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

[terminova]

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 read that somewhere once. I don't remember where.

[discosoc]

On an SSD there is something really wrong with that. Should take 2-5 seconds to load into the game world, not 15.

 

It is? then how come it looks dated, has horrible draw distance on foliage, and uses low res textures everywhere?

 

I can play BF3 on high/ultra, the Witcher 2 on high/ultra, etc, etc, but get 20fps on the fleet in TOR?

And don't use the old MMO excuse either. I get 60+fps in WoW, Org /SW with 50+ players around on max settings @1080p. So the low fps is not attributed to other players near me.

Wake up man.

 

I re subbed, and have fun playing TOR, but fan boy I am not, and am very aware of it's serious flaws.

 

I just want to chime in and say that the polygon counts on WoW models are insanely low, which is a big reason why that game does so well with performance. It wasn't always like that, though, with older computers. Lagrimmar and Ironlag where common names for some cities known for serious, well, lag.

 

SWTOR has some issues, that's for sure, but I've been impressed so far with how Bioware has prioritized the updates.

[GlowstickSwinger]

It wasn't always like that, though, with older computers. Lagrimmar and Ironlag where common names for some cities known for serious, well, lag.

 

I recall that, as well, and that problem was fixed by moving to a dynamic asset loading strategy. When applied here, it will fix a myriad of problems. Getting 10 packets every second per player is the fastest way to obliterate your servers and your clients... which explains the Ilum fiasco.

[Sammm]

From what I understand about networking, your logic and explanations (I also read your 2nd technology post) seem right but it's the way you say it that bothers me. Maybe it's just me but it sounds "rude" and "condescending".

[Gungan]

Hell yes.

 

I don't understand how SWTOR can push my GPU to 70C with an absurd amount of load screens, and most stuff hidden behind instances.

 

Can you please explain why the hell SWTOR throws up a load screen when I launch my TV tuner or my email while I'm standing in the fleet doing nothing?

 

Playing TERA with it's beautiful Unreal 3 engine is like waking up from a nightmare, and it never taxes my GPU past 60C, and there isn't a single load screen unless you teleport.

Edited April 28, 2012 by Gungan

[Gungan]

I just want to chime in and say that the polygon counts on WoW models are insanely low, which is a big reason why that game does so well with performance. It wasn't always like that, though, with older computers. Lagrimmar and Ironlag where common names for some cities known for serious, well, lag.

 

SWTOR has some issues, that's for sure, but I've been impressed so far with how Bioware has prioritized the updates.

 

I have never ever in 6 years of WoW heard anyone call them Lagrimmar or Ironlag, or even Stormlag.

[GlowstickSwinger]

From what I understand about networking, your logic and explanations (I also read your 2nd technology post) seem right but it's the way you say it that bothers me. Maybe it's just me but it sounds "rude" and "condescending".

 

Star Wars is like Fischer Price's "My First Intellectual Property". You could hire chimpanzees who have spent 70% of their lives in a coma and the property would market itself no problem.

 

You would actually have to work overtime to screw that up. (by not fixing your technical debt)

 

I don't apologize for having utter contempt for MBAs who can't even get to second base on this gently lobbed softball and I'm pretty sure their bosses agree.

Edited April 28, 2012 by GlowstickSwinger

[smilefunk]

man, i feel for all of you with severe lag issues...

hard to enjoy the game that way.

 

[lightSaberAddiCt]

Well, maybe in the eyes of computer geeks that like to examine the most minute intricacies of the equipment and software they are using like a bunch of gear heads standing around a 1968 Road Runner marveling at the chrome valve covers for hours on end, but I'm guessing that those of us that log on, play the game, and log off could care less what engine they are using.

 

I'm on a five year old machine. I leveled with no problems, I'm leading our raids with no problems, my loading times are insignificant. The game is fun. I could care less what's under the hood. lol

 

Well put, it seems that this is a forum topic for all the trolls to gather. I have a decent machine, nothing fantastic and I have had none of these problems. The initial loading screen may take around a minute in a half, but that is it. I have been in 12-18 man raids, no issue. Funny how in the gaming forums everyone is an expert.

 

Yes there is some annoying bugs that bother me, but what MMO doesn't. If the OP was such a well known designer, he would be working at BW, and not trying to tear it down. The one thing that is always true, it is way harder to create, then destroy.

 

So flame me if you want, I don't intend on visiting this pointless thread again.

[Anti_Bodies]

Color code the OP so its easier to naviagate

Put stuff in spoilers to reduce massive size

Compare to a more modern MMO that has been released. Comparing anything to a game years and years ago isn't fair.

