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

[EdAraujo]

Could we get an interrim fix where just our own characters are rendered with high rez textures.. So we can look at ourselves and not see an smudged blob?

 

The textures are fine when we run around looking at other players, but we spend quite a bit more time staring at our own player and I personally would like that to look a little crisper..

 

Agreed

[deathomight]

Are you kidding me? So basically no ones computer can run high resolution textures because their engine is garbage Lol. This game already looks poor and in a couple of years when pc games ccntinue to look better and the next generation of consoles are released this game will simply be a bad memory. At first I wasn't sure if all this negativity toward the Hero Engine was valid but this proves it was a poor design flaw.

 

No some peoples computers probably can run it on ultra, they just won't give us the option to do so. A simple check box and warning to not use the setting if have anything less than multi gpu system or something like that.

[GamewizX]

Its just you, theres a .dll that caps in game textures to half their fidelity. Zoom in and notice the crisp, clear, puddle of mud all over your chest.

 

Sorry, game looks great to me. I have zero complaints.

[Kugruk]

I can't convery how utterly *********** *disgusted* I am that this is the reply again after REPEATED advertising of the high resolution textures in ALL advertisement media.

 

I was ready to commit to this game all the way, it's got plenty of problems, sure. I'm willing to give a new mmo time to grow but, ****, man. How come when hundreds of threads about this were made this wasn't stated sooner? A lot of us would've liked to know before we spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars building a machine specifically to play this game.

[Jeronas]

woah. overreacting much?

 

I am not overreacting at all!

 

They are guilty of blatantly false advertisement! They advertised the game, hyped the game, showcased the game with HighResolution textures!

 

When the highres textures and AA dissapeared, we thought it was a bug, a temporary issue and it would be fixed before launch!

 

Now, AFTER launch, when EVERYONE has paid for their retail box, they come out and say it was a deliberate design decision to reduce the graphics quality of the game? And never bothered to communicate this fact??

 

I am sorry, but I already made a screenshot of Stephen Reids post, in case they suddenly retract their statement! They are guilty for false advertisement and hiding a decision THIS BIG from their playerbase till after release! Period!

[RaiausderDose]

Didn't you read, it was a glitch that the game created the word medium..........

 

 

 

a stupidly large number of people who got this game built pc's just for it.

 

 

that isn't the glitch

the menu only chooses =0 and =1 (0 for high and medium) and NEVER =2

and =2 is working and they are low res

Edited January 11, 2012 by RaiausderDose

[Zlodo]

Lol so just a tad false advertising then?

Welcome to the video game industry, and the marketing people working for it. I could tell you a lot of funny stories about one big profile (but low success) MMO I worked on.

 

Marketing people actually literally believe that as long as the screenshot was produced by the game engine, anything's fair - including tweaking the lighting and composition of the scene to make it look better (just for the screenshot), or creating entire scenes with gm commands showing off situations that never actually happen in the actual game content, or having special screenshot keys re-rendering the current frame at maximum settings that would otherwise be unplayable.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Zlodo

[Arkanovi]

Ah well that's a huge shame, I won't be resuming my subscription after this month, graphics are an important part of PC gaming for me. This game has great gameplay and story, but the low-res textures kills it for me, I'd hate to know what it feels like at high level when your armour sets just look washed out.

 

Bioware, good luck with the game.

[Nimiuel]

Rift has better graphics, and more things happening on the screen, how does a game with SWTORs budget not be able to excell in this?

[Fellthar]

I have to say that given the problems people even with high end pc's have reported having (unless it's all lies), Bioware's choice to not allow hi res textures in game is probably a very smart decision.

 

This really is a no win scenario for Bioware. If they leave the hi res textures in, people with awesome pc's will use them, and then they will complain that the game is crap when it starts to stutter like crazy in some places (Mr. Reid did say the performance issues were serious).

 

If they use these atlas textures instead, people with hi end pc's will complain that the game is crap when they don't see the best textures in game.

 

If they know that hi res textures can cause issues in some places, why in the world do you expect them to allow them? Oh yeah, let's leave something in game that we know is going to cause major issues, deliberately. I think they made the smarter choice, even if they still get haters (probably expected anyway).

 

Besides that, they are looking at future alternatives to provide more fidelity in game. What more can you ask of them?

