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

[Slugamaniac]

Spot on OP, thank you for posting. I hoped that 1.2 would have helped my FPS's but sadly it seems to have gotten worse. Fleet is stuttering worse than ever and my performance in my guild 16 man raids is so poor it makes me want to physicaly kick my PC and smash it to pieces with a sledge hammer. I am starting to feel like a liability in these situations since we are attempting to run Denova on a regular basis.

 

Note; this is with every graphic detail turned to low with NO NOTICABLE PERFOMANCE INCREASE!!!!

 

I want to upgrade my PC to try and fix this but after seeing so many people with jacked rigs still having this problem I'm starting to wonder if I should even bother?

[Metalmac]

90% of all problems that destroy a industry or business are management wrong choices.

Normally most bad management results are from management not knowing anything about how to write code in software.

They are ignorant of how to write code so they assume it can be done and quickly.

This is the reason for so much bad code being on the market today, management just sucks at knowing software.

[FooBard]

I stopped reading there.

Too bad...

 

Great job OP. I read your entire post. I'm a commercial developer myself, and here's how it works from my perspective.

 

CEOs do not listen to tech, they listen to CFOs.

CFOs do not listen to tech, they listen to VPs

VPs "might" listen to tech, but mostly managers - with MBAs.

MBAs run the tech departments and report to the VPs with info they barely understand...

 

So yea... The CEO doesn't know the game is broken, he only know if it is making money, or not making money... and is only insterested in "Forecast figures" of how much money it will make down the road.

 

Gone are the id software days of "it will be done, when it's done".

Edited April 24, 2012 by FooBard

[Zellata]

Oooooo... Did I pinch a nerve? Sounds like it because it's true. You people really are not game designers. Again not defending BioWare. I can just say I am a 36 year old doctor that makes $175k a year on here. People believe me? They shouldn't just like how I don't believe you and the other people in this thread.

 

If you were to show some medical knowledge, people probably would believe you - why not? That aside, it doesn't really matter what your personal beliefs are. What matters is whether BW is going to listen to a professional advice (a very good advice by the way) or not.

[Obie_Wan]

Oooooo... Did I pinch a nerve? Sounds like it because it's true. You people really are not game designers. Again not defending BioWare. I can just say I am a 36 year old doctor that makes $175k a year on here. People believe me? They shouldn't just like how I don't believe you and the other people in this thread.

 

I'm pretty someone pinched your nerves pretty darn hard there when you decided to make your posts in this thread. O_o

[Spankyjnco]

Bump for great justice.

[Cran]

I have to agree: Loading times are too long. I play on a laptop, and not a super-duper good one at that, so of course, my loading time will be longer. But it is getting longer and longer over time, especially after 1.2.

 

Now, I am at a point where I think twice: Shall I really pop over to Hoth and see if Gargath is there? I'd really LIKE that schematic, but those loading times... doing a warzone while questing on Belsavis? I'd love too, but it will take sooooooo long to load, so, no thank you.

 

And I wonder why - the graphics are quite static, the world is not evolving, there are no seasons, no growing plants, no animals hatching from eggs, no changing weather... (I told someone I played SWTOR, his reply? "Oh, isn't that the game with the empty servers and static planets?")

Judging from this thread, this is not only a problem of people like me whose equip is sub-standard, but a problem many people have, limiting their game experience.

 

A MMORPG will, in my opinion, have great difficulty keeping enough customers if it requires high-end PCs to play enjoyably.

Edited April 24, 2012 by Cran
Hideous typos

[Felioats]

Bioware says they have a team dedicated to optimizing performance. One has to wonder why they aren't doing this.

 

Also, props to OP for actually knowing what he's talking about. Most people who post saying they are "in the industry" are full of hot air.

Edited April 24, 2012 by Felioats

[Grammarye]

Interesting... however...

 

There's a lot of statements in the OP, but very little in the way of constructive developer-oriented content. I'm not flaming - simply stating that to me, I parse down the content of the post and read a few simple valid sentences, and the rest is hyberbole. Consider it critical writing feedback

 

Essentially, there are two problems. First, on some machines TOR runs poorly yet kicks the crap out of the graphics card. Secondly, on at least quite a few machines/connections, TOR has a tendency to be hiccupy, laggy, and other vague over-used terms.

 

Sure. None of that is really in doubt. The people having problems over in Customer Support are hardly making it up. It didn't need an entire page of text to say it. None of that is enormously surprising. I've yet to be in a major MMO that didn't have a line of people saying 'it runs terrible on my PC'; it's pretty much par for the course when you release a PC-based 3D application. How you handle that after launch is the test.

