Blue-Reckloose Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 Originally Posted by wildknight yes it is an assumption. saying bioware has the metrics does not substantiate your argument. as i have said before they do not know every system spec of every user of their product. nor will they attempt to. your metrics are at best an average, and at worse a baseline assumption of the lowest level hardware specs possible for this game to even run. Wrong yet again. They tested with top-end computers. Apparently you're not aware that "top-end computer" means highest hardware specs possible.Wrong yet again. They tested with top-end computers. Apparently you're not aware that "top-end computer" means highest hardware specs possible. You really need to do some homework before you just blurt something out. The hardware detector used for bringing people into beta wasn't looking at everything in the computer. It didn't seem to notice the type or speed of the HDD. Considering that Stephen Reid's first long-winded PR explanation of this issue planted the blame squarely on HDD's not being able to access fast enough for high res textures, it would indicate that there either were not enough, or very few people with SSD's (which is REQUIRED now for a "top-end" computer, but again, the detection system wasn't looking at that). So, we don't really know if people with top end computers were crashing. But what we do know, is that if an HDD cannot access the textures fast enough and it causes the game to crash, the bug isn't the availability of high res textures, the bug is that the game CRASHES instead of just performing cruddily. They should have fixed THAT, not buried the high res textures in a shallow grave. the second option is the right one. because i will be damned if i should have to limit my graphics options so you and your crappy computer can have the false pretense of running at the highest level graphics. option 1 i would have no remorse for someone who is too idiotic to turn down their graphics if their machine can't handle it. Oh, you don't understand... that's unfortunate. The two things I listed in my post were the things that would have happened had they left the high-res texture option in. We would be in the exact same situation, except that the problem would have been compounded by the fact that people would have been crashing and having to re-queue for hours at a time. Objectively, it's better that they disabled them and avoided the crashing, since the situations would be the same either way otherwise. I'm not sure what two options you were referring to, but I assume one is "let people crash" and the other is "let bioware bury high res textures in a shallow grave". The third option, which I will refer to as "The only correct solution" would be to fix the bug that causes systems to crash when the system was unable to load textures from the HD fast enough. It is truly that simple. Then, people with slower rigs would go "oh, my performance is terrible, turn stuff down" and people with mighty rigs would go "awesome". Instead, we have the shallow grave option. So, since the original bug isn't fixed, some people will still crash in high pop scenarios, excellent. People with SSD's feel insulted and slighted. And people with rigs bottle-necked by spindle HDD's are utterly unable to work with the graphics to find a happy medium between performance and quality. Did we want to upset as many people as possible? Because that's what the plan seems to have been. no it was not a damned if you do damned if you don't. people have good computers, great computers, or crappy computers. people with good computers run on medium settings. and people with great computers get their eye candy max settings. while people who have crappy computers get their low settings. that is how the world works. No, that's what you're not understanding. Even TOP-END computers were crashing in high pop areas. So people with "great" computers would be crashing just as much. What makes a "top-end" computer can be highly subjective. So, you just saying "all top end do this" means absolutely nothing. Many of the "forum computer experts" would tell me that my 2.4 GHz isn't enough for this game. Except that they don't understand that it's 2 quad core 2.4GHz Xeons, that eat little games like SWTOR for breakfast. And I would like to personally run with the high res textures all the time, if my game crashes, then I can provide info to bioware to fix the bug. I doubt it would, since SWTOR cannot possibly have any performance issues with a SATA III raid array running at about 1.6 GB/s and over 250,000 iops. As it stands, the option is just GONE. We can't troubleshoot it, figure it out, help bioware fix it. Bioware just took it away. And then pretended it being gone was a bug, promised it would be back, then fed us a PR line about how it was a fix. (Is anyone else noticing that things are bugs, then features, then bugs, then features, but they never seem to get resolved, they just get reclassified by Bioware). this isn't preschool where everyone is a special sparkle pony. if you can't afford the highest level computer hardware, know your place and play at a lower setting and like it. If this is directed at me, you'd be wrong. I build my own computers and recently upgraded. Also, your attitude is against the ToS... try being more polite. I'm pretty sure he wasn't directing it specifically at you, but rather the people who seem to think that covering up a bug by squirreling it away, is tantamount to some sort of fix. This would be like getting a flat tire, and having the tire repair place just take the tire off and go "Tada! It's fixed!". I think you're confused. They did was was best for the majority... a democratic process. Look, this "fix" wasn't part of any grand democratic process. It was nothing more than burying the body. Bioware needs to FIX the bug of crashing, and give us high res textures. Not a "fidelity enhancement", just the blooming high res textures. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Piddletrenthyde Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 You are really joking yeh? Yes he is joking. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kashaan Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 No this is not the reason. Most games are 32 bit. Whats more is, TOR is large address aware. It can use 4gb. It's poorly optimized. Period. Hey look, we agree! