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

[Scyo]

It was my intention to play this game at least until GW2 comes out, and if it's worth it even after that.

 

As it stands now, I won't resub.

 

This game was released too early by EA and suffers from it left and right. I imagine the poor guys at BW running around like headless chicken trying to fix all the little things as soon as possible, some of them imploding in the process. I really feel for you people, I know it's not your fault.

 

I will never ever again buy anything where EA is involved. They blew it majorly with Hellgate: London. I can't even begin to imagine how you can do a simillar thing with a AAA high potential title like SW:ToR again. Now I know again why I hesitated to buy this game. If you want your game to be a long lasting hit the basics have to be finished for release. The high standards people are accustomed to have to be met, polished, and improved on.

 

SW:ToR has/had the potential to be such a great experience. In it's current state however, it's an overall good experience, but not worth investing time and lots of money into. Too much problems at so many fronts. This whole texture mess is a biggy, right up there with an insult of an UI, no macro capability, loading times, performance issues, unfinished features, way too many small annoying things for a release, and this list could go on for a while.

 

Why? Why does it have to be this way? Why can't the people responsible for this see what they are doing?

 

I don't get it. I don't even want to. It's your own fault for alienating potential long time customers with your stupid greed.

 

I stop caring here and now. But despite all this, if in a few months stuff for the most part is sorted out and it doesn't look like that the game is already transformed into a cash cow, I will take another look into it.

 

This is what I expect lots of people to do, so please, don't blow your second chance, because I really like to play what this game could potentially be!

 

May a lot of force be with you, a huge lot.

[Lemon_King]

Huge disappointment. I've been thinking about unsubing and this has possibly pushed me over the edge. The textures look so muddy in game I don't feel cool when equipping new armour.

 

Soa the last boss in the 1st tier raid is a Muddy mess because of this.

http://i.imgur.com/0lF3U.jpg

[OberonSky]

All AAA MMOs have these "texture" and other graphics options. If people had the high end PC they turn them all on otherwise they pick and choose what to enable.

 

Why take the option away from the customer/player when it is already in the game (cut-scenes). Just enable the thing....

 

This is one of the worst decisions in my opinion, some of us got high end PCs especially for this game ... Bioware, reconsider.

[UnskilledBounty]

After reading that response about how having a "Medium" setting was a bug... im so glad i unsubscribed before i actually had to pay the $15 a month.

 

I'm sorry to say to you Bioware that there are people not that stupid to buy that excuse. Everyone from BETA has stated multiple times that there was THREE texture options in the beta and one of those options was indeed the high resolution textures used in cinematics.

 

I'm not trying to make one of those "OMG IM QUITTING" type posts because i dont think this is a good reason to quit. I am not subbing because of that response, i've have not seen such a outright lie of that magnitude in quite some time.

Edited January 11, 2012 by UnskilledBounty

[MurphyNox]

This thread should be locked because everything has already been said.

 

This is the new thread with a different question regarding the issue that is discussed.

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=162079

 

More people need to see this, the more unsubs the better. Why should people give their money to blatant liars that make an ugly game?

 

Final Fantasy 9 had better textures than this.

[UnskilledBounty]

More people need to see this, the more unsubs the better. Why should people give their money to blatant liars that make an ugly game?

 

Final Fantasy 9 had better textures than this.

 

See my post above, i think i said what most of us are thinking.

[SargerusIII]

It was my intention to play this game at least until GW2 comes out, and if it's worth it even after that.

 

As it stands now, I won't resub.

 

This game was released too early by EA and suffers from it left and right. I imagine the poor guys at BW running around like headless chicken trying to fix all the little things as soon as possible, some of them imploding in the process. I really feel for you people, I know it's not your fault.

 

I will never ever again buy anything where EA is involved. They blew it majorly with Hellgate: London. I can't even begin to imagine how you can do a simillar thing with a AAA high potential title like SW:ToR again. Now I know again why I hesitated to buy this game. If you want your game to be a long lasting hit the basics have to be finished for release. The high standards people are accustomed to have to be met, polished, and improved on.

 

SW:ToR has/had the potential to be such a great experience. In it's current state however, it's an overall good experience, but not worth investing time and lots of money into. Too much problems at so many fronts. This whole texture mess is a biggy, right up there with an insult of an UI, no macro capability, loading times, performance issues, unfinished features, way too many small annoying things for a release, and this list could go on for a while.

 

Why? Why does it have to be this way? Why can't the people responsible for this see what they are doing?

 

I don't get it. I don't even want to. It's your own fault for alienating potential long time customers with your stupid greed.

 

I stop caring here and now. But despite all this, if in a few months stuff for the most part is sorted out and it doesn't look like that the game is already transformed into a cash cow, I will take another look into it.