[GlowstickSwinger]

Color code the OP so its easier to naviagate

Put stuff in spoilers to reduce massive size

Compare to a more modern MMO that has been released. Comparing anything to a game years and years ago isn't fair.

 

Good ideas all around.

 

To be fair, WoW had these exact same problems regarding asset strategy as well. They solved it by going totally async.

[Strangefate]

I just want to chime in and say that the polygon counts on WoW models are insanely low, which is a big reason why that game does so well with performance. It wasn't always like that, though, with older computers. Lagrimmar and Ironlag where common names for some cities known for serious, well, lag.

 

SWTOR has some issues, that's for sure, but I've been impressed so far with how Bioware has prioritized the updates.

 

I'm a lead artist in the games industry and been in it for over 10 years and the polygon counts on SWTOR never struck me as an issue.

Visible zones are pretty small in this game and for today's standards still pretty low poly. Their planets (other than Tatooine which is empty desert anyway) are all compartmentalized nicely, cut into small, manageable zones that block view into sorrounding areas.

Given the simplicity of the environment, the reuse of rather lowres textures etc, no game with THIS art in it should ever run under 50-60 fps on a average machine.

 

I would never bother ripping off the content to look at the actual wireframes and material usage, but unless they're assigning 10 materials per asset, this game should run like a ferrari.

 

I know that at some point their particle effects were incredibly unoptimized, because I could stand under some steam vent that sporadically released steam and have my FPS go from around 60+ to 5 just from the particle.

This has since been fixed but it really raises the question, how competent are they at fine tuning and what else is out there...

 

It is usually the small interior areas (boxes and connecting rectangles!) than run the worse for me.

Normally these would run the fastest as you can put each box in its own zone if needed and not draw the rest until you go around the corner, yet, exteriors run so much better.

I haven't bothered trying to track this down as I just don't care enough anyway, could be more particles, could be real time lights that are always being drawn even while out of sight, could be that the engine doesn't know to not draw things not in sight in general...

 

Something, beyond their network programming, is definitely wrong with their engine, or perhaps it all works and it is simply just that bad.

 

Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with having more polygons than WoW.

 

Edit: Also, after all the years in the industry I know how hard it is to find actually competent and proactive people that can take care of issues without somebody prodding them with a stick every week and asking why why why....

The larger the studio the more it becomes an art farm, where nobody actually seems to really know anything beyond hoe to get their assets into the game.

If your leads can't educate or identify and resolve possible issues then nothing will get done. Rarely will someone make them own their incompetence and kick their butts.

Edited April 28, 2012 by Strangefate

[Deewe]

I'm a lead artist in the games industry and been in it for over 10 years and the polygon counts on SWTOR never struck me as an issue.

Visible zones are pretty small in this game and for today's standards still pretty low poly. Their planets (other than Tatooine which is empty desert anyway) are all compartmentalized nicely, cut into small, manageable zones that block view into sorrounding areas.

Given the simplicity of the environment, the reuse of rather lowres textures etc, no game with THIS art in it should ever run under 50-60 fps on a average machine.

 

I would never bother ripping off the content to look at the actual wireframes and material usage, but unless they're assigning 10 materials per asset, this game should run like a ferrari.

 

I know that at some point their particle effects were incredibly unoptimized, because I could stand under some steam vent that sporadically released steam and have my FPS go from around 60+ to 5 just from the particle.

This has since been fixed but it really raises the question, how competent are they at fine tuning and what else is out there...

 

It is usually the small interior areas (boxes and connecting rectangles!) than run the worse for me.

Normally these would run the fastest as you can put each box in its own zone if needed and not draw the rest until you go around the corner, yet, exteriors run so much better.

I haven't bothered trying to track this down as I just don't care enough anyway, could be more particles, could be real time lights that are always being drawn even while out of sight, could be that the engine doesn't know to not draw things not in sight in general...

 

Something, beyond their network programming, is definitely wrong with their engine, or perhaps it all works and it is simply just that bad.

 

Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with having more polygons than WoW.

 

Edit: Also, after all the years in the industry I know how hard it is to find actually competent and proactive people that can take care of issues without somebody prodding them with a stick every week and asking why why why....

The larger the studio the more it becomes an art farm, where nobody actually seems to really know anything beyond hoe to get their assets into the game.

If your leads can't educate or identify and resolve possible issues then nothing will get done. Rarely will someone make them own their incompetence and kick their butts.

Well Strangefate to be honest we both know more poly == slower rendering

 

Although you are right TOR should run much faster than it is now. What really puzzled me was how the UI would make my frame rate drop from 100+ to 5 opening multiple windows fast. And that explains why we don't have chat bubbles yet. It seems they improved that lately though.

