Darthater asks BW about engine optimization.

[SNEAKYSIX]

If you read the whole article, although patches of sarcasm I wouldnt say it was a negative read. You pulled out a single quote from the intereview and focused on it.. Thats like dismissing 9/10ths for the bible to read revelation.

[DigitalPrime]

When intelligence, and not hyperbolic grandstanding, actually starts taking place, you might have a point.

 

And I don't care that you don't care, belive it or not. So your first sentence means absolutely dick.

 

You seem to be fighting this engine thing dont ya. Yet you have not posted any information to prove your claims of ilum been fine. Yet there is post after post in here and on youtube showing ilums issues. Even Darthhater has got onboard. Yet you seem to find it a good thing to troll this thread. It achieves nothing apart from showing your age or maturity.

[Rikeryo]

Went and looked at my post history, did ya? Kudos. I guess.

 

yeah, you're obviously another white knight blindly defending bioware. or maybe renegadeimp's 2nd account? or erickson? ohlen? I'd like to see some proof for your statements. JUST ONCE.

[Kourage]

My equipment is all stock, nothing over clocked, nothing special

 

My wifes laptop is all stock ( but fairly high end )

 

No issues.

 

I don’t expect Bioware to investigate everyone’s individual computer to tell you what is wrong with your equipment or internet or network connection.

 

So you would also suggest he do some investigation.

[Jederix]

You seem to be fighting this engine thing dont ya. Yet you have not posted any information to prove your claims of ilum been fine. Yet there is post after post in here and on youtube showing ilums issues. Even Darthhater has got onboard. Yet you seem to find it a good thing to troll this thread. It achieves nothing apart from showing your age or maturity.

 

You apparently didn't read. I said I haven't been to Ilum. My issue was with the inventory thing. Does good to read everything someone posts and not just the parts you want to read.

 

If the engine is bad, everyone would have the same issue. If everyone is not having the same issue, logic concludes it's not the engine. And youtube videos from a handful of posters looking to find fault barely registers as legitimate.

[Goretzu]

Then why is not everyone seeing it? If it is an engine limitation, doesn't it stand to reason that the issue would be happening to everyone?

 

And it's a split second if it happens at all. If you have a 15 sec delay or something, then you might have a legitimate concern. If it hitches for a split second when you open it and you consider that a game breaking problem, I'd hate to see how you react to a real game breaking problem.

 

TBF if even Drewser admits it's happening, I think you're probably on to a losing cause.

[Jederix]

TBF if even Drewser admits it's happening, I think you're probably on to a losing cause.

 

Is that supposed to mean something? Who's Drewser? Forum celebrities do not concern me.

 

You know what, keep complaining about it. It will either eventually get fixed, or you guys will continue your tirade on the forums looking for justification, or you will quit and the rest of us will go on about our business.

 

I'll be playing the game and enjoying it. This thread is going nowhere fast.

[Rikeryo]

You apparently didn't read. I said I haven't been to Ilum.

 

but you still participate here?

 

If the engine is bad, everyone would have the same issue. If everyone is not having the same issue, logic concludes it's not the engine. And youtube videos from a handful of posters looking to find fault barely registers as legitimate.

 

fail logic is fail. again, 36 years old .. really?

so, you seem to be quite clever, do you mind telling me where the 15000 posts in http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=3426588#post3426588 come from? or the other countless threads? are all the guys complaining just dumb idiots? PC newbs?

Edited March 15, 2012 by Rikeryo

[MackumDog]

To find a software problem you have to reproduce it, it is all well and good people complaining about what the problem is, they need to pass on information

 

I have never had a freeze opening an inventory, but then i read on and it happens in Illium, is there more, everyone in a certain guild gets it.. so could it be republic/imperial orientated to fix these issues the developers need as much info as possible.

 

And not on these forums they cannot sit here and read this sort of thing they need it in the bug logs. I have worked in IT for many years, and I quite often see bugs reported as simply "Screen Locks Up" ... can you imagine how helpful that is?

 

I am by no way saying there are no problems, but you have to encourage everyone who has a fault to report it, with as much detail as possible, as soon as possible and via the right means.

[Quinlynn]

I don't know of anyone who doesn't get a freeze opening their inventory bag or when the quest/valor updates in Ilum.

 

Every single one of my guildmates has this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEuFZbdJsKk

 

QFE

 

We have had as many as 10 peeps on Illum and everyone, and I mean everyone, gets action freeze everytime a message about stuff flies across the screen.

