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

[ishtori]

all i can say is *** were the lead producers thinking in making a decision like this?! as if the ability delay wasn't a bad enough decision...

 

sub cancelled....let's pray gw2 fulfills our hopes now. even pandas as looking good now.

[Apax]

While I always appreciate it when a developer responds to an issue, concern or question, I think I would have preferred a much shorter answer if it meant getting that answer weeks ago when we first started asking the question. A simple statement like "The medium texture choice in the UI was an oversight and being removed in a future patch. Those high resolution textures are for cutscenes only; our client is currently unable to render them in normal gameplay while maintaining an acceptable level of performance (even on the beefiest of systems). We're looking at ways to change this in the extremely long term and appreciate your patience and understanding." would have sufficed, and been preferable if given weeks ago.

 

Also, using gameplay screenshots with high resolution textures that are not available to the players may have been a good marketing move, but it was bad from a community trust perspective. Furthermore, if you weren't comfortable using *real* gameplay screenshots for advertising and felt it necessary to spice the scenes up with high resolution textures, I think maybe it might have helped to consider "why". If they normal gameplay textures weren't pretty enough for advertisements then perhaps consider the perspective of the player who is stuck looking at them every moment they're in the game.

 

As for solutions, while it would be nice to see high resolution textures on everything, at a bare minimum I would like *my character* (and perhaps my companions) to use high resolution textures all the time. Because that is the main graphical element I'm seeing every moment in the game. I don't care if the fellow standing over near the vendor is using high resolution textures or not. But I do expect to see it on my character, and realistically the impact on performance should be minimal. At the very least it should be an optional setting.

 

One of my beefs is that you use these high resolution textures in the character creation screen. I hope you're aware that items like tattoos (which look nice in the character creation screen) look very poor in the game world, more like smudges than tattoo art. Maybe you should also consider boosting the resolution on those textures at least.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Apax

[Skylerr]

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.

In what way?! Didn't Apple get in big trouble a few years back because they used pre-rendered videos for their UI in their promotional material (that were like 2x faster and smoother than in reality)?

 

It falls to Bioware to make a clear disclaimer (in thise case, along the lines of "not actual in-game footage")... which they didn't.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Skylerr

[eadnams]

Would it be possible to have the "cutscene textures" for armour previews at least?

It's kind of shame that what we see when choosing armours is so low quality at the moment.

 

Yeah, this is the only place I really care about it. The game is the same to me regardless of in-game players texture resolution... I dont spend much time looking at myself or other players otherwise.

[Improv-]

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?

 

Sure,

 

Just as an FYI though AA is in version 1.1 So it is going to be added very soon.

 

Anywho here is the download.

 

http://downloads.guru3d.com/NVIDIA-Inspector-1.94-download-2612.html

 

And someone did a handy guide on this.

 

http://www.swtor.com/fr/community/showthread.php?t=119413

[Belarkin]

Your playerbase has discovered that your game engine is ignoring the high texture option. Do you:

 

1. Fess up, explain that the pressure of the impending release date caused your team to have to cut a few corners, and this got missed.
   
2. Acknowledge the issue and agree that the textures should be fixed, and promise to do so in an upcoming patch.
   
3. [Force Persuade] [Dark Side] Rename “Medium” to High, and pretend like removing high res textures has always been the plan. Move along! Move along!
   

I think Bioware has just achieved Dark II!

Edited January 11, 2012 by Belarkin

[Sunsoar]

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.

 

 

 

Well my 60days (plus year in beta) were wasted. Wasted 200 bucks on this game. It's ok though thanks for trying. I didn't think you would 'trick' me into believing we were getting a next gen mmo. Good luck with the future of the game.

 

Maybe your poor engine choice is why you decided to 'nerf' our graphics. Peace TOR players. Axis on Daragona Trail is officially retired.

[they]

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

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

 

Shadows are a tricky beast, and MANY games have problems with them. (Take a look at the shadows in MGS4, for example. For a beautiful game, it had some real issues with shadows at some points.)

 

Good shadows -can- be done. For example, look at the DX10 shadows in LotR:O (excusing the low polygon count for the models, the shadows are very smooth, and function wonderfully.) Especially the shadows of the leaves of the trees, which sway in the wind. That uses a newer technology, and therefore can enable better looking detail While it does that, it also cuts off a whole subset of people who have access to that.

 

The point I'm trying to make is, they're reaching as many people as they can with the current shadow implementation, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it as something that gets touched up, revamped, or even replaced at some point in the future. At this point, I'm sure they have many other high-priority issues that trump it in terms of urgency.

[Pudsley]

Sorry to say but that's just an excuse, the low res textures look like trash and some of us have systems that can run two instances of your game should the client allow.

 

110 fps and you want me to look at low rez textures.

 

Your dev team is making excuses.

[carnac_fett]

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.

 

You seem to be under the impression that a developer cannot get in trouble for showing off misleading imagery of their game.

 

http://www.gamerlaw.co.uk/2010/09/advertising-standards-authority-to-take.html

[Skylerr]

your playerbase has discovered that your game engine is ignoring the high texture option. Do you:

 

1. fess up, explain that the pressure of the impending release date caused your team to have to cut a few corners, and this got missed.
   
2. acknowledge the issue and agree that the textures should be fixed, and promise to do so in an upcoming patch.
   