 

This is what I expect lots of people to do, so please, don't blow your second chance, because I really like to play what this game could potentially be!

 

May a lot of force be with you, a huge lot.

 

 

I will only buy BF3 and ME3, after that i will be done with EA games for a while

[MoonsLightV]

If enough people voice their outrage over this and if enough gaming and press sites will cover it, Bioware will have no other choice but to put in the textures they showed us during the development of the game and that was actually IN early beta.

I for one, have had enough of gaming companies taking away my choices when it comes down to my own PC that i know inside and out. ID did this with Rage, but being this is an MMO and the amount of time and investment i am putting into it, I want what I was thinking i was paying for.

As one poster said, this more about the textures and the bugs, this is about being deceived outright and it simply is NOT acceptable to me as a paying customer.

[SWTOR-GR]

Mr Reid and Develloper Team.

 

i am here to give you some suggestions and i hope to use the correct words because english is not my nature language.

 

The phenomenon of Atlas Texture is the same with the overheating that have a web server when someone clicks to open a page. the web server takes big stress when it has to send many answers for different thinks that serve , like images , css styles and javascript files.

 

this is the reason that many web devellopers are using gzip ( they are zipping the content to one file ) and modern browsers can understand this format and make the unzip in the client side that is the browser ( until now in my site remains to make the new theme with the sprites option and it is laggy because of many images to download and serve )

 

in our situation.

 

LAG is not only GPU related. it is also network related and of course as you said it matters the Number of objects that the client have to compute and ofcourse server has to send to the client.

 

In a previus post of mine i have discovered that i am reaching the EU server = hex droid after 15 hopes. This is the first online game that i have ever played ( i am playing online games from the first quake ) that i have to deal with so many hopes.

 

my trace to the server said that my tcp packets spend 6 hopes of the 15 inside the UK Network . This is A Real Network problem for the client - server connection and of cource for the perfomance of my gameplay in PVP because the server and client must synchronize more often than in PVE situations.Mini games are like fps games and you must have in mind that are like quake , bf3 e.t.c.

 

speak with your devellopers in EA from your fps games in ea and take some advises in how to deal with the lag in warzones . I AM SURE THEY KNOW !!!

 

i Have played many mmo and their devellopers they had deal with the client side perfomance by tweaking the DISTANCE of view ( it is client - server related option ) .

 

More distance to see the client means more information ( objects ) for the server to send to the client .in swtor the view is by default incredible far ( and we can not change it at all ) and it is really useless for pvp ( i don't want to see far away from my skill distance . it is uselless for me ) where players have the perfomance problems.

 

By making smaller the distance in public test server i am sure that you will see very big perfomance boost for the clients and ALSO for the server . as i said smaller distance view means also less informations to send to the clients .

 

In conclusion .

 

1. Ask for the people by region to give you the tcp trace to their server's ip and send to your IT department the results and

 

2. tweak the client to have the option ( right now is missing ) to lower the distance of view .

 

 

Note 1. There are more graphic tweaks but i chosse the most important for the perfomance issues in a mmo and for the part of the game that has the biggest problems right now ... warzones.

 

 

Note 2. Speak with nvidia and ati devellopers to make quickly a new driver ( the beta for nvidia gave some boost perfomance ) because one part of the problem is that the drivers are not so compatible with swtor.exe . right now my gpu uses only 59% at all the situations and i did eveything i could do ( on high also ). it is driver issue and i bet 1m credits with you ( if i loose i will give you in the furture , i have not so much right now )

[Sunglare]

Sorry S.R. Not good enough. It's 2011 and a big budget mmo such as this should not be running outdated textures. To me this the most important thing you guys should work on.

I can overlook all the other little bugs, there's no reason I should be looking at a game with textures that are worse than games that came out seven years ago.

The silly thing is you don't even need to add textures, they are already in the game just enable it. I won't be canceling my sub but my enthusiasim has taken a major hit and I won't be spreading the word of swtor anymore.

[UnskilledBounty]

After reading that response about how having a "Medium" setting was a bug... im so glad i unsubscribed before i actually had to pay the $15 a month.

 

I'm sorry to say to you Bioware that there are people not that stupid to buy that excuse. Everyone from BETA has stated multiple times that there was THREE texture options in the beta and one of those options was indeed the high resolution textures used in cinematics.

 

I'm not trying to make one of those "OMG IM QUITTING" type posts because i dont think this is a good reason to quit. I am not subbing because of that response, i've have not seen such a outright lie of that magnitude in quite some time.

 

Bump Quoting my post as i think more people should see it.

[BeeblesTV]

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.

