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

[Arkulin]

Oh you meant the textures that are BETTER than WoW?

 

Well...

 

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r277/UnruheEndlos/TORWOWComparison.jpg

 

Cheers

[AlValentyn]

I hear you man. I have unsubscribed and an really disappointed. My main problem is the FPS issue, but thats for another thread. Im EU too and before i left last week i was in Balmorra with 40 other people, thats not a mmo to me. Bioware just seem to be shooting themselves in the foot

 

The sharding is hurting the game as well yes.

 

I picked a PVP server, hoping it would be even slightly like Warhammer Online or WoW's PvP servers. Where there's actually groups of people fighting, having fun while on voice comms.

 

I'm on Hoth now and there's 7 people....

 

Taris I saw a max of 23.

 

Yet when I logged in for the first time on the 1st January most places had people running everywhere.

 

 

It could be for many reasons, I know quite a few people that can't stand looking at an ugly game that runs badly on high end systems.

 

For others, it's something else.

 

I for one, have unsubbed myself and I'll see what happens to the game.

 

Hopefully it won't end up like WAR after EA got their hands on Mythic. ( DAoC actually has more subscribers than WAR last time I checked and many of my old guild from there went back to it )

[RicoFrost]

Vanilla wow graphics and texture where not impressive at all, when it came out it was terrible.

 

As time goes on SWTOR will improve on the textures, improve on the game performance and improve on everything.

 

Wow when through the same ****, people complaining about many different things, the difference is wow has had 7yrs of being live. I"ve played wow for over 6yrs and I remember many times when people had problems hell even i had problems.

 

They will fix things give them time.

 

Also for all you people claiming that the engine if stuffed and they will never fix it, since your a programmer and know what your talking about why don't you inform them on how to fixed rather then screaming the skying if falling since you know what your talking about.

 

People need to just wait, in time they will fix everything. They have to fix everything because if they dont have a good number of people paying for subs then they will lose money. It is in their best interest to keep you happy, playing and paying.

[PjPablo]

And so you're saying textures aren't used in the environment?

 

Or are you just being myopic to limit it to character textures in order to troll an agenda?

 

If you read the several thousand posts by now (lol) you would realize that the issue for most of the posters are character textures and how BW has handled this issue.

 

Read any of my posts on this. I am not trolling in any way. You obviously don't agree with the crowd that has concerns and that's ok. To each his own. I for one am not as concerned with the textures themselves as I am with the way BW has handled this. Trust in the developer is huge in an MMO community and when people begin to lose that trust you get what you see here.

[ObiWonCanolli]

Well...

 

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r277/UnruheEndlos/TORWOWComparison.jpg

 

Cheers

 

Repeating the same thing does not make it any more effective. +1 for trolling. But you still have laughable 2D trees. Maybe next time you can Photoshop those.

[LaVolpex]

If you'll search my posts, you'll find I have mentioned other bugs as well.

 

Specifically one where you click a skill, the cooldown appears yet the skill does not execute.

 

Graphics do make a game, otherwise we'd all be playing text based games. What's wrong with people wanting a game that both looks good and plays good.

 

If you were to sell this game and advertise it with it's actual gameplay graphics, well you'd not sell it very well and you'd receive a lot of bad press.

 

 

There's a reason Blizzard make their new models and textures better, there's a reason Battlefield 3 looks good. It sells, and people expect it.

 

 

Take the Witcher 2 for example, it's an amazing PC game. The story is engaging and diverse. Yet it uses brilliant graphics and art to draw you into the world. Therefore making the overall experience far more enjoyable. Art style plays a big role yes, along with story and gameplay.

All that can be marred with terrible graphics, which degrade the overall experience.

 

u mean the cooldown DISPLAY bug thats gettin fixed on this very same patch? that one?

