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

[Unruhe]

While I too am disappointed we won't be seeing High-res textures for awhile, this is a ludicrous statement. The textures look nowhere near as bad as WoW.

 

The blatant and demonstrably false WoW-bashing really, really has to stop.

[blumps]

Find it funny how my computer doesn't even use 30% of my GPU when its in a congested area. However does the complete opposite in areas less populated. Maybe if they'd use the technology that wasn't dated back with directx 9 and such. Honestly, I know you are appealing to the people with low end computers, but they have those "low end computers" because they hardly use it in most cases. How about you appeal to the mid range and up, that will actually play the game for more then an hour a week.

[RyceTOR]

"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'."

 

The used hi res graphics at one point, including the video you posted most likely, until during the test (probably the beta test) they realized that they were breaking performance even on high end machines in certain areas (probably the fleet and warzones).

 

Additionally, they are going to fix this in 1.2. I think that is a positive outcome.

 

Yes. That's the completely bogus BS answer that we would not have liked and needn't settle for.

 

Then came the further 'intentional untruths' being woven in to every response now. That somehow this was all a misunderstanding and nobody ever took away high res from the gameplay - those textures were only ever meant for cinematics.

 

We did not 'remove' high resolution textures - they were always in the game for use in cinematics.

 

Ask yourself this ... if a new PR video were to be created today ... would they allow it to be created using the textures their potential customers will actually receive or would they continue to use these high res textures they are telling us are not meant for gameplay?

[myrmexaw]

They meant it is a lot of work to put it back and not destroy performance.

 

performance are already ****** for a large proportion of player because bioware does not let us decide at wich resolution we can play at ...

 

 

It's as if you bought a race car but the dealer capped the car at 60 mile because anything over this limit is dangerous and not supported....

[CriDaDimon]

For all of you that do not think graphics quality is important, you do relaize that a video games quality is based on its graphics right? we paid for better graphics that were advertised as better.

 

THE QUALITY OF A VIDEO GAME IS DIRECTLY BASED ON ITS GRAPHICS!!!!!!!

 

Stop acting like this doesnt matter, that we were falsely advertised to doesnt matter. Then we were lied to and now they are acting like cutscenes fall under the terms cinematics to keep from getting sued.

 

If you do not care what you video game looks like, why arent u playing pacman and astroids and space invaders?

[Shoxc]

Try January/February/March

 

Fiscal year, look it up.

[monoptic]

No guys seriously this game looks great and I can't wait for my sage to look this this promo shot:

 

http://i.imgur.com/8TQWQ.jpg

 

Well, I guess this is the same kind of armor, right? I mean, it looks okay. I guess...

 

http://i.imgur.com/WYfY9.jpg

 

 

I think calling those textures "High" in the coming update is a bit of a misnomer.

 

The second screenshot is with maximum textures enabled. Look at the lines! Look at the colors bleeding in to one another! I could have forced AA easily, but that would be dishonest when discussing how the graphics shipped in this game.

[Kashaan]

Yanno I think they should let me decide whether my computer is going to crash, for myself, and then let me decide to step my graphics down to keep it from happening.

 

Simple facts are a DX9 game shouldn't be doing that in the first place.

 

And thats my issue, it should be MY CHOICE whether I lose a few frames or crash at the Imperial Fleet cause I like my game to look good. BioWare shouldn't be arbitrarily making that decision for me to try artificially pad their performance capabilities and put out bullcrap press releases about how "95% of TOR players experience great performance!" when they're intentionally bottlenecking the graphics to back those kinds of statements up.

 

 

You say that now, but you wouldn't have after the first few times you crashed at the Fleet. You would be on these forums ************ about how you crash every time you go to the Fleet.

 

People will complain no matter what they do, but it's better for people to be able to play than to be crashing their computers. Can you imagine the QQ that would have happened when there were still queues and people crashing every time they went to Fleet if they had high-res textures on?