 

Anyone that says otherwise is a fan boi or BW agent.

[Quinlynn]

To find a software problem you have to reproduce it, it is all well and good people complaining about what the problem is, they need to pass on information

 

I have never had a freeze opening an inventory, but then i read on and it happens in Illium, is there more, everyone in a certain guild gets it.. so could it be republic/imperial orientated to fix these issues the developers need as much info as possible.

 

And not on these forums they cannot sit here and read this sort of thing they need it in the bug logs. I have worked in IT for many years, and I quite often see bugs reported as simply "Screen Locks Up" ... can you imagine how helpful that is?

 

I am by no way saying there are no problems, but you have to encourage everyone who has a fault to report it, with as much detail as possible, as soon as possible and via the right means.

 

If anyone at BW says they cannot reproduce what all these players are experiencing only means they fail at testing.

 

All they need to do is give an employee a medium / similar spec'd rig, and tell them to go home and create an account using a game disc that does not grant special access.

 

I pay money to play, not to be a BW tester.

[DigitalPrime]

You apparently didn't read. I said I haven't been to Ilum. My issue was with the inventory thing. Does good to read everything someone posts and not just the parts you want to read.

 

If the engine is bad, everyone would have the same issue. If everyone is not having the same issue, logic concludes it's not the engine. And youtube videos from a handful of posters looking to find fault barely registers as legitimate.

 

Everybody who goes to ilum in a big ops vs ops battle has these issues

 

The proof is there with the engine issue on ilum. yet no one has posted any screenies or vids of ilum been fine in a ops vs ops battle. says alot really!

Edited March 15, 2012 by DigitalPrime

[rhirne]

The stuff you have talked about can be true. But these things you mention would effect all play, usage. Not just one game. ...........

 

Not necessarily true.

 

Earlier I mentioned a registry key (HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management \SystemPages). It sets the system pages. If that value is anything other than 0 (Xp and higher), Windows cannot dynamically manage how many PTE's are available. Say that entry is set to 500 MB. So long as Windows does not need to map anything more than 500 MB worth of PTE's, you will never notice an issue. Game A may only cause windows to need to map 400 MB of PTE's - you won't see an issue. Now say an application comes along like SWTOR and now it needs to map 1.5 GB of PTE's (maximum of 2 GB on a 32 bit system) and there is only 500 MB available, NOW you will start seeing problems when in the past you did not. I may not be seeing problems, cause mine was set to 0.

 

So it CAN be a computer configuration issue. I don't think anyone is saying that the engine could use some performance enhancements cause we all know it can. And we all know the crappy fun times people have on Illum; even BW knows it's a problem. I think what people are saying is not to put ALL the blame on the game engine. A persons rig config can play a big role. So while you may be seeing game crashes and memory errors, I may not be. Could it be a problem with the engine.. possibly. But if it works for me and not you, and it works for him, and her, and him, and her, and her, but not for him, or her, or her..... You see the problem. Could it be an actual issue - sure, but who's to say it's not your PC configuration when other people are working fine.

 

Really what BW needs to do is say "Here's the settings that we know work optimally with SWTOR. Make sure you are configured at least this way." That way, they now have a base to work off of, instead of 1.5 million different computer configurations. And becuse they can't reproduce the problem easily and consistently, it makes issues hard to track down.

[drosalion]

Truthfully, I don't care if it does it for you. It doesn't for me.

 

I don't have a screen freeze when I open my Inventory (haven't been to Ilum). There, now you know 1 person.

 

I have a comparable rig and mine has no problems at all. Its on the user's end, not the engine's.

 

Then you do not know me.

 

I have never had a freeze opening an inventory

 

Prove it. Upload a video of you running while opening/closing the inventory/character screen.

 

Then why is not everyone seeing it? If it is an engine limitation, doesn't it stand to reason that the issue would be happening to everyone?

 

And it's a split second if it happens at all. If you have a 15 sec delay or something, then you might have a legitimate concern. If it hitches for a split second when you open it and you consider that a game breaking problem, I'd hate to see how you react to a real game breaking problem.

