Your technology needs help... lots of help... lots and LOTS of help. :(

[RabidPopcorn]

I don't know any tech but I do know SWTOR uses loading screens way too often for my liking when travelling from 1 place to another.

 

I find that having to go through loading screens so often - especially if they take quite some time to load - takes away from that fundamental aspect of an MMO - a seamless, persistent world. It's really undermines that MMO atmosphere where the player feels like he's part of one single unified universe.

 

Perhaps, if technology (and costs) allow it, SWTOR could be better if they just allowed de-instanced inter-planetary travel - this means no load screens from the point where you enter your ship till you disembark.

 

In fact, it would be best if they would allow us to use our ships to travel freely throughout space; we should get greater control over our ships - even more than what we can do in space missions - to the point where we can literally manually pilot it from any point in space to another.

[nytegaunt]

Meh, I'm going to enjoy what's left of my subscription then forget TOR.

 

Pre 1.2 - GPU's temp is 86 degrees on the "highest" settings indoor and ~92 degrees in confined areas.

Post 1.2 - 90 degrees on medium settings which I assume are equivalent now that they've added high res textures, and 92-104 degrees GPU and CPU in confined areas.

 

I can't even enjoy the game anymore on the same graphics settings without worrying it'll kill my comp. Not to mention the tripled loading times (enter area -> freeze/program has stopped responding -> Start loading to ~25% -> freeze -> continue loading to ~80% -> program has stopped responding? -> finish loading! -> black screen?).

 

Oh thank god it's not just me! Really since 1.2 my graphics card constantly sounds like a roaring tornado! Even when I turn down the graphics settings.

 

As for the loading screen discussion, I'm looking at the positive side - I've been using that time to get caught up on past issues of "The Economist".

 

On thing that kind of surprises me is that, with how litigious American society is, we haven't seen more about how this game's "minimum" requirements aren't enough to render the game playable.

[Hyde_v]

My last foray in to programming was BASIC on an Apple IIE. So I have no modern-day programming knowledge.

 

But I've been gaming for far longer. So I know my games. Certain game companies are known to me. And sometimes, when I hear who is making a game, even if I don't know the game, I know whether the game will be good or not. But I consider myself an impartial gamer and will call a spade a spade. In other words, I'm not a "fanboi."

 

Does ToR have load times here and there? Yes. Mostly between planets, to and from your ship, and to the fleet. While on a planet, I can go from zone to zone, from quest to quest, even on a speeder bike and do not have slowdowns or lag. Nice stuff.

 

Do load times bug me? Naw. Every game has them to some extent even if it is only done in the background. I'll complain about load times if they lock up and prevent me from playing the game. Does it take twenty seconds sometimes? I wouldn't know since I don't bother counting down the time that passes while the progress bar advances. I don't start worrying about that unless a good amount of time passes and the bar hasn't moved.

 

My computer is rather high end. I saved for while to upgrade my system with an AMD Athlon II X2 245 2.90 GHz video card.and four gig of RAM. I wanted my gaming to be high quality. At the time, that was pretty darn good. I'm sure there are more powerful items out there now. And in a few years when I upgrade again, I'll repeat the process and deck my system out again. But it does what I want it to right now. And that includes playing ToR, which it does quite well. Yes, I do have brief pauses sometimes in a Warzone. But pvp isn't really my thing in ToR yet. I find the story and quests more interesting right now. Perhaps as I get closer to level fifty.

 

How's ToR working for me? Just fine. Do I wish there was a better player selection method in the game so I could don't have to work around a companion to click on another player? Yes. Do I want to see a better method of finding a group to run a flashpoint? Yes. Am I unsubscribing because there is a loading screen when I go from Coruscant to the fleet? No. Heck, WoW has the occasional load time. It's gotten faster over the game's lifetime. I see ToR doing the same. I am not calling for the game's death after four or five months of it's launch. But that's just me.