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sunkisttuna Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 ~years of education summed up in 4 paragraphs~ + It is in my opinion that the Dev team either has a critical design flaw in their engine that prevents them from fixing a severe performance degradation due to additional switching between textures without a large amount of code re-write, or there is a bug with their option for limiting high quality character textures, with no know eta to fixing, and in the mean time they figured they could just completely disable the feature and pass it off as working as intended until they can either fix it or everyone stops caring. There are a number of other things that can be causing the issue, however the point to be made, and that has been made, is that far worse games have pulled off far better texture quality and SWTOR's player base expects no less from you Bioware, and we will not accept the "No" you have given to us as an answer. Kilran Out. This is an excellent post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ommm Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 (edited) nvm me. To tired. Edited January 12, 2012 by Ommm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Khechari Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 He doesnt even grasp that the game was upscaled for 720p/1080p, and that the source textures are the freeking same. On top of that he thinks literally higher resolution textures ( mathematically, LARGER textures), are not better than TOR's I;m still trying to figure out how he managed to get a couple people to gang up on me,lmao. I don't know. If you take what they've been saying to the logical extreme, you could say- PS3 has better graphics than NES." Then they would reply "that's, like, your opinion man". I have a feeling they are confusing model/texture-art with graphics, because your arguments were about as solid of a case as you can make. Requiring anything more is just a blatant attempt to make "better" an impossibility, which for sake of argument, is really hypocritical and unfair. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wildknight Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 Good post and read man. I am not a techie person, but someone mentioned that the game is running in 32bit mode and therefore can only access 2gb of Ram. Can this be one of hte reasons for the performance hit. Hi res textures on players characters and companions would eat up memory, add in other characters and you could run into memory issues due to the game only using 32bit. Again, not a techie person, just retyping what I read in an earlier post in this thread. no 32bit vs 64bit is solely what the processor can handle. a 64 bit can bring in 64 bits of information to process in one instant. compared to 32 on a 32bit processor. think of memory as a hard drive that can give information to the processor (and wherever else it needs to go) in orders of magnitude faster than a real hard drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paganini Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 You can sugarcoat or read into things as much as you want, but at the end of the day this is not okay: http://imageshack.us/f/706/14521080.jpg/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shakunetsu Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 You can sugarcoat or read into things as much as you want, but at the end of the day this is not okay: http://imageshack.us/f/706/14521080.jpg/ Anyone want to start a petition? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
United_Strafes Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 No this is not the reason. Most games are 32 bit. Whats more is, TOR is large address aware. It can use 4gb. It's poorly optimized. Period. No! Didn't you hear? Low res textures are better than higher res ones, and dx9 is better than dx10! Poor rendering distance on foliage is also better than far distance, and blocky shadows are better than smooth and dynamic. Ya there are very few game that that don't run a 32.exe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Your_dominus Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 (edited) I don't know. If you take what they've been saying to the logical extreme, you could say- PS3 has better graphics than NES." Then they would reply "that's, like, your opinion man". I have a feeling they are confusing model/texture-art with graphics, because your arguments were about as solid of a case as you can make. Requiring anything more is just a blatant attempt to make "better" an impossibility, which for sake of argument, is really hypocritical and unfair. Thank you. And ya...that has to be the only explanation. Blocky shadows is not better than smooth and dynamic. Lower res textures is not better than higher res textures. Dx9 is not better than dx10. Maybe he/they prefer TOR's " art style"?...which I didn't even make the smallest reference to. Literally grahicaly? any mmorpg except WoW is superior to TOR. "Art style" preference though, is subjective. Edited January 12, 2012 by Your_dominus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
monomatic Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 Quite frankly, I am insulted at the explanation Stephen has given the community about the Texture resolution issue. As such let me take some time to truly explain the completely inadequate farce that is the SWTOR texture LOD System. First, a quick background of myself. I am a student at Full Sail University studying Game Development, which focuses on 3D graphics programming, primarily in C++, however we dabble in a few other things and learn to optimize in Assembly as well. I have already taken several engine development courses, the most recent of which focuses on texture management, deferred rendering, transparency sorting, and post process chains (With a focus on HLSL Shader programming). Now, Stephen mentions something called a Texture Atlas in his post. For the un-initiated, this can be simply considered a 2D Sprite sheet meant for use on 3D models by scaling and positioning (offsetting) UV texture coordinates. A low end atlas could store textures for multiple objects, where as a high end one might only be able to store 1 object's textures. UV Texture coordinates are Jargon that simply means that each vertex, or point, on a 3D model also have 2 values that represent a position on a 2D picture. UV is used because X, Y and Z are used for the position of the vertex. When saving the data from whatever editor was used to make the models, Bioware either saved data for how to alter the UV coordinates, or what seems more likely from Stephen's explanation, They saved out multiple sets of UV coordinates that correspond to the different Textures used to skin (UV map) the object (The former is more efficient). The key element in the entire process is what is called a state change, or a context switch, in the graphics hardware when rendering (drawing) the 3D objects to the screen. When a state change