3. [force persuade] [dark side] rename “medium” to high, and pretend like removing high res textures has always been the plan. Move along! Move along!
   

i think bioware has just achieved dark ii!

 

-belvan

 

+1

 

rofl!

[CalvinDu]

Look Stephen, we're not happy because the cutscenes have far better texture resolution than the actual game's muddy-ness.

 

But the fact that you people falsely advertised the graphics for months showing us that the game will have higher end graphics when we get a game that doesn't even compete with other recent MMOs when it comes to the textures.

 

Acknowledge your faults and perhaps there will not be as much public anger.

[Baedun]

Peace TOR players. Axis on Daragona Trail is officially retired.

 

Peace! Oh, can I RE yer stuff?

[realID]

The biggest insult here Bioware is you making the choice for us.

 

I understand, there are several people who play computer games with low end machines, and you should definitely aim to develop a game that can run reliably on those machines.

 

HOWEVER, among us PC gamers there are several people who upgrade their machines on a yearly basis if not more often to ensure we have a very high end machine and you've simply chosen not to give us that option.

 

Allow us to crank the settings to whatever we want. If it slows down our client, we can reduce them back down. It should be our choice.

[Zezel]

Your playerbase has discovered that your game engine is ignoring the high texture option. Do you:

 

1. Fess up, explain that the pressure of the impending release date caused your team to have to cut a few corners, and this got missed.
   
2. Acknowledge the issue and agree that the textures should be fixed, and promise to do so in an upcoming patch.
   
3. [Force Persuade] [Dark Side] Rename “Medium” to High, and pretend like removing high res textures has always been the plan. Move along! Move along!
   

I think Bioware has just achieved Dark II!

 

-Belvan

 

The sad part is that it was the playerbase, not Biowaste being outright and honest.

[ItsToof]

I feel like making a youtube video of me, dressed as Ackbar, running around Best Buy waiting for an unsuspecting customer to pick up a copy of TOR, then jumping out yelling "It's a trap!"

 

 

*nudge* Psst....hey SOE...yeah, you know that game you released a long time ago...you know, the game with the huge sandbox world on multiple planets that many people enjoyed that you ultimately ruined....the one before the NGE....nope, even before the CU....yeah, Star Wars Galaxies....vanilla.....now would be the opportune time to re-release it as it was back then. Just sayin....

[Astralll]

Seriously your comparing wows graphics to this for high end textures? That is absolutely absurd.

[Vlacke]

all i can say is *** were the lead producers thinking in making a decision like this?! as if the ability delay wasn't a bad enough decision...

 

sub cancelled....let's pray gw2 fulfills our hopes now. even pandas as looking good now.

 

OUR?!

You must mean YOUR dreams?

 

Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

[mitrikzoltan]

That's not going to do anything. Every game uses bullshots no matter how good the game actually looks. While BF3 looks stunning go and look at the official screenshots. They are completely out of this world and look better than the game maxed out. This is a shameful and common practice in the industry.

 

Does not mean it's legal as well.

[carnac_fett]

OUR?!

You must mean YOUR dreams?

 

Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

 

Better to be hit by the door on the way out than stay here and keep bending over for Bioware.

[daMarek]

You seem to be under the impression that a developer cannot get in trouble for showing off misleading imagery of their game.

 

http://www.gamerlaw.co.uk/2010/09/advertising-standards-authority-to-take.html

 

Saw it before deleted

[MurphyNox]

Your playerbase has discovered that your game engine is ignoring the high texture option. Do you:

 

1. Fess up, explain that the pressure of the impending release date caused your team to have to cut a few corners, and this got missed.
   
2. Acknowledge the issue and agree that the textures should be fixed, and promise to do so in an upcoming patch.
   
3. [Force Persuade] [Dark Side] Rename “Medium” to High, and pretend like removing high res textures has always been the plan. Move along! Move along!
   

I think Bioware has just achieved Dark II!

 

-Belvan

 

This is the same company that made Baldur's Gate, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect and KOTOR.

 

I couldn't care less what the mods do, I really hope this game crashes and burns. You're making Activision look like angels.

[Redorbz]

I'd say the appeal is less.

 

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

 

Yes, my wow and rift characters armor, the game shadows, etc are all much more intricate.

[Jeditheos]

All I read and saw was...

 

SOMETHING...SOMETHING...SOMETHING....DARK SIDE!!!!!!!!!

[MoonsLightV]

I feel like making a youtube video of me, dressed as Ackbar, running around Best Buy waiting for an unsuspecting customer to pick up a copy of TOR, then jumping out yelling "It's a trap!"

 

 

*nudge* Psst....hey SOE...yeah, you know that game you released a long time ago...you know, the game with the huge sandbox world on multiple planets that many people enjoyed that you ultimately ruined....the one before the NGE....nope, even before the CU....yeah, Star Wars Galaxies....vanilla.....now would be the opportune time to re-release it as it was back then. Just sayin....

LOL Awesomeness.

But seriously there is no reason why they can't put the textures back in and have an "ultra" setting for people with rigs that can handle it. Either way, i'm debating now on whether or not to cancel my sub, not just because of the texture problem, but in how they are handling the situation and trying to deceive us as to the reason why the textures are not being enabled.