is a technical limitation on the engine with what the developers would deem as a reasonable payoff technology wise with regard to a user's PC that they decided isn't feasible! It's not your choice to make. We bought this game under the impression that the graphical capability is as advertised.

 

Given the sheer amount of effort that has gone into the landscaping and art in this game not to mention the huge amount of money on the overall budget to end up with a game that has textures worse than games which are years older is absolutely shocking and totally unacceptable for me.

 

What makes it worse is that the actual armour in game seems to have been designed by people who think dressing up as a tramp or just plain horrible drab clothing is a good idea. Given the visual splendour and diversity that we see in the films the clothing that you can have in this game is horrendous. ALL the armour needs a complete overhaul if you ask me as even with high res textures they will still look drab and samey.

 

What an extremely disappointing outcome especially for the artists who have done amazing work on the landscaping and scenery (pathetic grass draw distance aside but again that's not their fault).

 

I was all set to subscribe for 6 months. However with the complete farce that has been the outcome of an important issue I'll at best be switching it to a 1 month subscription to see what happens in the immediate short term. If things are not improved drastically and rapidly then I'll be taking my custom elsewhere.

 

Once again thankyou to Stephen Reid for his hard work in getting the information and keeping us posted.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Sanxion

[wickedzen]

WOW this was not what I was expecting to read. Bad, bad move.

 

I have been patiently looking forward to the day when I would be able to use the textures I was expecting, assuming the wait would be a few weeks, at most. Now we find out, weeks after release, that the textures were removed on purpose, and we won't get them back for a while, if at all.

 

Look, anyone who's played an MMO knows the graphics won't look as nice as single-player graphic showcases. But these textures we're getting right now, they would have been acceptable perhaps when Final Fantasy XI was new, but man... Lord of the Rings: Online blows you out of the water in this area. That looked better than this in 2007, and that was before they added DX11 support and let me tell you, that game looks amazing now.

 

So yeah, I love the class stories of SWTOR, but every day, it seems like there is less and less to keep me subscribing.

 

Please, light a fire under whoever is in charge of this. Get it done, because this is, frankly, unacceptable.

[jHats]

You have to use your eyes. These are usually located in the front of your head.

 

Using your eyes, visually appraise the page.

 

There are two kinds of information on the page - one of these is 'writing', the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols. The other is images - an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.

 

Using your eyes, examine the images.

 

Oh I gotcha. There is no advertisement that says "we use high res textures". Thanks for verifying. It's really hard to accuse them of false advertising in this case.

[Redlir]

Hey everyone, thanks for bearing with us as we investigated the concerns raised here.

 

After investigation, it seems that the confusion here is a combination of a UI issue that's been resolved and a feature that's working as intended, but the reason why it's 'working as intended' needs explanation.

 

First, the UI issue. The preferences menu as it is seen on the Public Test Server for version 1.1 of the game is correct - there are only supposed to be two texture choices, 'Low' and 'High'. This replaces the original three-choice preference of Low/Medium/High because in reality, there was never supposed to be a 'Medium' choice - that was a bug.

 

Here's where we need to explain. As many of you have noted, your character in the game world is rendered using lower resolution textures than inside of cinematic conversation scenes. This was a deliberate decision by the development team. To understand why this was done, I have to briefly talk about MMOs and their engines.

 

In comparison to single player games and other genres of multiplayer online games, MMOs have much higher variability in the number of characters that can be potentially rendered on-screen at the same time. In MMOs, even though most of the time you'll see a relatively small number of characters on screen, there are certain situations in which many more characters will be seen. Some examples of these situations include popular gathering places in-game (in our case, the two fleets), Operations with large teams, and Warzones. In those scenarios the client (and your PC) has to work hard to show off a lot of characters on-screen.

 

During development and testing of The Old Republic, our priorities were to ensure the game looked great and performed well. In testing, we discovered that using our 'maximum resolution' textures on in-game characters during normal gameplay could cause severe performance issues, even on powerful PCs. There were a variety of possible options to help improve performance, but one that was explored and ultimately implemented used what is known as a 'texture atlas'.