needs to occur, information must be sent to the graphics card informing it that new settings are in place, and for it to use the new information for future rendering instructions. State changes are considered slow because they are limited by the speed of the connection from the motherboard to the graphics card (this is called the "Bus" of the graphics card) which is several orders of magnitude slower than normal operations, and the changes cannot benefit from multiple processors because of this. The most common state change is a change in texture binding. The way the graphics card uses textures is that it has a limited number of slots available for it to refer to on the fly to retrieve color information from an image at any given time. Many of these slots are taken up by information used to calculate lighting behind the scenes, such as Normal maps, ambient occlusion maps, specular maps, displacement or parallax maps, ect. This means that a state change must occur whenever an object needs to use a texture that is not already slotted into one of the available references the graphics card has access to quickly. Keep in mind that a texture can be loaded onto a graphics cards without being in one of these slots. There is a way to speed up the process however, and that is to batch similar objects together that all need the same state, and render them back to back so that a state change does not need to occur when rendering that batch. Any engine worth it's salt does this. The texture atlasing solution Stephen has posted about is meant to further alleviate state changes by making it easier for more objects to share the same states needed for rendering. The picture I have painted above may seem like a complete disaster zone of a coding nightmare (It is), however, the actual expense in performing a state change can be drastically reduced by also batching by state changes as well, something it seems the SWTOR engine is not doing efficiently, or at the least the dev team is overreacting about the performance hit. Furthermore, already having the textures present on the graphics card will further reduce the time cost drastically. Hence why cards with more RAM tend to perform much faster. Batching by state changes entails a few things. First, you will want to have the next batch have as many similar states as the one before it... to a degree. Signals across the bus are sent in bursts and thus it is important to calculate just how many state changes can be sent at a time, and try to maximize this without going over. Furthermore, it is also of extreme importance that you keep track of what texture information is loaded onto the graphics card at any given time, and try to only make calls to draw objects in which the texture information is already present on the card. Otherwise the card will wait for it to load before doing any drawing, which murders your framerate. Death From Above style. It won't move on and come back; it just sits there and does nothing. Now, on to the topic of more draw calls that Stephen mentions... I have no idea what he is talking about. Drawing an object requires a call to tell it to draw. all objects must do this, there are not any more or less calls made to do this with different textures unless someone faceplanted on their keyboard while coding the engine. The only increase is the number of state changes. Texture atlases are almost mandatory for high counts of character models, all with different gear on, however, as seen in most every MMO released for a while, there is an option for a maximum number of high detail characters before reverting to using the atlas for the rest. The player character is ALWAYS one of them, and the rest are allocated to party members first, and then just the closest characters to the camera for any remaining characters. This option limits the number of additional state changes that can happen due to high quality textures so that a variety of cards can keep up with the demands of the game. This option is unfortunately sorely lacking (read: unavailable) in SWTOR. Instead, the textures are uniformly downsampled, or in essence, shrunk by a certain ratio (usually 2 or 4) and tacked on to an atlas to save memory and state change costs. It is in my opinion that the Dev team either has a critical design flaw in their engine that prevents them from fixing a severe performance degradation due to additional switching between textures without a large amount of code re-write, or there is a bug with their option for limiting high quality character textures, with no know eta to fixing, and in the mean time they figured they could just completely disable the feature and pass it off as working as intended until they can either fix it or everyone stops caring. There are a number of other things that can be causing the issue, however the point to be made, and that has been made, is that far worse games have pulled off far better texture quality and SWTOR's player base expects no less from you Bioware, and we will not accept the "No" you have given to us as an answer. Kilran Out. *claps* Very interesting. More interestingly, this matter "actually" also becoming a PR disaster. I hope Bio manages to fix/solve this mess less then 24 hours..Its too late for them to cover ups, like "oh theyre bugs bugs, only for cinematics (which are cutscenes btw) nothing more.." well..if the textures we are talking about were GODLY EPIC 3d cinematic rendering, ofcourse it would be silly to expect them ingame.. but the expleaination according to the state of the game from Bio...makes me..dont know, maybe cheap and insulted or screwed even?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
United_Strafes Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 You can sugarcoat or read into things as much as you want, but at the end of the day this is not okay: http://imageshack.us/f/706/14521080.jpg/ Well in a bit of fareness the second image is obviously taken in low or something because the enviroment doesn't look that bad like in that screen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Exponentially Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 The ********** continues. Perhaps some of you haven't seen this? The first major changes will be in our next major Game Update, which will have the version number of 1.2. Those changes will bring greater visual fidelity to your character and those around you, but will still allow for good performance in situations where a lot of characters are on-screen at once. In other words, for those screenshots of your character in their best gear, you should see a marked improvement. Other potential changes are being discussed right now – as I said, many of which are similar to changes suggested by many of you. As usual, you’ll see these sorts of changes on our Public Test Server before they make it into the live game. Right now we cannot commit to a live date for the 1.2 Game Update, but it will be within Q1 2012. You've been listened to. It's being worked on. They get it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