 

sorry bro

http://i41.tinypic.com/9blnd2.jpg

 

i just dont see all the " ZOMG HORRIBLE " you guys are screaming home about, srslly , look at that screen shot and tell me thats downright unplayable...you need to have your eyes checked bro, and this is on a 2 year old rig with 2 9800's @ 1080p

 

now dont get me wrong, i like as much pixels as i can get as much as the next guy, but the only way these textures look " unplayable and not worth 15 a month is if you try to play @ 2k resolutions in wich case its understandable since the texture gets "stretched " that much more ive seen it look horrible on other rigs and i think thats why the textures look so bad but not so bad on mine (just a thought) anyways as i said, go ahead , quit over minor pixels , i think its stupid to quit over something so inconsequential but to each its own

Edited January 12, 2012 by LaVolpex

[Sanxion]

Contrary to what Mr. Reid is trying to feed us (or his development team), SWTOR does use remote rendering. Although, I'll give them that, it's "locally remote".

 

In a couple of words, the second SWTOR process is most likely rendering then pipelining the result to the first process (or the other way around, but it makes no difference).

 

With that said you might wonder how I came to this conclusion. The answer is simple. If you have a SWTOR crash dump (if you do it'll be in ...\AppData\Local\SWTOR\CrashDump\swtor\CRASH.dmp

 

Now, if you have notepad++ (or a real text editor), open that file then do a search of: RemoteRenderingClient.pdb In the sole crash dump file I have I found it once. Here's what it looks like: http://i.imgur.com/TEl4G.png

 

pdb extension refers to a debug file, although it's not on the hard drive, the debug information for that file is most likely somewhere in the crash.dmp.

 

Now, the normal conclusion is that both processes have to talk to each others. It is unknown what information is passed between those two processes but we can guess textures have to be swapped from one to the other. Given that most mid/low-end systems have limited memory bandwidth compared to their better high-end rigs, I would imagine this is the kind of problem the team encountered.

 

Let me be clear here. There is NO remote rendering server swapping textures while you're playing SWTOR via the internet pipe. It's done locally. BUT, this also has very problematic implications. The way I see it, textures have to be available to both processes and in the very limited knowledge I have of the Zero Engine, this might mean double the texture memory. Which, if true, does not bode well at all.

 

It remains to be seen if this is the true culprit, but my guess is, it is. I've been wrong before though.

 

I'm currently trying to unearth some more info, but I'm walking on a fine line here. I do like the game and I wouldn't want to lose my access to it.

 

If I find anything noteworthy I'll repost in here.

 

THIS!

 

Did everyone blink and miss this post? That is VERY interesting and like I said earlier the official response to a solution so far has been completely vague giving me the impression they know well enough the limitations of what they are dealing with.

[Threefiddie]

u mean the cooldown DISPLAY bug thats gettin fixed on this very same patch? that one?

 

sorry bro

http://i41.tinypic.com/9blnd2.jpg

 

i just dont see all the " ZOMG HORRIBLE " you guys are screaming home about, srslly , look at that screen shot and tell me thats downright unplayable...you need to have your eyes checked bro, and this is on a 2 year old rig with 2 9800's @ 1080p

 

now dont get me wrong, i like as much pixels as i can get as much as the next guy, but the only way these textures look " unplayable and not worth 15 a month, as i said, go ahead , quit over minor pixels , i think its stupid to quit over something so inconsequential but to each its own

 

you don't get it do you, all these textures are in the game, kept from us from use. Yet the 1.1 video released today is ALL high textures. ALL OF IT.

[BobTheTeepo]

Vanilla wow graphics and texture where not impressive at all, when it came out it was terrible.

 

As time goes on SWTOR will improve on the textures, improve on the game performance and improve on everything.

 

Wow when through the same ****, people complaining about many different things, the difference is wow has had 7yrs of being live. I"ve played wow for over 6yrs and I remember many times when people had problems hell even i had problems.

 

They will fix things give them time.

 

Also for all you people claiming that the engine if stuffed and they will never fix it, since your a programmer and know what your talking about why don't you inform them on how to fixed rather then screaming the skying if falling since you know what your talking about.