 

I noticed the characters have indeed more poly but the world meshes are very rough. I did not look at the world textures but I would be surprised if they where that bigger than Wow ones. And the draw distance is also quite low, even for an MMO.

 

What's even more surprising is how the shadows hurts the frame rate when we see the really poor result.

 

Now what I was impressed with is the database access when looting items. I don't know if it's preemptive processing or not but the loot is generated faster than in others MMO. The funny thing is you can actually loot an item even before its loot aura is rendered.

 

However contrary to other games it does not looks like the client is pre-loading contiguous zones that much so we are hammered with loading screens.

 

Finally, maybe it's just me but I noticed a frame rate increase in 1.2 but when there are many assets loaded the game will only display the gear high textures when we are like1 feet from a character.

[GlowstickSwinger]

Edit: Also, after all the years in the industry I know how hard it is to find actually competent and proactive people that can take care of issues without somebody prodding them with a stick every week and asking why why why....

The larger the studio the more it becomes an art farm, where nobody actually seems to really know anything beyond hoe to get their assets into the game.

If your leads can't educate or identify and resolve possible issues then nothing will get done. Rarely will someone make them own their incompetence and kick their butts.

 

+1 Strangefate

[strictnine]

As much as I admire the effort the OP put into their post, and clearly they seem quite passionate, I think they show very little appreciation for the realities of game development. I've worked in the industry for over ten years myself, it is a rare situation where developers either have the time or the resources to really shine technically at all levels. I've worked for some of the best companies in the industry, and I've seen plenty of awful code and I've even written some myself.

 

Having a good technical strategy comes down to experience, and you only get experience by researching and solving problems. While some solutions may meet the requirements of a project, they are by no means the best solutions, and any good developer will tell you how many times they wish they could go back and rewrite systems. But game developers, who work hard enough with often demanding schedules, don't always have the luxury of unwinding their mistakes. Sooner or later the game has to ship.

 

I don't know anyone who worked on this game personally, so I can't vouch for their technical prowess. But I can say that it is easy to criticize technology and offer solutions based on anecdotal analyses, and quite another to be knee deep in the project, facing the realities of a huge project with lots of dependencies and technical hurdles, as well as team politics, which I could seriously write a book about.

 

Anyway, good luck to the OP. And good luck BW. I'm enjoying the game.

Edited April 28, 2012 by strictnine

[Ricktur]

As much as I admire the effort the OP put into their post, and clearly they seem quite passionate, I think they show very little appreciation for the realities of game development. I've worked in the industry for over ten years myself, it is a rare situation where developers either have the time or the resources to really shine technically at all levels. I've worked for some of the best companies in the industry, and I've seen plenty of awful code and I've even written some myself.

 

Having a good technical strategy comes down to experience, and you only get experience by researching and solving problems. While some solutions may meet the requirements of a project, they are by no means the best solutions, and any good developer will tell you how many times they wish they could go back and rewrite systems. But game developers, who work hard enough with often demanding schedules, don't always have the luxury of unwinding their mistakes. Sooner or later the game has to ship.

 

I don't know anyone who worked on this game personally, so I can't vouch for their technical prowess. But I can say that it is easy to criticize technology and offer solutions based on anecdotal analyses, and quite another to be knee deep in the project, facing the realities of a huge project with lots of dependencies and technical hurdles, as well as team politics, which I could seriously write a book about.

 

Anyway, good luck to the OP. And good luck BW. I'm enjoying the game.

 

what do you consider "the best companies in the industry"? im truly curious

[ironix]

Now with numbers!

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=4176540#post4176540

 

Holy crap, I just tested this myself. Absolutely insane...

 

The physics engine in the SW:TOR client appears to be authoritative regarding movement. This means that if I jump, the client broadcasts data every single video frame until I land on the ground again.

 

Running tcpdump on my firewall box for all traffic on SW:TOR related ports. I did that simple test of jumping and watched the packet dump suddenly spew forth at more than twice the rate it normally does until I hit the ground.

[Dirtysmellyhippy]

Bump for truth

[dprijadi]

BW please hire this guy, he knows what he is talking about.

 

no he doesnt know anything at all, he just blabbing nonsense. his blabber filled with tech jargon that will make layman think he know something grand, but to a real programmer his talk is just that .. a clueless person pretending to know everything..

 

Game development is a massive team effort with lots of different speciality. Not many Game Developer make their own engine for their game, most just license an existing engine to save development time , save money and save headache of troubleshooting both engine and content. Bioware uses customized HEROENGINE as their core engine and if there are performance issues then it can be traced back to this engine.