 

After that, the OP gets entirely speculative, and thus of limited value (it even says 'I haven't researched your tech at all.'). Sure, blocking calls are a thing to avoid when handling networked clients, but any developer worth their salt knows that there is always a tradeoff between non-blocking/responsiveness and actual client results. Asynchronous calls are completely useless if your main thread can't do anything productive until those calls complete. At best, you're faking a responsive UI that has to play catch-up later. You might paper over the problem so people don't see it that way, but that doesn't address the underlying problem. Rule 1 in developer circles is that you understand the problem before trying to optimise it.

 

We, as end client observers, have no real clue as to what blocking call the client ends up waiting over in some cases. You can allege it's all sorts of things, but it's unfounded speculation without in-depth research and possibly source access. Good remote clients are complex beasts, tough to test in what approaches reality, and tossing out multi-threading 101 statements doesn't impress this parallel developer.

 

The rest of the OP about management culture is pretty much standard big business, so I am forced to ask the following:

 

If you truly believe all this (and it does sound very familiar I grant you), rather than merely being jaded & bitter as your second sentence heavily implies, then how come other equivalently run companies aren't all having the same problem? I've yet to be in any big company where this doesn't happen. In my experience, the 'one root problem' is a simple early decision made that is usually almost impossible to undo at a later stage. I absolutely disagree that any of the issues you highlight are 'simple to undo'. Most developers are not fools, and if there were a quick easy fix, we'd have seen it.

 

In short, to me, as an experienced developer in an equivalent large scale company, the entire post could have read 'the sky is blue, and thus Bioware are doomed' - and that to me does not compute. Much as half the thread loves to just jump on the bashing bandwagon, applying a little thought suggests that this ought to be a problem everywhere (as exemplified by your own implied experiences)... Clearly it is not.

 

Also, developers are almost never the right people to lead anything, unless they are that rare breed of developer that actually have leadership skills. It is not a coincidence that team lead & architect positions are tough to fill.

 

As an aside, the theme of the post is that Bioware needs management help, yet the title claims the technology is the problem. This makes the post look contradictory.

Also, props to OP for actually knowing what he's talking about. Most people who post saying they are "in the industry" are full of hot air.

Nothing personal, but this sort of statement really pisses me off. 'Knowing what you're talking about' does not translate to 'saying what I believe and agree with already with no background knowledge'. Biased much? Good developers know when they're speculating vs when they are backed up by facts.

Edited April 24, 2012 by Grammarye

[demonolithic]

Glad to see this is still on page one. I would also apologize for the idiots that have side tracked this thread but seeing them bump the thread with their useless gibberish between themselves almost makes them useful at something.

 

Kudos to the OP and to those that understand what was being posted. Bioware would do well to take the OP seriously.

[Grammarye]

+1 to the OP. I have a fairly decent mid to mid-upper range comp I bought just before this game hit. 64-bit, core i7, moderately-rated vid card, etc etc. I can play Skyrim somewhere between High and Ultra-high with a sustained 30+ fps. I keep this game on medium settings, with a few special effects cut off or way down.

 

- Some of the planets in this game give me several minutes of loading times.

- When I "Quit Game" from the ESC menu, my computer locks up for several minutes.

- If there are more than 10+ people in the area I'm loading into, my screen is black except for the GUI for a good minute or three.

- There are occasional momentary freezes during combat that seem to occur more frequently since 1.2.

And I have none of that, and a mid-to-high range PC. The issue isn't that there are problems. Of course there are. The issue is this blind bashing that just says 'it's crap for me, it must be a poor codebase'. That is why I tend to get a bit upset when even developers (who should know better) make these statements. To the OP's credit, he is at least pointing the finger of blame at managerial decisions rather than simply alleging that the developers at Bioware are not very good.

 

I remember one example where a big client reported to us they were having all sorts of problems. We couldn't repro any of them. Eventually, after talking with them for a while, we discovered their problem machines had a combination of a given graphics card and OS. We tried that specific combination out - and lo & behold we wanted to murder ATI for not optimising a given function call that worked beautifully on every other card & driver. PCs are complex systems, and code is not a magical panacea that somehow you can design perfectly and it'll run like a dream everywhere. Only developers fresh out of university think that. The moment your code hits reality is when you discover all the cases you hadn't considered, and find that in some cases, the platform on which you rely is just plain rubbish in some circumstances, and you have to work around that.

 

Absolutely, Bioware have stuff to fix. Wildcard statements don't really help that. What does help is lots of error & bug reports.