 

So no, it really shouldn't have been your choice, since you'd be ************ either way. At least this way, you can still play.

 

 

That being said, I agree that BW didn't make the right call here. They should have allowed the option to use High-res textures in a limited capacity.... either a small number of models in a short range, or limited to your character and your party members.

[Your_dominus]

Game runs like crap and looks like a 12 year old doodled it. Excuse? Oh, it'd run poorly if we made it look like it did in the beta.

 

This.

Unfortunatly too many fan boys think it looks great.

[Zorvan]

Since nowadays we can only induce change by voting with out wallet and i believe we can make them change when they see subs drop because of the issues that should be obvious when reading the forums or talking to people ingame.

Gonna enjoy my last 9 days ingame as best as i can but cancelled my subscription for now, gonna sit it out for a few months to see if things change.

 

 

Here´s my farewell letter to bioware, both through ingame ticket aswell as in their little subcancel survey:

 

 

Hopefully all of you going thorugh with this aswell will be nice and concise about it why you are cancelling aswell or at least raise your voices to the customer support if you are not willing to cancel.

 

Unfortunately, I don't have a way to officially cancel, as I used a pre-paid game card to activate my account as there was no way in hell I'd ever have given these jokers my credit card info, so there's no recurring subscription for me to cancel. All I can guarantee is that the 75 days remaining on my account ( as they only have game time cards in 60 day denominations ) represent the last dollar EAware will see from me after this crap. That includes any and all games they put out in the future as well.

[Aisar]

No guys seriously this game looks great and I can't wait for my sage to look this this promo shot:

 

http://i.imgur.com/8TQWQ.jpg

 

Well, I guess this is the same kind of armor, right? I mean, it looks okay. I guess...

 

http://i.imgur.com/WYfY9.jpg

 

 

I think calling those textures "High" in the coming update is a bit of a misnomer.

 

The second screenshot is with maximum textures enabled. Look at the lines! Look at the colors bleeding in to one another! I could have forced AA easily, but that would be dishonest when discussing how the graphics shipped in this game.

 

That is no better what-so-ever than what it is now.

[Unruhe]

Having a lot of patients and the ability to pay a subscription for a game no matter what is definitely helpful ^^

 

Patients my Young Padawan heh

 

Are you a doctor?

[nonforma]

Try January/February/March

 

When giving timeframes, if you give a date as vague as an entire quarter, at least make sure that isn't the very same quarter you're currently in.

 

As in, within 3 months they should be able to give us something more tangible. Otherwise it just seems like PR spin.

[blumps]

And on that note, I noticed while I am in those congested areas. My whole graphics card goes into a state at which it think it's idle. If I close every single program, including SWTOR...The voltage drops, core, shader, and memory clocks fall below default level....because it stops working. I wonder why I have low fps? Any other game it works fine.

[Undahill]

Looks like I will be playing Diablo 3 for the months I wait on this to be fixed.

[AnotherJaggens]

Q1 2012? No. You and dev team and whoever hutted up with textures got time until late february. Start working already, 3 weeks since release.

[Harower]

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.

 

 

So medium was the bug... and the **** we have no is there admitted intended hi rez textures?

 

So they really are going to call what we see in cutscnees "cut scene textures"

 

I am insulted you are trying to tell me what my computer can handle. Let us be the judge of that!

 

Can someone clarify for me? It sounds like they are trying to find a way of "improving" these medium textures. Rather then ever let us enable high rez textures.

 

Anyone who has seen the shots will know that a lot of gear looks totally different in hi-rez including the coloring.

 

 

 

 

Again I can't believe they are saying that "medium was always the high they intended" This is... gah so angry ><

[Trigg]

I recently just set my graphics driver to force negative LoDs to -3.000

What i found that made such a large difference to the environment (nothing to characters) was that guess what, the LoDs are more detailed, i.e. higher res textures on objects further away than would usually be used.