 

To understand that I've got to get technical for a minute. When a character in the game is 'seen' by another character - ie, gets close to your field of view - the client has to 'draw' that character for you to see. As the character is 'drawn' for you there are a number of what are known as 'draw calls' where the client pulls information from the repository it has on your hard disk, including textures, and then renders the character. Every draw call that is made is a demand on your PC, so keeping that number of draw calls low per character is important. With our 'maximum resolution' textures a large number of draw calls are made per character, but that wasn't practical for normal gameplay, especially when a large number of characters were in one place; the number of draw calls made on your client would multiply very quickly. The solution was to 'texture atlas' - essentially to put a number of smaller textures together into one larger texture. This reduces the number of draw calls dramatically and allows the client to render characters quicker, which improves performance dramatically.

 

When it comes to cinematic scenes, however, characters are rendered using the higher number of draw calls and maximum resolution textures. This is because in those scenes, we have control over exactly how many characters are rendered and can ensure that the game performs well. The transition between 'atlas textured' characters (out of cinematics) and 'maximum resolution' textures (in cinematics) is mostly hidden by the transition between those two states (when the screen goes black), but obviously it's clear if you pay close attention.

 

In summary; yes, we had a small UI bug that unfortunately caused confusion over how the game is intended to work. The textures you're seeing in the course of normal gameplay are optimized for that mode of play. The textures you're seeing during cinematics are also optimized for that mode of play. They are higher resolution, but that's because we're able to control cinematic scenes to ensure good performance in a way we can't during normal gameplay.

 

We understand the passion and desire for people to see the same textures you see in our cinematic scenes in the main game. Because of the performance issues that would cause for the client, that's not an immediate and easy fix; we need to ensure we're making choices that the majority of our players will be able to benefit from. Having 'atlassed textures' helps performance overall, and that's a very important goal for us.

 

With that said, we've heard your feedback here loud and clear. The development team is exploring options to improve the fidelity of the game, particularly for those of you with high-spec PCs. It will be a significant piece of development work and it won't be an overnight change, but we're listening and we're committed to reacting to your feedback.

 

In all the ads and hype for this game, by you, BIOWARE, the hi res textures were there.

 

To come out now and say, only the medium textures were design intent is quite frankly fraudulent false advertisement. You showed us smoke and mirrors to get pre-sales and then gave us something else.

 

My pending 6 month sub just turned into a cancellation. This is the final straw for me.

[Leatherbeak]

Stephen,

 

First off, thank you for the explaination. I know many of us appreciate all the hard work you guys are doing.

 

Now, to me, your explaination makes a lot of sense. And to be honest, I kind of thought that the cutscene gfx were not meant for normal gameplay. Let's face it, you guys arent the first to create a game that has better textured cutscenes versus normal gameplay.

 

Let me also state that I am perfectly happy with the graphics as is. I think the game renders beautifully. That being said I am a technophile as well and ALWAYS want better and more If things stay the same it wont hurt my experience though to be totally honest.

 

Here's what I would like to understand. You state that the decision made by the devs was to use a texture atlas to cut down on draw calls. If I understand that correctly, you send the whole atlas to the hardware and that way you dont need to make additional calls. In order for that to be the case the atlas needs to be stored in vmem. So, what I dont get is why you cant still do that with higher quality textures as well? Granted, you would need to have the vmem but wouldnt that still work to cut down on draw calls? Many higher end cards now come with more than 1G vmem so I would think that this would be an option to consider.

 

The other thing I am hoping you will persue is to make a DX11 optimized client. DX11 is way more effecient over DX9. I get that not everyone has the ability to use DX11 but can't you allow for both? That way, those of us with the better hardware can utilize it. Besides - I'd love to see tesselation added!

 

Anyway, thanks again for keeping us up to date.

[zerohaste]

No offense anyone but....Did anyone really not get the memo over the last few years that the game would not be geared to high end machines? Did they not see the interviews or read the interviews that stated this. W

 

World of Warcraft (yes, that game) manages to run on all sorts of low end systems while still making high resolution armor textures available to those who can use them.

 

World of Warcraft.