[Hugey]

This isn't some big secret. Yes for some reason, SW:TOR uses a lot of resources, and works my AMD graphics card to 80C, as if I was playing Skyrim at max settings. But it doesn't have the quality graphics of Skyrim. In fact, Skyrim doesn't even push my graphics card that hard at max settings.

Crysis 2 max settings: no noise

SWTOR on high: as if I am vacuuming

:/

[otakuon]

Loading times in TOR are not a function of the client having it load resources from the server. Those resources are already present on your HDD. The reason it takes so long to load certain planets is because they are very large. This is why there is no loading screens once you are on the planet (unless you jump from one end to the other via QT or holocom). Even transitioning into an instanced section of the game (the green "doors") does not cause any loading. This is also why loading up your ship or the station goes much faster. Less assets to have to load from the HDD.

 

As for general graphical performance, it would seem that SWTOR is rather taxing on the GPU despite not having "high end" graphics. This could be due to the density of objects that are rendered on a screen at once... particularly other player models. Patch 1.2 proved that further optimization could improve TOR's overall performance, so perhaps there is still more tweaking to come.

[Drakkip]

I don't know any tech but I do know SWTOR uses loading screens way too often for my liking when travelling from 1 place to another.

 

I find that having to go through loading screens so often - especially if they take quite some time to load - takes away from that fundamental aspect of an MMO - a seamless, persistent world. It's really undermines that MMO atmosphere where the player feels like he's part of one single unified universe.

 

Perhaps, if technology (and costs) allow it, SWTOR could be better if they just allowed de-instanced inter-planetary travel - this means no load screens from the point where you enter your ship till you disembark.

 

In fact, it would be best if they would allow us to use our ships to travel freely throughout space; we should get greater control over our ships - even more than what we can do in space missions - to the point where we can literally manually pilot it from any point in space to another.

 

Yeah, it's a throwback to the late 90's. What I hate are the triple/quadruple/quintiple zoning you have to do. I want to go from the fleet to Ilum Zone to hanger, zone to ship, travel to ilum, zone to airlock, zone to orbital station, zone to planet. After having played so many games in the recent 5-10 years where zoning is minimal, this is something in SWTOR I would really like to see reduced.

[Lord_Ravenhurst]

It's such a shame how bad the current game engine is, considering how even top-of-the-line PCs aren't enough to make this game run well, due to the engine not using resources efficiently or not even using the full GPU a lot of the time.

 

What´s even worse is that all upcoming MMOs (here´s top 5 list http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsMxgdVT_JY) have far more detailed worlds and better graphics features.

There will be a lot to do for the TOR team to catch up and make this look like a 2012 title.

Edited April 26, 2012 by Lord_Ravenhurst

[geulsae]

Well written, but pointless. No one significant from BW is ever going to read this.

So if you wanted to just showoff that you know something about game dev, you win I guess.

 

ps. Average pc gamer already knows that this game is hardly optimized. Looks at all the whine about how their rig can run game X in 60fps but not swtor.

[chaosdefined]

Quick question, I'm not incredibly technically minded, but how do I check on my GPU temperature whilst running SWTOR?

I have checked the CPU usage and whilst not too high, I did notice that SWTOR opens two processes which take up a fair amount of physical memory, which is strange.

[Kthx]

On thing that kind of surprises me is that, with how litigious American society is, we haven't seen more about how this game's "minimum" requirements aren't enough to render the game playable.

 

That's because even U.S. courts don't reward self-entitlement.

 

Fact: The game is playable and it is playable on a broad range of computers.

[terminova]

~~

My load times were long to begin with, but seems like they've gotten significantly longer after a month or two of not playing. Little hiccups all over the place still suck too (mount/dismount, open character pane, etc).

 

Shall we add in the fact that if i close the game from the task manager, it closes immediately, but if i quit via in-game methods, it stops responding for like 2 minutes before it finally closes?

~~

 

Do you have virtual memory enabled? After I turned Virtual Memory off, the game quit instantly when I used the in-game method to quit the game. I'd read somewhere that SWTOR maintains a sizeable swap-file if virtual memory is used, and makes the game take longer to quit via in-game methods.