 

I have a Radeon 6970, and if hi res textures would kill my performance anymore than it already is in the fleet and warzones, I think I'll have to pass. Playability > beauty.

[ItsToof]

Points to be made.

 

1.) Why was the release client vastly smaller in size vs beta client?

 

2.) Why did performance issues start with retail vs good performance in beta?

 

3.) Why are there performance issues on "medium" if you removed high rez because of performance issues?

 

4.) You made the decision to remove an option due to "possible" perfoemance issues, yet are not addressing that we are still having performance issues on other settings, so why remove an option altogether if there are those that will benfit with minor performance hits?

 

5.) In a sense, you have committed a blatant act of false advertising as you released a client for full retail price + subscription when it was not ready and already advertised it as being such with high res video and textures in place.

 

6.) Why when forcing antialising to 32x CSAA am I receiving a significant performance INCREASE?

 

7.) What exactly is the other swtor.exe process doing? If it was a debugger during beta, why is it still there using resources on my computer?

 

8.) You claim the performance drops are localised, yet reports in beta claim that the game had run smoothe before release, what exactly changed in the client from beta to release? What was added or removed last minute that you deemed important that may have cause issues with possible shadow rendering to poor performance output?

 

 

Just sayin...

[Angellus]

Excited about this game since 2008, very disappointed by this response.

 

I have a freakin Alienware desktop with Nvidia GTX 480's running in SLI, and an i7 Quad Core processor with 8gb memory. Your telling me I can't handle high rez textures...

[Gomhi]

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.

 

Is it just me that think this is strange if they said we did a mistake I would belive them blame it on a bug .... eerhm

[Merwanor]

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned already, (the thread is moving too quickly to keep up with at the moment), but I think it might help a lot if they gave us a client-side option to always show the highest quality textures for our own character. We want to be able to appreciate the look of our characters, and it's hard to do that when the textures appear blurry and washed out.

 

Sure, it'd be nice to see other players with those textures, but I understand where they are coming from and am willing to sacrifice that for performance.

 

This ^

[mcfabulous]

I can't convery how utterly *********** *disgusted* I am that this is the reply again after REPEATED advertising of the high resolution textures in ALL advertisement media.

 

I was ready to commit to this game all the way, it's got plenty of problems, sure. I'm willing to give a new mmo time to grow but, ****, man. How come when hundreds of threads about this were made this wasn't stated sooner? A lot of us would've liked to know before we spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars building a machine specifically to play this game.

 

If I added up just the people I talk to on vent, and myself. Theres probably 15 grand spent on new comps specifically for this game. and I only talk with about 18-20 people.

 

We cant be the only group who did so.

[digitalfreak]

The game was obviously designed with high-res textures in mind, since it was an option until a couple of months ago. There's no excuse to force those of us with the machines capable of handling it to run with the current crap textures. Roll it back!

[Skylerr]

Thank you for the response.

 

a, Why not enable the "High Resolution option", but have it come with a warning, like ALL normal games do. ie: "Warning: settings this option could reduce your game performance are you sure you want to enable it?"

 

QFT.

 

There are some older games that STILL run like hogs on high end gaming machines... taking away choice in this way seems more than a little heavy handed (and fairly odd by PC gaming/mmo standards).

 

B is a tricky one... it mostly depends on the engine being used, etc... there may be a horde of unique advantages in this engine that put unusual limitations on other aspects of the game (like texture streaming / bandwidth). That doesn't explain why in the world they decided to leave us without the CHOICE.

[Imhotep]

SR, this really needs to be addressed by your dev team. Why is everything you do catering to those with the lowest end systems (and forcing the rest of us to suffer for it). Why is it that I can set WoW to ultra and it looks great but I cant do the same with TOR. Wow plays well on low end machines but can be set to ultra and beyond. That makes zero sense.

 

Seriously you guys cant seem to get out of your own way. Im a TOR fanboy and I wont be cancelling but this is very disappointing.

[Norbix]

there was never supposed to be a 'Medium' choice - that was a bug.

 

I don't believe this for a second. I'm sorry, I'd rather you guys be honest and just say you couldn't optimize the game as well as you hoped you could. There's no such thing as a bug that magically includes three graphics options instead of two.