Edited April 24, 2012 by Grammarye

[Bigbozo]

Bioware says they have a team dedicated to optimizing performance. One has to wonder why they aren't doing this.

 

Also, props to OP for actually knowing what he's talking about. Most people who post saying they are "in the industry" are full of hot air.

 

When I first got SWTOR, playing on a high end custom gaming rig, my GPU's fans would kick into overdrive at some of the strangist times. Now, I hardly can tell they are ever runing. So there has been some improvement.

 

I do still have realy long load screens. And I do understand that people that don't have money to burn on tech that will be obsolete in a few months still have the overheating problem. So I will agree with the OP, the game does still need much work in the performance area.

[vandana_]

Interesting... however...

 

There's a lot of statements in the OP, but very little in the way of constructive developer-oriented content. I'm not flaming - simply stating that to me, I parse down the content of the post and read a few simple valid sentences, and the rest is hyberbole. Consider it critical writing feedback

 

Essentially, there are two problems. First, on some machines TOR runs poorly yet kicks the crap out of the graphics card. Secondly, on at least quite a few machines/connections, TOR has a tendency to be hiccupy, laggy, and other vague over-used terms.

 

Sure. None of that is really in doubt. The people having problems over in Customer Support are hardly making it up. It didn't need an entire page of text to say it. None of that is enormously surprising. I've yet to be in a major MMO that didn't have a line of people saying 'it runs terrible on my PC'; it's pretty much par for the course when you release a PC-based 3D application. How you handle that after launch is the test.

 

After that, the OP gets entirely speculative, and thus of limited value (it even says 'I haven't researched your tech at all.'). Sure, blocking calls are a thing to avoid when handling networked clients, but any developer worth their salt knows that there is always a tradeoff between non-blocking/responsiveness and actual client results. Asynchronous calls are completely useless if your main thread can't do anything productive until those calls complete. At best, you're faking a responsive UI that has to play catch-up later. You might paper over the problem so people don't see it that way, but that doesn't address the underlying problem. Rule 1 in developer circles is that you understand the problem before trying to optimise it.

 

We, as end client observers, have no real clue as to what blocking call the client ends up waiting over in some cases. You can allege it's all sorts of things, but it's unfounded speculation without in-depth research and possibly source access. Good remote clients are complex beasts, tough to test in what approaches reality, and tossing out multi-threading 101 statements doesn't impress this parallel developer.

 

The rest of the OP about management culture is pretty much standard big business, so I am forced to ask the following:

 

If you truly believe all this (and it does sound very familiar I grant you), rather than merely being jaded & bitter as your second sentence heavily implies, then how come other equivalently run companies aren't all having the same problem? I've yet to be in any big company where this doesn't happen. In my experience, the 'one root problem' is a simple early decision made that is usually almost impossible to undo at a later stage. I absolutely disagree that any of the issues you highlight are 'simple to undo'. Most developers are not fools, and if there were a quick easy fix, we'd have seen it.

 

In short, to me, as an experienced developer in an equivalent large scale company, the entire post could have read 'the sky is blue, and thus Bioware are doomed' - and that to me does not compute. Much as half the thread loves to just jump on the bashing bandwagon, applying a little thought suggests that this ought to be a problem everywhere (as exemplified by your own implied experiences)... Clearly it is not.

 

Also, developers are almost never the right people to lead anything, unless they are that rare breed of developer that actually have leadership skills. It is not a coincidence that team lead & architect positions are tough to fill.

 

As an aside, the theme of the post is that Bioware needs management help, yet the title claims the technology is the problem. This makes the post look contradictory.

 

Nothing personal, but this sort of statement really pisses me off. 'Knowing what you're talking about' does not translate to 'saying what I believe and agree with already with no background knowledge'. Biased much? Good developers know when they're speculating vs when they are backed up by facts.

 

Well the OP may not be using the best possible language and have the best possible attitude. He may not have researched the subject enough to offer any solutions or maybe he doesn't care to offer any solutions because he is just bitter or thinks its not his job because there are other people who actually get paid for it....

 

But that doesn't change the fact that he is 100% right.

Edited April 24, 2012 by vandana_

[vandana_]

Absolutely, Bioware have stuff to fix. Wildcard statements don't really help that. What does help is lots of error & bug reports.

 

I doubt that. And having seen how poor is the game engine I believe bashing statements are quite fair.

[playfirst]

Game runs fine. I load in under 15 seconds in most planets at 2560 x 1440 resolution. GTX 580s plus I7 2500k overclocked FTW. If you're complaining about high load times then its time to update your computer. I heard these same complaints for Age of Conan when it came out and i'm sick of the ignorance of former WOW mmo players.