 

All I really know is that with virtual memory on, game shutdown takes forever and can freeze the client and without virtual memory on game shutdown is immediate and doesn't cause the client to freeze.

[Januaria]

read the title, read half of the first sentence , then decided ........

 

 

GO MAKE YOUR OWN *********** GAME BRO

 

I did not find your response to be particularly helpful to this discussion.

[Januaria]

Sorry but that is unplayable and i dont want my ATI card to melt through the Earth's crust to try and find its way back to China.

 

Now that just made me laugh out loud at work! Huzzah to you, sir.

[terminova]

Quick question, I'm not incredibly technically minded, but how do I check on my GPU temperature whilst running SWTOR?

 

I've been using MSI Afterburner to both monitor and adjust the fan speeds of my graphics cards. It's been good at keeping the temp around 62C when SWTOR is running down from 72-80C without. The program can display both GPU temp and fan speed in the task bar.

 

I have checked the CPU usage and whilst not too high, I did notice that SWTOR opens two processes which take up a fair amount of physical memory, which is strange.

 

It's not really strange, one is probably the launcher program and the other is the actual game client. This is probably to keep multiple clients from being opened on a single computer. The amount of memory being used should be normal considering how the game loads zones.

Edited April 26, 2012 by terminova

[Rotny]

But I love when the game freezes anytime another player comes near me. When I'm out on a planet it's like a warning that another player is near even though I don't have line of sight on him

LOL.

Actually it's not funny at all.

All these weekly DEV Q&As and I still haven't seen them address why the game freezes anytime you open a ui window, or another player comes near or a quest updates.

Also what the hell is with the game taking 60 seconds to close. You know I had gotten used to it "not responding" when I tried to exit out of SWTOR. Then I played the D3 open beta last weekend and when it closed in 1 second it struck me again how broke SWTOR is..

Edited April 26, 2012 by Rotny

[kurzis]

Justice bump.

 

great post op

[Matteis]

I agree 100% OP.

 

I unsubbed precisely because of the abundance of, and length of time load screens take. This is a lobbied multiplayer game at best - lack of seamless design makes for a sectioned off single player feel and kills the immersion into a convincing game world to sink one's time into. Yes my sig indicates I was in beta and you may ask, "Why did you buy the game if you didn't like the game design that far out?". Well, in a beta, everything is subject to change and I was praying to the tech-gods that the horrible loading times and abundance of black screens and elevators were just placeholders for some epic polished solution that would be released for the gold client. I asked plenty of times in the closed forums back then and had no official responses, of course. There were so many obstacles during travel that they just had to be placeholders, no AAA title would release calling themselves an MMO with all this red tape in between traveling!!!! Indeed internal builds are ahead of any beta, and I clung to this hope even in the final weeks of testing. I was let down of course with launch build. My morale was instantly shot.

 

Fun gameplay (post-ability delay fix), bad game world. I warned them on these forums about needing a seamless game design from the beginning when we knew nothing about the galaxy design. They did not heed the words! A few planets with massive designs would have been the best thing for this game, not dozens of places segregated by horrible, lengthy loading screens and cumbersome elevators and orbital stations.

 

This was a core design issue that from the very beginning set this title up for failure imo. It only helped sell copies of WoW as undecided gamers craved that large open feeling of adventure and exploration they want in an MMO.

Edited April 26, 2012 by Matteis

[Lokai]

Only ever takes me about 5 seconds to get past a loading screen. I have a 3year old GTX295 and spent some additional cash on getting some extra RAM (12GB worth DDR3). I use the RAMdisk software/method. GF uses a 560GTi and only has about 6GB RAM, takes her about 10-15 seconds tops. When you spend 30mins-1hr on most planets at a time, those seconds aren't so bad. Could be a little more annoying for constant WZ loading, but considering you'll have to wait 2mins to start for everyone to get in anyway, it's no big deal.

 

Nice go at pointing out the more technical aspects and the reasons for the performance hit, is much better than most do. I'm just not sure that those seconds mean that much in the grand scheme of things. Would rather other issues were fixed or more things added as time goes on.