 

Everyone is experiencing it, although it appears some in this thread may not be seeing it. Those that say there is no delay whatsoever are lying, unless they're able to prove otherwise. And a small delay is still a delay, it indicates a clear underlying flaw and limitation with the engine and the user/server tramissions if something as simple as opening your inventory causes your machine to freeze (even if for only a fraction of a second). The issue is not so much the delay when opening the inventory in itself (however annoying it may be), its what the delay indicates that is a far greater issue.

Edited March 15, 2012 by drosalion

[MackumDog]

If anyone at BW says they cannot reproduce what all these players are experiencing only means they fail at testing.

 

All they need to do is give an employee a medium / similar spec'd rig, and tell them to go home and create an account using a game disc that does not grant special access.

 

I pay money to play, not to be a BW tester.

 

It is not as easy as it sounds, but you do have a point they should probably go and buy a PC from some sort of super store and try from home. Often in industry you all work with the same PCs with the same builds.

 

but I will give you a problem we recently had, we bought 3 servers, installed RHEL and the drivers and application all the same, but one server didnt work properly, it was one of the NIC cards was a different chipset, but all had the same part numbers. all bought the same time.

it only takes one small difference that might be with a small number of machines even localised to a certain region that can cause a problem.

[Rogoo]

 

But I drop to below 10 FPS on the absolute lowest settings in battles on Alderaan, so like I asked earlier in the thread, if it is on my end what am I doing wrong?

 

Freshly formmated, all drivers are up to date.

 

AMD HD 6870 2 gigs, Quad Core 2.1(2.7 overclocked) Processor, 8 gigs of 1600mhz ram.

 

^Precisely this. ~20 fps on lowest possible settings and resolution, running 6870 in crossfire. With a 6GB ramdisk....

[Tarka]

Once again Daniel shows just how arrogant he can be by making a mockery out of valid questions.

[Darth_Bond]

Settings and memory access (and OS).

 

If Windows has pre-cached your game you won't see the hitching when opening UI elements, if it hasn't, it's hard fault to disk access. If you have an SSD, but its improperly configured, or if you have other disk access at the same time it will again, hard pause and wait. If you're running chrome/firefox/opera with SWTOR on decent settings and only have 4 gigs of ram, guess what, you have a lot of stuff in memory which will cause problems. An SSD in the wrong mode, with the wrong settings in windows or with the wrong firmware will also cause persistent hitching. SWTOR is really big.

 

It's sort of an engine problem, and sort of not. Ideally the engine programmers should know how to pre-fetch stuff on their own. The problem is that the game is already creeping up to a 2GB memory limit and it will just barf on a 32 bit OS if it does more than that, or if it can't find enough ram. How much should you pre-fetch? Well if you have low settings (really low settings for example, especially textures) then windows or the engine will have more memory to cache into main memory (i.e. RAM) and less hitching.

 

 

Something like crysis is a nonsense comparison. They have completely different performance profiles. The problem with something like SWTOR is that you have this hugely diverse collection of stuff that could show up on your screen at any time (every character, in every suit of armour). In crysis the programmer knows in advance exactly what can ever be on your screen and when.

 

 

Hero engine is really a content creation system. For example, the game is probably written in heroscript mostly (aka the Hero Scripting language). It's a fully OO language, but it runs on top of the Hero engine, I don't think it's compiled to bytecode directly. That's not a bad thing particularly, but it makes optimization inherently harder because the 'engine' isn't aware of what HSL code is going to do until it runs it.

 

Because of hero engine SWTOR can be really really big. But that means it will behave completely differently than most other games. You could try comparing to WoW, but the conversation system (specifically how jars you into a higher resolution view of yourself and a face close up) completely changes how the engine can perform. That, believe it or not, is a huge 'storytelling' idea, but a disastrously bad performance one, and theres probably no easy way to fix it.

 

It's also and online game, and they might be phoning home for a lot of things which don't necessarily need to phone home for. E.g. finding cover is a slow process because it has to query the server if it can go, and then go, rather than take cover, where you just tell the server you're taking cover here. You can actually watch the two, if you don't have a smuggler or agent, make one just to see the difference, that highlights just how the 'ask the server' causes hitching effects, and someone with a different latency connection to their server or who just happens to be on lower load times than you will experience completely different performance.

 

These days technically I'm an AI programmer, but have been an engine programmer. There are lots of things that could probably be improved in the hero engine as used in SWTOR, but without server monitoring tools it's hard to know where problems are.

 

 

+1

respect.