 

http://www.heroengine.com/

[ironix]

no he doesnt know anything at all, he just blabbing nonsense. his blabber filled with tech jargon that will make layman think he know something grand, but to a real programmer his talk is just that .. a clueless person pretending to know everything..

 

Are you a developer? Cause I am, albeit not a games developer, and what he says does explain a lot of things.

 

Incidentally, I did do test of one of his assertions (the physics engine being responsible for sending out player location data) via tcpdump and jumping and it does appear that this is indeed the case.

[dprijadi]

Are you a developer? Cause I am, albeit not a games developer, and what he says does explain a lot of things.

 

Incidentally, I did do test of one of his assertions (the physics engine being responsible for sending out player location data) via tcpdump and jumping and it does appear that this is indeed the case.

 

i am game developer , part of a team of developer and on my private time i program games for mobile devices with my friend as personal venture.

[dprijadi]

Incidentally, I did do test of one of his assertions (the physics engine being responsible for sending out player location data) via tcpdump and jumping and it does appear that this is indeed the case.

 

the question should be directed to HeroEngine guys since they are the one making the low level parts of the engine, not bioware as the user.

 

in my line of work , i never modify the core SDK or any low level Engine parts (if its even modifiable by licensee) because to modify SDK / Low Level parts means upgrade nightmare when your custom low level codes get mixed up with the new Engine update..

[ironix]

the question should be directed to HeroEngine guys since they are the one making the low level parts of the engine, not bioware as the user.

 

in my line of work , i never modify the core SDK or any low level Engine parts (if its even modifiable by licensee) because to modify SDK / Low Level parts means upgrade nightmare when your custom low level codes get mixed up with the new Engine update..

 

Actually, the question should not be directed to the HeroEngine guys. Bioware bought an unfinished version of the HeroEngine with swaths of undocumented code. Bioware would have subsequently heavily modified the engine to suit their needs. What the HeroEngine is today is NOT what Bioware bought.

 

From: http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/

 

“It’s not productized yet,” we told Gordon. “There are whole sections of code that is only roughed in and not optimized for performance or security. And there are very few comments and very little documentation.”

 

He didn’t care. “We are going to have tons of engineers. We can finish it ourselves. We’re going to want to modify your source code for our special project anyway.”

Edited April 28, 2012 by ironix

[dprijadi]

as for my experience in playing SWTOR, im using 3 different computers (all at different locations) and never encounter performance problem. My computer are not high tech or massively overpowered gears, its a mix and match of last year spec and even older specs.. here the list :

 

- Macbook Pro 17" 2010 with Core i5 and 4GB RAM, running W7 Enterprise x64 using BootCamp, GPU Nvidia 230

- Macbook Air 11" 2011 with Core i5 and 4GB RAM (128GB SSD), running W7 Enterprise x64 using BootCamp, GPU Intel HD3000

- PC with Phenom X3-720 and 4GB RAM , running W7 Ultimate X64 , GPU ATI Radeon 6790

 

Note that Macbook Air 11" uses a low power low performance Core i5 with clock speed below 2ghz. The GPU is Intel HD3000 and yet i ran SWTOR full quality (except Shadow=low and Anisotropy=low) at 1366x768 resolution. Every computer on that list is old especially the PC. The Macbooks are development machines set to dualboot OSX Lion and Windows , the PC are just for gaming.

 

All 3 computer also used to play World of Warcraft, EVE Online and other BIoware Products (Mass Effect series, Dragon Age Series, Witcher Series) successfully (using External Harddisk for macbook air to save the small onboard SSD space)

[GlowstickSwinger]

the question should be directed to HeroEngine guys since they are the one making the low level parts of the engine, not bioware as the user.

 

in my line of work , i never modify the core SDK or any low level Engine parts (if its even modifiable by licensee) because to modify SDK / Low Level parts means upgrade nightmare when your custom low level codes get mixed up with the new Engine update..

 

You're wrong. Completely. Totally. Someone learned iOS and... what, you're writing real-time apps via push notifications?

 

Network I/O strategy is not a 'low level' engine component that you just swap out with a new, shiny, speedier solutoin. It is an all-inclusive business-wide effort, from the design decisions, to asset creation, to the IT (and any CDN in this case if it's even there) capabilities, to the deployment scripts, to the the coder discipline to operate within the set limitations. It's not just something you download and plug-in.

 

Having an event broadcast, per frame mind you, coords to the server using the physics engine authoritatively through TCP is overkill for a non-FPS. It's what a dev team with a strong FPS history would do.

 

Complete tomfoolery to think that network i/o is the job of the engine team only.

Edited April 28, 2012 by GlowstickSwinger