 

Also know this. pretty much every metal surface in the game is set to reflect. however, look at the reflection when negative LoD is set to default (0) they're either blurry or so blurred that it appears no reflections are present. Now after setting to -3.000 negative LoD, the reflections are changed, they appear crisp and to some people who seem to be blind, seem to show reflections on floors that couldn't possibly of had reflections before!! /sarcasm

 

So, basically, the reflections in this game are the LoDs. The floor is reflecting the Low detail textures and models of the surrounding environment. Thus, setting the negative LoD on the gfx driver to -3.000 which makes LoDs more detailed, will inevitably increase the sharpness and overall visibility of the reflections in lets say, the fleet's floor!

 

So now you know what LoD changes do to the environment.

[Calarand]

So let me guess, we'll see an update "fixing" the issue that says:

 

"Added new high resolution screenshot feature!".

My thoughts exactly...

[Your_dominus]

And on that note, I noticed while I am in those congested areas. My whole graphics card goes into a state at which it think it's idle. If I close every single program, including SWTOR...The voltage drops, core, shader, and memory clocks fall below default level....because it stops working. I wonder why I have low fps? Any other game it works fine.

 

Your gpu is falling asleep, it's so bored.

It's crap coding causing the juttery dips, spikes and low min's on the fleet, and nothing else.

 

Cuz it sure as **** aint 133t graphics/textures.

Edited January 12, 2012 by Your_dominus

[wewter]

BW REALLY screwed up .... no excuse for this kinda crap to happen in a game with a multi-million dollar budget billing itself as a AAA title.

 

L2 had better graphic quality, and was what kept many of us playing that game (and from going to WoW) for sooo long. Graphics absolutely DO matter.

[CriDaDimon]

No guys seriously this game looks great and I can't wait for my sage to look this this promo shot:

 

http://i.imgur.com/8TQWQ.jpg

 

Well, I guess this is the same kind of armor, right? I mean, it looks okay. I guess...

 

http://i.imgur.com/WYfY9.jpg

 

 

I think calling those textures "High" in the coming update is a bit of a misnomer.

 

The second screenshot is with maximum textures enabled. Look at the lines! Look at the colors bleeding in to one another! I could have forced AA easily, but that would be dishonest when discussing how the graphics shipped in this game.

 

hit it on the head, that is exactly what is called false advertising

[Ashes_Arizona]

I believe he may be refering to the fact that the Hero Engine is so bad that they would not even consider putting High Res Textures back into the game until..well.. they do whatever they do

 

Actually I think they mean that the Hero Engine is so bad they can't consider putting High Resolution textures back into the game until it levels out at the 500,000 subscriber range they're hoping they keep.

 

Hope you keep them too BioWare, I really do. It would sure be nice to see the MMO industry actually have options.

 

Oh wait options, thats what this entire uproar is about in the first place. Never mind.

[Cicatrize]

How many of you received forum warning/s 'cause of how upset you are over this issue?

 

I'm going to smile when Bioware starts to see their lackluster sub numbers in the months to come.

[Fellthar]

Yes. That's the completely bogus BS answer that we would not have liked and needn't settle for.

 

Then came the further 'intentional untruths' being woven in to every response now. That somehow this was all a misunderstanding and nobody ever took away high res from the gameplay - those textures were only ever meant for cinematics.

 

 

 

Ask yourself this ... if a new PR video were to be created today ... would they allow it to be created using the textures their potential customers will actually receive or would they continue to use these high res textures they are telling us are not meant for gameplay?

 

I work in the IT world, users say we lie all the time, which is not true at all. We are professionals that care about our work and want to help the users if possible.

 

That is blatant conspiracy theory territory and I see no reason as an adult to continue to participate in a discussion that is calling Stephen Reid or any other representative of Bioware a liar without definitive and unequivocal proof. Even then, I would not do so in a public manner. I would be equally respectful of other game development teams as well who work hard on a very complex development process, if any would like to know.