 

BS Answer. My computer can handle it. It did when they where enabled in beta, and it will now. Your game looks very bad outside of cutscenes.

[Threefiddie]

soa the last boss in the 1st tier raid is a muddy mess because of this.

http://i.imgur.com/0lf3u.jpg

 

 

 

good lord friend, that looks horrific. What is this 1999?

[Valanze]

I will say this I actually love Rift. I have to agree with the previous poster. They are awesome on communication. I really like the game and actually still have active subs in that game. They publish FREE updates with massive content quite often that does follow a story including calm points in between. I think it is one of the better done MMOs out there and have no problems continuing to support them.

 

Now BW has been very quiet. I am not saying it is bad. It does mean that (Ok I hope it means) they are working on our issues. I do think they really need to talk a lot more than they do. I am normally pretty patient person this information blackout seems terrible. Combine that with the numerous bugs that this game has and it does look bad. Trust me I know there was a letter identifying why its been quiet and that bugs do take time to resolve. What they must remember is they are only seeing initial sales revenue right now. People do have a free month and if this silence is what they can expect why resubscribe? Now me I am staying but I do understand the frustration.

 

In the end I have hopes this bug along with many others will eventually get fixed. If not I can always go back to Rift. Although this will make me extremely sad as I like all of you expected great things (ok not all) if this bombs because of bugs it will be SWG all over again. On a side note I remember you could actually see the code in SWG dialog. Anyone else remember that was hilarious and funny thing is YEARS later it still had the same NPCs dialog bugged where you could read the actual code. Oh man HI-larious. I hated that game wow I ranted ok sorry.

[Permaximum]

As a big SWTOR lover, this is disappointing and I really fear this issue alone will hurt SWTOR, it's reputation and future pretty bad. Bioware have to do something very quick about it or I sense there is an avalanche coming on the horizon.

 

In short, this should definetely be the top priority for Bioware and EA now. I'm getting worried about the game's future already. I don't want to see SWTOR suffer AOC, Warhammer's fate.

 

I hope it won't get out of control or nobody will be able to stop the hatred on the web.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Permaximum

[BeeblesTV]

This needs to be posted again and again.

 

http://img859.imageshack.us/img859/7371/swtor2012011110050596.jpg

 

THIS is not quality work Bioware.

[JonnyFS]

Ok if everyone in this thread wants to make a statement to them about the graphics and the other bugs that annoy us. go cancel and put these reasons in the cancelation discription. I'm sure that might get some attention. I canceled and have 7 days left or so to play and if you want to resub do so.

[Grapenut]

Maybe the found a bug with hight textures and video card heat issues.

 

I've noticed every time I'm in a cutscene my video card fan goes in overdrive and heat spikes.

[SargerusIII]

More and more i'm convinced that EA rushed the game so it could be released before MoP/GW2

[VladVV]

This needs to be posted again and again.

 

http://img859.imageshack.us/img859/7371/swtor2012011110050596.jpg

 

THIS is not quality work Bioware.

 

This is even better!

 

http://i.imgur.com/0lF3U.jpg

[Dits]

"Star Wars: The Old Republic stands as one of the greatest and most ambitious achievements in video game history"

 

http://img859.imageshack.us/img859/7371/swtor2012011110050596.jpg

[SnakeCL]

This needs to be posted again and again.

 

http://img859.imageshack.us/img859/7371/swtor2012011110050596.jpg

 

THIS is not quality work Bioware.

 

Heh, that's my Jedi. And yes, I'm running high-quality. I don't think I had shadows on in that pic, and I hadn't forced AA.

 

Running on an i5, 4 Gigs RAM, and a 460 GTX.

[Threefiddie]

This needs to be posted again and again.

 

http://img859.imageshack.us/img859/7371/swtor2012011110050596.jpg

 

THIS is not quality work Bioware.

 

we gonna party like its 1999!

[wifeaggro]

wrong .ini, the one in your appdata folder CAN be edited with "antialiasinglevel = 8"

or better yet just force it with your gfx program.

 

Read the toms hardware review. most cards are unable to force aa through their programs which is the case for my 590 gtx also do you have the correct ini file address? id like to try forcing in my ini

[knightblaster]

Maybe the found a bug with hight textures and video card heat issues.

 

I've noticed every time I'm in a cutscene my video card fan goes in overdrive and heat spikes.

 

This is my guess as well, although not from cutscenes but from large numbers of characters appearing with high res textures.

 

It seems fixable in other ways (e.g., not rendering other characters in high res, limiting the radius of high-res, etc.), but my guess is that the engine may not be capable in its current form of doing that.

 

This is going to be a huge issue for the game, I think. I can see the game losing hundreds of thousands over this in terms of how this is being handled and described.