 

you have a high preformance gaming PC most people do not, heck i consider my PC to be fairly top notch yet doesnt come close to what you listed.

 

12 gigs of ram? average is only 4 gigs most hard core gamers want 8 at best, your way over that.

 

6gigs of video ram? average player is rolling with 1 gig of video ram... some might go 2 or 3 but 6 seems excessive...

 

You use RAMdisk most i dont think are using this method...

 

anyway not going to go on i will leave it at...your a PC gamer with a PC gamers PC, with a high end top preformance system is 3 years old yet STILL far exceeding average players system and what most gaming PC players feel is needed... basically your sitting in a ferrari while most of people playing TOR are in a ford... simple as that.

[Seberus]

Thank you for posting this OP.

 

This provided some good insight into what is causing a lot of the "hitches" that occur within the game. I have noticed the problem get a bit worse after 1.2 - now I even get a short pause/hitch after looting a materail node for professions (scavenging, archeology, etc). They definitely need to do something.

 

Thanks for your clear and concise explanation, and your time. Hopefully they actually take this information and change their tech how you have suggested.

[Rowandiki]

Actualy the OP just sounds butt hurt he didnt get a job with EA lol

EA for a long time was\is one of the worst companies to work for in the gaming industry.

[mattgyver]

awesome OP. Hope they investigate your claim. I also hope you sent this message to them in other ways and not just in this post.

[Rowandiki]

I don't have the heating issues or load issues anyone else does the most trouble I have had are certain rooms or cave areas lag other then game runs fine to me nothing game breaking. I don't have an uber computer either then again no two computers runs things the same schooled computer people should know that.

 

Keep your comp fans clean or use something instead of a laptop.

Notice how many game designers there are that pop up on forums when new MMO's come out.

 

That's a great marketing slogan.

 

Want to stress test your Computer ? Play SW:TOR!!! Just don't play on a laptop!

 

Seriously, I could name a number of games I play on this laptop without issue or burning my hand. But I'll just name one for contrast. DCUO, this game is free to play and is far from perfect. Despite being FTP it gets a lot of things right (design wise) that SW:tor fails at. And it's graphics though slanted at a comic type feel are better then SW:tor when you add in it has a ton of effects going in raids. Yet my laptop is barely warm, it get's about as warm as it does if I surf the web for a few hours watching vids. Some other well known MMO's look and play great, while SW:tor chugs along. So it has nothing to do with my laptop or someone elses pc and everything to do with the code they wrote/use.

[Rowandiki]

Using this "logic", a cancer researcher should not be able to do his work if he hadn't had cancer, an airplane designer must be a pilot, and a lawyer must be a criminal.

 

You have to follow something to understand it. I understand the poster perfectly, your post demonstrates the opposite. If you knew anything about the industry past being a client recipient you'd understand.

[Sonikon]

Former game developer here. (No gigs with Lucas, BioWare, or the other companies associated with this... although I did contract for someone who did help with the marketing push lulz) I left the industry because too many non-gamers were entering it. Some thing about the dream of accruing abusive amounts of money from a single title seems to attract the parasites, the wolves, and the incompetent.

 

I like your game. I really do. The focus on the single-player aspect is amazing. The voice acting is from top notch talent (I personally know many of the voice actors in the game, actually) and it is delivered as well as it can be given the -extreme- amount of disconnected copy that had to be read. My kudos to your producers. I'm sure many, many long hours were spent on that aspect of the game alone.

 

Let's move on to the problem. Notice I said “problem” and not “problems”. You only suffer from one problem and all of these ailments stem from it.

 

The Client

 

I haven't researched your tech at all. I'm assuming you purchased licenses for the 3D engine and that the lead devs on the project had a solid streak of 3D game programming on their resumes.. but only a few of them them had any experience with the engine itself. This shouldn't come as a shock, as there are many, many 3D engines on the market and having one dev knowing them all would price that dev right out of the market entirely. The logic behind my guess is that if the entire dev team was deeply intimate with the engine, then they would have been able to successfully push back against the art and marketing department's insistence on using high poly count models everywhere.