[Coldin]

Odd that you left out this part:

 

A: "We have a programming team now that literally that’s their only mandate is game run better. Long term target is you should be able to play on your laptop, you should be able to play on your second and third machine in the house. And we are fiercely dedicated to that goal."

 

The issue I find here though, is that they're looking at treating the symptoms rather than the cause. Basically adding in all these adjustments (which are nice, don't get me wrong) that can make the game run better by turning things off, but not actually making those things run more efficiently.

 

It still makes NO sense to me that the game requires 100% of my processing power when I'm in an empty area staring at a wall.

[MackumDog]

Prove it. Upload a video of you running while opening/closing the inventory/character screen.

 

 

I dont think I said it isnt happening but it has not happened to me, and how am I supposed to sit there and video something that does not happen...

 

As I clearly said it seems the fault is common on Illium, but if you dont mention that how can the devs find it, they really cannot read your mind when you have your tin foil hat on.

[MPagano]

I'm surprised at how many people think that because they aren't experiencing problems then the engine runs fine. Do you understand how complicated the issue is? 2 computers can have identical specs with near identical physical composition but depending on every hardware component and the way the computer uses them, the engine could be poorly optimized.

 

I read this interview, and I found the response to be pretty telling of BW. They're so overwhelmed with the success and the equally apparent issues in the game that they're actually shutting down like a child shuts down when they feel overly criticized.

 

When people are running other games that are more demanding at higher settings with better frame rates, something is wrong with the game.

 

That's not to say the game doesn't run well on many systems, but it isn't running well on every high-end machine (i'm not talking about low or mid range rigs). What could possibly be the issue? Does the computer just happen to like Crysis 2 more than TOR? Clearly this is illogical. Crysis 2 uses an engine that is better designed to utilize the system's resources. TOR just is not. It becomes even more audacious when you consider their CS performance. They're simply out of their depth.

 

When I saw the BW response, I realized that they're taking the low-road on things like this. Rather than acknowledging some major issues, they're going to act like it's another community-side issue. This could very well undo them. I know it's made a strong impression with me and other friends who read it.

[BurningDT]

Is that supposed to mean something? Who's Drewser? Forum celebrities do not concern me.

 

You know what, keep complaining about it. It will either eventually get fixed, or you guys will continue your tirade on the forums looking for justification, or you will quit and the rest of us will go on about our business.

 

I'll be playing the game and enjoying it. This thread is going nowhere fast.

 

Some of us cannot enjoy it because of bioware's engine. I want to enjoy this game I really do, but if I cannot play PvP because of an awful framerate.

 

Like I said previously I have a more than adequate computer and I drop below 10 FPS on the absolute lowest settings in Alderaan(the wz).

 

It is not my computer as I freshly formatted it and recently updated the drivers.

 

Is it so hard to believe that their engine isn't optimized for every hardware configuration? Yours may be fine, but their engine is somehow interacting awfully with my system.

 

I run EVERY SINGLE other MMO and game that I have played on high/ultra(games with better graphics like Rift, LOTRO, which use directx11) and never experience less than 30 fps, now I get less than 10 on the lowest settings.

[BurningDT]

To find a software problem you have to reproduce it, it is all well and good people complaining about what the problem is, they need to pass on information

 

I have never had a freeze opening an inventory, but then i read on and it happens in Illium, is there more, everyone in a certain guild gets it.. so could it be republic/imperial orientated to fix these issues the developers need as much info as possible.

 

And not on these forums they cannot sit here and read this sort of thing they need it in the bug logs. I have worked in IT for many years, and I quite often see bugs reported as simply "Screen Locks Up" ... can you imagine how helpful that is?

 

I am by no way saying there are no problems, but you have to encourage everyone who has a fault to report it, with as much detail as possible, as soon as possible and via the right means.

 

It is not just happening in illum, the inventory framing happens everywhere for most people.

[Holden_Dissent]

^Precisely this. ~20 fps on lowest possible settings and resolution, running 6870 in crossfire. With a 6GB ramdisk....

 

My i5 work computer does better than that and it's running Intel integrated graphics......

[MackumDog]

It is not just happening in illum, the inventory framing happens everywhere for most people.

 

Is it only the inventory window, have you bought more inventory slots, have you a full or empty inventory? is there any items in the mission tab ?

Could it be class related, side related?

 

As I say it does not happen to me, but I am not denying it doesnt happen to others. I just would say that people need to get into detail what is happening.