 

People need to just wait, in time they will fix everything. They have to fix everything because if they dont have a good number of people paying for subs then they will lose money. It is in their best interest to keep you happy, playing and paying.

 

I agree with this guy, for all those who unsubscribe of a graphics issue, this industry is not for you. There will be worse problems down the road, so if you can't take it then it really is best you leave (even though on a personal level, I hope people don't leave).

 

They'll have it fixed in time, filling threads with thousands of immature posts that lack any constructive quality is not going to help anything.

 

I do support adding in High Res as a temp fix, and just letting people who can't handle it turn it down (although perhaps there's an issue for them in all of this?).

 

It's not like Bioware is to get us. They want to make us happy because the happier we are the fatter their piggy bank gets, which is how business works. They're trying their best, so just be patient.

[carnac_fett]

Vanilla wow graphics and texture where not impressive at all, when it came out it was terrible.

 

As time goes on SWTOR will improve on the textures, improve on the game performance and improve on everything.

 

Wow when through the same ****, people complaining about many different things, the difference is wow has had 7yrs of being live. I"ve played wow for over 6yrs and I remember many times when people had problems hell even i had problems.

 

The difference is that WoW launched in 2004 looking like a game from 2002.

 

TOR has launched in the final month of 2011 looking like a game from 2006.

 

Not all MMORPGs look awful when they first come out. Lord of the Rings Online and RIFT both looked gorgeous when they first came out.

[ObiWonCanolli]

If you read the several thousand posts by now (lol) you would realize that the issue for most of the posters are character textures and how BW has handled this issue.

 

Read any of my posts on this. I am not trolling in any way. You obviously don't agree with the crowd that has concerns and that's ok. To each his own. I for one am not as concerned with the textures themselves as I am with the way BW has handled this. Trust in the developer is huge in an MMO community and when people begin to lose that trust you get what you see here.

 

LOL, you take your gaming way too seriously. "Trust in the developer"? This isn't brain surgery, it's a GAME! Play it at regular speed and honestly tell me that the character textures of your face or that of your opponent chewing your face off really make a difference.

 

As opposed to say a tree looking like a tree? Or a spell animation looking different from another and representative of what it is. I am comparing texture utilization because the character texture thing is such minutiae compared to everything rendered on your screen that the extremes of the outrage on this look absolutely pathetic.

[Morcova]

Awesome, enjoy your Panda karate chops.

 

My light saber swoosh will keep my money over your Pandas any day of the week.

 

Enjoy your dating simulator, I hope your companion is everything you dreamed she was, but don't worry soon you can "romance" one of your male companions too.

[Kashaan]

Perhaps the OP can add this suggestion to the first page so it's more accessible to BW to see?

 

 

To Bioware: Please add one of the following two functions:

 

1) An option to use High-res textures for just your character and your party members/compaions

 

2) An option to use High-res textures for the first 20-ish character models rendered.

 

 

I think that would placate a lot of people and would be a great [temporary] fix. Not to mention it wouldn't take long to code and implement either.

[Kractoa]

Repeating the same thing does not make it any more effective. +1 for trolling. But you still have laughable 2D trees. Maybe next time you can Photoshop those.

 

Lotro 2007

 

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/220/screenshot00063ul9.jpg/

[AnotherJaggens]

Vanilla wow graphics and texture where not impressive at all, when it came out it was terrible.

 

As time goes on SWTOR will improve on the textures, improve on the game performance and improve on everything.

 

Wow when through the same ****, people complaining about many different things, the difference is wow has had 7yrs of being live. I"ve played wow for over 6yrs and I remember many times when people had problems hell even i had problems.

 

They will fix things give them time.

 

Also for all you people claiming that the engine if stuffed and they will never fix it, since your a programmer and know what your talking about why don't you inform them on how to fixed rather then screaming the skying if falling since you know what your talking about.

 

People need to just wait, in time they will fix everything. They have to fix everything because if they dont have a good number of people paying for subs then they will lose money. It is in their best interest to keep you happy, playing and paying.