 

Yes, the creativity of these departments are paramount because it's the pretty pixels us consumers froth over. However, if this factor is the foundation of developing a game (It often is the most frequent goto by artists, marketers, and MBAs alike) then it will become obvious in the final product. That being said, your leadership has long crossed over the “golden ratio” between pretty pixels and performance. It is obvious BioWare's entire objective regarding client development is to wage a holy crusade against GPUs everywhere and crush them. It's one thing to write Crysis. It's another to write something that blows up a GPU like Crysis and have absolutely none of the visual effects.

 

I'm sure the politics in your company, the silverback chest-thumping, and the e-peen flopfests all take turns stifling any attempt to rebalance this pixel-vs-performance ratio. (SSDD) When the flaws of your product are broadcasted to the world that the devs are not included in any actual decision making regarding priority or direction, it's time to fire your CTO for being spineless and probably all of his reports.

 

The Servers

 

Your networking infrastructure, however, is not as easily purchasable as an out-of-the-box 3D engine that you just drop in and start hacking away at. It is woefully taxed. I have nothing but pity on your back-end and IT department for one reason: your asset loading strategy is completely untenable in relation to your resource demand.

 

These loading screens between “zones” (See: MQ channels/rooms/subscriptions) are reminiscent to installing an operating system from a pack of floppy drives. You do know that when broadcasting client data to other clients, that shouldn't issue a blocking resource pull from the HD -every- -single- -time-, right?

 

Right?

 

I mean, I like the little pause when on a PvP server because it lets me know that I'm about to be ganked. But I know why that pause is happening. And I know that when you tested it on your local machines that were well-tuned for this sort of testing, and on staging server setups that didn't have even 1% of the load of a live environment, this issue never cropped up.

 

It happens to everyone.

 

Don't fire off blocking calls as a response to time-sensitive events that are pushed down from the server. Your client will fall apart because those events are random. Have a default placeholder asset primed in memory and ready to instantiate until the rest of the local resources (model, textures, etc) are pulled asynchronously.. Spinning plates, man. Spinning plates.

 

This blocking call is only part of the problem. I am almost positive the vast majority of these load screens are caused by the servers trying to poll live information regarding other connections... and that you've made this a blocking call as well. Network I/O is, literally, the most expensive time operation you could perform and you've made a mass polling operation a blocking call. Going from a planet to a warzone to planet is an experience similar to participating in hurdling... except each hurdle is a two hundred foot tall stone wall. This is because you've relied on blocking calls and no one caught it.

 

And no one's going to fix it. It's very easy to undo and yet... it will never be fixed. Why...?

 

...and back to your organizational problems we go.

 

Somewhere, an investor is having ******s (I can say "******s", right? American's aren't still squeamish about that word, are they? Does that put me on a terrorist list or something?) about the revenue and ROI. Yay, capitalism! All is well... except your growth is in jeopardy and both you and I know it. Anyone watching this pure marketing-driven priority of pushing out pointless doodads and trinkets instead of solving fundamental performance problems can spot it a mile away. You have too many non-devs leading the effort.

 

You will not survive your own success because your leadership will not take the ten minutes required to have someone explain to them that people won't play a game where 30% of the time is spent at loading screens due to a failure to prioritize and solve an extremely common problem in an industry-standard fashion. What they will listen to is some non-tech failed actress say that little cute tauntauns will solve these problems. B*tches love little cute tauntauns. (The * is for 'o')

 

Say it with me, BioWare:

 

YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.

YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.

YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.

YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.

YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.

YOU DO NOT HAVE A CONTENT PROBLEM. YOU HAVE A PERFORMANCE PROBLEM.

 

Say that in your next stand-up, loud and proud. E-mail it every fifteen minutes to the CEO. You can fix these problems. It's solvable. You just have to spill some blood and not be afraid of it.

 

 

 

BRAVO!!! Take a bow sir.

[Radox]

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