 

SWTOR is a modern MMO, get a modern computer. Idiots complaining are clearly not real computer gamers and are just coming over after playing WoW and going damn this game loads so slow compared to WoW. Get a clue guys, WoW is an 8 year old game that looked outdated when it launch, EQ2 came out at the same time and was 10x better graphic wise. Real computer gamers who play other high end games like The Witcher 2 and Battlefield 3 understand this. Time to upgrade your computer guys.

[Arkerus]

I am confident that the engine issues will be worked out as the game matures. Bioware (even though they messed up ME3) has some of the industry best. I am willing to wait (a bit) while they work it out.

[Kubernetic]

I've often wondered why, when loading onto a new planet, I usually have time to get up, make a sandwich, and watch a season of Breaking Bad.

 

"I am not on the planet, Skyler. I am at the loading screen. A guy opens his ship door and gets out and you think that of me? No.”

 

"I AM THE ONE WHO WAITS!"

Edited April 24, 2012 by Kubernetic

[Lord_Ravenhurst]

Bioware says they have a team dedicated to optimizing performance. One has to wonder why they aren't doing this.

 

I sense a great performance increase in 1.3....

[Asuka]

I stopped reading there.

 

Same here. Armchair game development without knowing anything about the tech being used is just fail, well armchair game developement in general is fail too.

[lokivoid]

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.

 

Well, the problem is two fold. It misuses Video memory combined with vary poor coding. In reality the primary cause for the high memory usage is the way the game handles cache (it does not clear it, with cached information is no longer in use).

 

So what ends up happening is memory usage becomes exponential the longer the process runs. (This is vary similar to a memory leak, however the cache is cleared when the process ends). Funny part is such issues are easy to locate and fix with a debugger. I am willing to bet the cause is with the GUI API, mainly because flash should of never been used as the GUI for a resource intensive program in the first place.

[sambeta]

Thank you so much OP for raising these issues, we all know they're there even those of us who aren't devs, but some of us refuse to acknowledge the faults.

 

My computer has no issues running SKYRIM/BF3 or Crysis1/2 on full GFX. But thanks to this games engine and severe faults my computer damn near self destructs. Some times I can't go into PVP warzones due to massive lag (not internet lag but GFX lag) as well as other faults. Not to mention trying ops raids etc. I mean the frame rate drops when I'm on the fleet.

Edited April 24, 2012 by sambeta

[Rikeryo]

I am confident that the engine issues will be worked out as the game matures. Bioware (even though they messed up ME3) has some of the industry best. I am willing to wait (a bit) while they work it out.

 

they have yet to show. the engine is not the only rotten part of this apple.

but they will continue denying this problem as they did in the past. does anyone remember the "horrid fps" thread with 15000+ posts and the countless other threads over in the CS section?

Edited April 24, 2012 by Rikeryo

[Agemnon]

Well, yea its obviously not a big secret, and probably like you said their biggest problem.

 

I know I dont have a good computer but, i am able to run well WoW with high graphics whitout laging. It takes me some seconds to finish a loading bar.

 

In Swtor, some planets like Corelia literally takes 5 mins to download with everything at very low. So pretty much, when i am on these planets, i cannot Queue for a Wz even if i want to) because its WAY too long to dl the map. This problem actually stopped me from leveling alts.because i love to PVp and lvl at the same time and i am not patient enough to wait 5 mins between each wz.

 

I agree with your post even tho i dont think they are gonna change anything soon.

 

Wow, and I thought 12 seconds with a SATA III SSD was long!

[Your_dominus]

Wow, and I thought 12 seconds with a SATA III SSD was long!

It is.

This goes to show how flawed the client is. ( I my self as well have TOR on a SSD and experience minimal improvement in load time)

And the fps on the fleet? Good god Bioware, you can't tell me this is that big a deal to fix. People clustering in a group for the rhatgoul event crap brings my 6950 2b and 4ghz quad to 20fps. Wth is that?

My fps is perfectly fine, 60fps+ anywhere else. Go to the fleet and it's juttery and low.

 

Then there's the chia pet foliage. It literally grows as you approach, the draw distance on foliage is so piss poor. WoW's does it too, but at least it sort of... fades in/out and leaves your eyes with the feeling like it was always there.

 

The engine is dated , and flawed.

Edited April 24, 2012 by Your_dominus

[Your_dominus]

Game runs fine. I load in under 15 seconds

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

SWTOR is a modern MMO, get a modern computer.

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.

Edited April 24, 2012 by Your_dominus