 

I DON'T WANT TO GIVE AWAY TIME FOR A FEATURE I PAYED FOR ALREADY 60 BUCKS AND 30 MORE FOR 2 MONTHS IN ADVANCE! IT'S MY RIGHT TO GET FULL SERVICE FOR MY MONEY! And no excuses may be there. Can't deliver - don't release and advertise.

Edited January 12, 2012 by AnotherJaggens

[Deathsidehell]

I found some stuff online and would like to share with you guys:

 

 

While we wait for the graphical enhancements coming in patch 1.2, here are some great tricks you can use to make your game look better! Of course, you will have to tweak these settings yourself, based on your hardware. Some of these can be tweaked to make your performance better on a lower spec system. You would just tweak the numbers the other direction.

 

First, let's talk negative LOD bias. If you don't know what it is, basically it governs the general sharpness of the textures. If you use an LOD bias of -3.0, the picture will be sharp, whereas 3.0 would be more blurry.

 

So we want to try and add -3.0 LOD bias. How do you go about doing this? If you have an ATI card, get a tweak program like RivaTuner or ATI Tray Tools. Nvidia, you'll want something similar (usually a tweak program used to overclock and unlock your card's potential). In this program, you'll want to look in your 3D or Direct 3D settings for the LOD bias slider. Set it to -3.0. Save and exit. Try it out in the game! You can adjust it up or down to your liking! Here are some comparison shots:

 

NORMAL

 

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j136/Cgramnaes/SWTOR_No_LOD.jpg

 

FORCED LOD

 

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j136/Cgramnaes/SWTOR_Forced_LOD.jpg

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Now, let's talk .ini file tweaks!

 

For this to work, you have to unhide your C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\SWTOR folder! Then you'll be able to access the client_settings.ini file. Double click to open in notepad.

 

When finished, save the file, then right click it, and set to read-only, as the game will overwrite it when you restart!

 

If a line is not added to your .ini, you can add it yourself!

 

Also, texture quality set at 0 is the setting you want! Trust me!

 

PLEASE BUMP AND STICKY!

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

[Renderer]

Height = 1080

Width = 1920

WindowX = 0

WindowY = 0

DynamicLightsLimit = 8

MeshLODQuality = 1

TextureAnisotropy = 16

FarClipScale = 3.9371195

PlantDensity = 150

D3DFullScreen = true

NativeHeight = 1080

NativeWidth = 1920

doShadows = true

doBlobShadows = true

UseMinSpecShaders = false

EnableBloom = true

VerticalSyncState = true

FullScreen = true

TextureQuality = 0

AllowDepthOfField = true

GammaRamp = 1.037854

SpeedTreeDistanceScale = 1.25

enableadvenvirolighting = true

DebugAdvEnviroLighting = true

 

[Game]

MoviesFolder = ....\Movies

SwtorRegKey = SOFTWARE\BioWare\Star Wars - The Old Republic

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

RESULTS:

 

Cutscene:

 

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

 

World (with plan density 100 instead of 150):

 

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

 

 

 

original post:http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/951199-star-wars-the-old-republic/61628417

[LaVolpex]

you don't get it do you, all these textures are in the game, kept from us from use. Yet the 1.1 video released today is ALL high textures. ALL OF IT.

 

yes i get it, i still think you guys are getting worked over stuff that , if no one told you , you wouldnt have minded at all

 

as i said, the game is NOT UNPLAYABLE, i mean , im not seeing lego blocks coming out of peoples heads or anything right? so people screaming that minecraft looks better are not only grossly overexagerating but adding fuel to the fire just to see crap burn...its honestly disgusting

[Dodosan]

Perhaps the OP can add this suggestion to the first page so it's more accessible to BW to see?

 

 

To Bioware: Please add one of the following two functions:

 

1) An option to use High-res textures for just your character and your party members/compaions

 

2) An option to use High-res textures for the first 20-ish character models rendered.