 

This post is incredibly disheartening because this issue is of particular importance to me. I'm not exactly satisfied playing a game with character models that look worse than MMO's released previous to this one.

 

I sincerely hope this issue is of the highest priorities for you. I understand the message says it's an important goal and it won't happen overnight but that doesn't make me feel any better whatsoever.

 

In fact, I feel that we should be updated on the progress of this issue quite often. It's the least Bioware could do after holding back the truth for so long and then revealing it as a 'bug'.

[spcdog]

Why isn't atlasing an option for the high-res textures? Surely they are not 4096x4096 each. I'm sorry, but as someone who knows something about this, your explanation leaves more questions than answers. All atlasing does is reduces the number of texture resources to improve caching. The client still makes the same number of draw calls, and the texture units still sample the same number of pixels.

 

I get a feeling the answer has more to do with things totally unrelated to GPU perf. Either level load times were too slow with high-res textures, or the artists didn't put them into atlases and you'd have to 1) do all that work and then 2) either have people DL a huge amount of new data or write a new patcher that can generate the atlases client-side.

 

But whatever the reason, I'm pretty disappointed by this answer. I know you guys are doing the best you can, and appreciate you taking the time to communitcate with us, but it feels like our intelligence is being insulted here a little bit when we see so many other games perform just fine with high-res textures. I don't see why you don't just provide the option, and let people decide for themselves whether their systems can handle it or not. You guys didn't seem to have much problem leaving the "high" shadows option available, despite the fact that it crushes anything that's not a high-end system.

Edited January 11, 2012 by spcdog

[Zakua]

That's extremely disappointing. Honestly, probably one of the biggest gut punches I've read from a developer. I appreciate the time you took to type of the response, I just don't appreciate the content of it.

 

It's perfectly acceptable for there to be bugs, features not fully implemented or simply missing, etc. Those are things common with any game of this scale. When something like higher graphics quality is there, but it's disabled due to not functioning well on lower end PCs, that's just something I can't continue to support.

 

Well said, Though they claim they tested it on high end PC and it still slowed them down. Im having a hard time swallowing it all.

 

Listen I love the game and it plays nice, story is pure awesome, combat rocks, pvps a blast but Ima candy guy and I like making my PC scream. This play-dough look just doesn't cut it.

 

Give us the option and if some guys with a mid range PC complains of bad performance then thats their problem, this is so .....OMG its (over dramatic here) like communism!!!!!

 

I feel sad and lonely...LOL =P

[KerinKor]

Rift has better graphics, and more things happening on the screen, how does a game with SWTORs budget not be able to excell in this?

Bioware used a substandard engine because the guy who wrote it was a big buddy of someone in charge of deciding these things .. Trion used a competent engine not sourced from 'friends'.

[Parrothead]

Sorry, game looks great to me. I have zero complaints.

 

While the game may look 'great' to you, there are many other people who are highly disappointed with the lack of graphical fidelity in this game.

[Angellus]

Rift has better graphics, and more things happening on the screen, how does a game with SWTORs budget not be able to excell in this?

 

You know why, because RIFT downsamples textures for players and NPC that are a pre defined distance from you character. Zoom in on your character and he looks great zoom out and he's a noticeably lower resolution YET IT WORKs because at that distance you CAN"T see those textures.

 

Think the same concept as tessalation where high quality texture models pop in the closer you get. (or something to that effect)

[cynicalyouth]

This response answers my question but is an unacceptable interim solution. High-res textures where pulled from the in game options menu because of issues with client performance, that's fine, but they should give us the ability to re-add them in the config ini file at least. Wouldn't it be good for helping them debug the issues that as they optimize the engine people can try the high-res textures and tell them if they are able to use them or not. I understand wanting to reduce calls to tech support from people using high-res textures when you know that they will not perform well on a system with the recommended specs in some situations, but I think this has gone to far in removing that option from us completely.

 

You obviously have a way to turn it back on internally since you say you are working on fixing it which means you need to test it. I would be happy if you exposed that ability to us as well.

 

I do agree that the marketing videos and screenshots are now very misleading, and if you don't have optimizations to get hi-res textures back in the game as a high priority item(I understand it wont be a quick fix) then I do think these screenshots need to be removed-changed because it is misleading.