Lack of graphic detail - I've solved the mystery.

[SiEDeN]

In several threads people have been trying to make sense of Bioware's decision to pull the detailed character and object graphics completely instead of making them an option.

 

Questions:

 

Why limit everyone, even those who weren't suffering significant performance hits?

 

Why say it will take 3 or more months to turn something on that was taken out of beta in one patch cycle?

 

Answer:

 

They had plans to sell a high-res texture expansion pack.

 

Occam's Razor - the simplest explanation in this case is to follow the money. It's really the only thing that makes sense.

 

I suppose another explanation could be that the dev in charge of this who took it out of the beta client quit or something, and everyone else can't for the life of them figure out how he did it. Hah.

 

 

Dumb people are dumb

[Fraxture]

In several threads people have been trying to make sense of Bioware's decision to pull the detailed character and object graphics completely instead of making them an option.

 

Questions:

 

Why limit everyone, even those who weren't suffering significant performance hits?

 

Why say it will take 3 or more months to turn something on that was taken out of beta in one patch cycle?

 

Answer:

 

They had plans to sell a high-res texture expansion pack.

 

Occam's Razor - the simplest explanation in this case is to follow the money. It's really the only thing that makes sense.

 

I suppose another explanation could be that the dev in charge of this who took it out of the beta client quit or something, and everyone else can't for the life of them figure out how he did it. Hah.

 

Hmm, then this game would be like WOW.

[Rophez]

You misquotet Occams razor...

 

Uh, I didn't quote Occam's Razor - sorry if I lead you to believe that.

[Iskareot]

In several threads people have been trying to make sense of Bioware's decision to pull the detailed character and object graphics completely instead of making them an option.

 

Questions:

 

Why limit everyone, even those who weren't suffering significant performance hits?

 

Why say it will take 3 or more months to turn something on that was taken out of beta in one patch cycle?

 

Answer:

 

They had plans to sell a high-res texture expansion pack.

 

Occam's Razor - the simplest explanation in this case is to follow the money. It's really the only thing that makes sense.

 

I suppose another explanation could be that the dev in charge of this who took it out of the beta client quit or something, and everyone else can't for the life of them figure out how he did it. Hah.

 

You may need to get outside and get some air.

 

Seriously..... no no ... really.

 

WHEN it was in beta, there was for lack of a better term some issues with it. IT WAS NOT as smooth and I run a wicked rig... Sli... 3 gigs video ram 16 gigs DDR SSD, Raptor drives... etc.. None the less it was NOT perfect.

[Commodorepants]

To quote StephenReid:

 

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'.

 

Read the rest of the post at the link below, and stop your fearmongering. Ignorance is not an excuse for it.

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=1478869#edit1478869

[solidkjames]

As someone who played with the high res textures in beta I can tell you it does work you gpu and cpu REALLY hard. My card would run really hot with things turned up in this game and I could see it being more of a problem than its worth atm. Having said that I do believe if people spend thousands to have a top end machine they should have the option to play this game at high res. I think it will eventually be released but the current engine needs more optimization before they focus on that. The good thing is the game still looks pretty good without the high res and when AA gets implemented it will look even better.

[TaylorMomsen]

Except you can't, you signed the EULA which waves your right to sue EA or BioWare for anything related to SW:TOR.

 

Didn't you read it?

 

EULA is not a legally binding contract, obviously.

[Rogoo]

 

Questions:

 

Why limit everyone, even those who weren't suffering significant performance hits?

 

Why say it will take 3 or more months to turn something on that was taken out of beta in one patch cycle?

 

Because the game engine just could not handle those textures even on very high end rigs, so no one would actually benefit from this.

 

So instead of a massive thread about having no high-res textures you'd get countless massive threads going:

 

"ZOMG! MY RIG (enter some specs here) CAN RUN BF3 AND CRYSIS 2 ON MAX BUT I LAG SO MUCH SWTOR AND CAN'T RUN HIGH!!!!111111 FAIL BW FAIL!!!!!1111111"

 

Hope this answer is to your satisfaction.

[Vastalee]

Hello,

 

Please see the following statement on this issue:

 

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.

 

Feel free to further discuss this issue in this thread:

 

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

 

We will now close this thread.