 

 

I think that would placate a lot of people and would be a great [temporary] fix. Not to mention it wouldn't take long to code and implement either.

 

I would also like that the OP can add this to the first page.

[aluisi]

Vanilla wow graphics and texture where not impressive at all, when it came out it was terrible.

 

As time goes on SWTOR will improve on the textures, improve on the game performance and improve on everything.

 

Wow when through the same ****, people complaining about many different things, the difference is wow has had 7yrs of being live. I"ve played wow for over 6yrs and I remember many times when people had problems hell even i had problems.

 

They will fix things give them time.

 

Also for all you people claiming that the engine if stuffed and they will never fix it, since your a programmer and know what your talking about why don't you inform them on how to fixed rather then screaming the skying if falling since you know what your talking about.

 

People need to just wait, in time they will fix everything. They have to fix everything because if they dont have a good number of people paying for subs then they will lose money. It is in their best interest to keep you happy, playing and paying.

 

Your right wow looked like crap when it came out. But wow was a open world dealing with lots of stuff from water effect particle effect and other things. It took people complaining and ************ to get blizzard to fix anything in that game. The community here shouldn't sit back be quiet and hope they fix something. If we don't voice our opinions nothing will get done. There is no reason with the game in current state that high rez textures shouldn't be included. The game is VOID of people even on full servers because of the shard crap. So a instanced game void of people can't handle high rez textures? Its a joke if it can't. It worked in beta where i might add you saw a lot more people in your areas then you do now. It just comes down to lazy programing and the fact that this game was in no condition and really still isn't in one to have launched. Sure every MMO is plagued with issues when it launches. But a instanced void with people MMO can handle high rez textures is a joke.

[carnac_fett]

yes i get it, i still think you guys are getting worked over stuff that , if no one told you , you wouldnt have minded at all

 

I wouldn't have minded this if I hadn't been told?

 

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/1466/screenshot2012011115012.jpg

 

I suppose if I had been blind, or lived in a cave with only Nintendo 64 games to keep me busy until I was released last December.

[Arkulin]

Repeating the same thing does not make it any more effective. +1 for trolling. But you still have laughable 2D trees. Maybe next time you can Photoshop those.

 

I do not care about a tree, tree is not representing me, I don`t control the tree, I do not grind branches and leafs, I grind uber armor to equip my mighty hero in that "2D surroundings", but armor look worse than that "2D tree" .

[Unruhe]

Cancel your sub in protest. But before you do please ask yourself this basic question:

 

Are you paying for textures or a game?

 

Big difference.

 

Textures OR a game? Then I'll give them 7.50$ a month for the game part, since the graphics part isn't there.

[BobTheTeepo]

Originally Posted by TheRealMadJack

Contrary to what Mr. Reid is trying to feed us (or his development team), SWTOR does use remote rendering. Although, I'll give them that, it's "locally remote".

 

In a couple of words, the second SWTOR process is most likely rendering then pipelining the result to the first process (or the other way around, but it makes no difference).

 

With that said you might wonder how I came to this conclusion. The answer is simple. If you have a SWTOR crash dump (if you do it'll be in ...\AppData\Local\SWTOR\CrashDump\swtor\CRASH.dmp

 

Now, if you have notepad++ (or a real text editor), open that file then do a search of: RemoteRenderingClient.pdb In the sole crash dump file I have I found it once. Here's what it looks like: http://i.imgur.com/TEl4G.png

 

pdb extension refers to a debug file, although it's not on the hard drive, the debug information for that file is most likely somewhere in the crash.dmp.

 

Now, the normal conclusion is that both processes have to talk to each others. It is unknown what information is passed between those two processes but we can guess textures have to be swapped from one to the other. Given that most mid/low-end systems have limited memory bandwidth compared to their better high-end rigs, I would imagine this is the kind of problem the team encountered.