United_Strafes Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 The ********** continues. Perhaps some of you haven't seen this? You've been listened to. It's being worked on. They get it. No they really don't, and that statement just goes on to prove that they don't. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deamor Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 You can sugarcoat or read into things as much as you want, but at the end of the day this is not okay: http://imageshack.us/f/706/14521080.jpg/ Yeah, the pic on the right is clearly taken with low-settings on. You can easily see it by looking at the rocks to his left. However, I am not here to defend Bioware on this issue. I too am disappointed of their response. Just pointing out an unfair comparison. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kashaan Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 I'm not sure what two options you were referring to, but I assume one is "let people crash" and the other is "let bioware bury high res textures in a shallow grave". The third option, which I will refer to as "The only correct solution" would be to fix the bug that causes systems to crash when the system was unable to load textures from the HD fast enough. I'm well aware. The situation: With high-res textures enabled, even those with High-end PCs were crashing in high-pop areas. BW had two options (well three, but I'll get to the third in a sec): 1) Release with high-res textures and create even more problems than they have now (people would still be ***** ing about the textures, but they'd also be QQing about crashing and having to re-queue for hours). 2) Release with the high res textures only in cutscenes. They still get the flak for the low res textures, but at least they avoid the disaster with crashing and re-queuing. Now, BW did have a third option that they either didn't think of or just had a "DURR" moment on: 3) Release with a "Limited high-res texture" option. It would only apply to your character and your party members, and maybe about the first 20-ish character models to be rendered on your screen. Option 3, while not perfect, would have been the best solution. I'm frankly appalled they didn't think of it. But Option 2 was the next best thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Khechari Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 Well in a bit of fareness the second image is obviously taken in low or something because the enviroment doesn't look that bad like in that screen. I agree. Let's make our arguments responsible.... Even though I entirely agree with the spirit of that picture. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PjPablo Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 The ********** continues. Perhaps some of you haven't seen this? You've been listened to. It's being worked on. They get it. It does and it will. If you don't understand why this is an issue with quite a lot of people we can't help you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paganini Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 Yeah, the pic on the right is clearly taken with low-settings on. You can easily see it by looking at the rocks to his left. However, I am not here to defend Bioware on this issue. I too am disappointed of their response. Just pointing out an unfair comparison. So you think the ingame settings on high are comparable to the one on the left? Is that what you're saying? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mormack Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 This game's textures and graphics aren't even remotely close to groundbreaking (and I'm okay with that...brings more people into the game this way) but I fail to see, short of HORRIBLE optimizing, how the High Rez Textures can put that much of a strain on the computer. If the high Rez textures were taking a while to load and causing crashes with HDDs, fix the Crash issue. This really leaves a bad taste in my mouth about the game and makes me wonder if other issues are going to be fixed or just dusted under the rug as "working as intended" because you can't get it right. I'm not mad at Stephen. he's just the messenger. The actual Development house seems to have forgotten how to develop for PC exclusives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ommm Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 (edited) The ********** continues. Perhaps some of you haven't seen this? You've been listened to. It's being worked on. They get it. Not half of it they get. The engine is poorly optimized, but they cheated via advertisment to draw people in. Now poeple feel screwed over for a good reason. Edited January 12, 2012 by Ommm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Khechari Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 So you think the ingame settings on high are comparable to the one on the left? Is that what you're saying? No, that's clearly not what he was saying, if you bother to read the post as it's written. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ogitrev Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 The ********** continues. Perhaps some of you haven't seen this? You've been listened to. It's being worked on. They get it. Quarter 1 2012 is between now and the end of March. I do hope that it is more early Qtr1 2012 or at least in the middle of q12012. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PjPablo Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 This game's textures and graphics aren't even remotely close to groundbreaking (and I'm okay with that...brings more people into the game this way) but I fail to see, short of HORRIBLE optimizing, how the High Rez Textures can put that much of a strain on the computer. If the high Rez textures were taking a while to load and causing crashes with HDDs, fix the Crash issue. This really leaves a bad taste in my mouth about the game and makes me wonder if other issues are going to be fixed or just dusted under the rug as "working as intended" because you can't get it right. I'm not mad at Stephen. he's just the messenger. The actual Development house seems to have forgotten how to develop for PC exclusives. If it were easy it would have been handled in Beta. Methinks this is going to be a challenge for them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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