 

Let me be clear here. There is NO remote rendering server swapping textures while you're playing SWTOR via the internet pipe. It's done locally. BUT, this also has very problematic implications. The way I see it, textures have to be available to both processes and in the very limited knowledge I have of the Zero Engine, this might mean double the texture memory. Which, if true, does not bode well at all.

 

It remains to be seen if this is the true culprit, but my guess is, it is. I've been wrong before though.

 

I'm currently trying to unearth some more info, but I'm walking on a fine line here. I do like the game and I wouldn't want to lose my access to it.

 

If I find anything noteworthy I'll repost in here.

 

THIS!

 

Did everyone blink and miss this post? That is VERY interesting and like I said earlier the official response to a solution so far has been completely vague giving me the impression they know well enough the limitations of what they are dealing with.

 

I just have to say, it's INTERESTING, but it's nothing concrete. Notice how his first paragraph hints at what he is saying is the TRUTH and is a FACT, but notice how he carefully words the rest of his post?

 

His statement would be summarized like this then:

 

If what I'm saying is correct, then this could be what's going on.

 

So basically, we're left with something interesting, stated by a clearly intelligent person, but it's nothing more than that. It's purely speculation, and I wouldn't take it as anything more.

[Blue-Reckloose]

yes i get it, i still think you guys are getting worked over stuff that , if no one told you , you wouldnt have minded at all

 

as i said, the game is NOT UNPLAYABLE, i mean , im not seeing lego blocks coming out of peoples heads or anything right? so people screaming that minecraft looks better are not only grossly overexagerating but adding fuel to the fire just to see crap burn...its honestly disgusting

 

But we see them in the cutscenes. And to add insult to injury, all the promotional videos and screenies use the high res textures.

 

So, here's the thing. EA/Bioware lied to our faces, first calling the lack of high res textures a bug, then reversing course and declaring it a feature, and THEN being wishy washy about fixing it.

 

They existed in beta, we know they can be turned on because of that. They are used in marketing screen shots, so we know they can be turned on. But, Bioware refuses to allow us to turn them on (because we the users are, in Bioware's opinion, to dumb to be able to figure out our own balance between quality and performance).

[AlValentyn]

Vanilla wow graphics and texture where not impressive at all, when it came out it was terrible.

 

As time goes on SWTOR will improve on the textures, improve on the game performance and improve on everything.

 

Wow when through the same ****, people complaining about many different things, the difference is wow has had 7yrs of being live. I"ve played wow for over 6yrs and I remember many times when people had problems hell even i had problems.

 

They will fix things give them time.

 

Also for all you people claiming that the engine if stuffed and they will never fix it, since your a programmer and know what your talking about why don't you inform them on how to fixed rather then screaming the skying if falling since you know what your talking about.

 

People need to just wait, in time they will fix everything. They have to fix everything because if they dont have a good number of people paying for subs then they will lose money. It is in their best interest to keep you happy, playing and paying.

 

Do you honestly think this game will have the same player base and longevity that WoW has?

 

I like Star Wars, always have. But this game is somewhat lacking in many aspects. Graphics being one of them.

 

Not to mention that WoW, looked rather well compared to many other MMO's out at the time such as Dark Age of Camelot.

 

WoW, also made up for it with good artstyle. People let the graphics slide a lot because of the cartoony look. And when the game launched the ingame graphics looked just like those saw in reviews and gameplay footage.

 

With TOR, that's not the case. The game is shown as having high textures, amazing lighting, bloom, AA and large beautiful environment. All of this, shown in game play footage. The key words being, Game Play and Footage.

 

 

That was not delivered, and actually most of those options removed.

 

Now as I travel with a speeder I see grass and the environment grow infront of me. I see blurry textures without any sense of depth or surface.

 

Yes the dialogue and story are good, but they're tarnished by terrible visuals. Especially compared to those shown right now in the Patch 1.1 video and in all their screenshots of in game footage on their site.

 

 

Problems like these can not be afforded, not this early on when the launch makes or breakes the game like it has for so many other MMO's out there.