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

[ProsaicProse]

I can't comment on whether or not the original poster knows their stuff, even if they sound like they do. I'm no techie or game designer. But I know one thing and agree with the main point of their post.

 

I love this game.

 

I have NO meaningful issues with content, gameplay, story, or anything else, content wise. Bioware has done an awesome job, and continues to do so.

 

The only consistent issue I have is the games performance. This has got to be the games greatest hurdle, and the only one I would ask for them to prioritize for the sake of their devoted players (and many more who could potentially come, but are barred by this hurdle.)

 

If they aren't prioritizing this already, here's to hoping they do!

Edited April 27, 2012 by ProsaicProse

[Slipfeed]

I can't comment on whether or not the original poster knows their stuff, even if they sound like they do. I'm no techie or game designer. But I know one thing and agree with the main point of their post.

 

I love this game.

 

I have NO meaningful issues with content, gameplay, story, or anything else, content wise. Bioware has done an awesome job, and continues to do so.

 

The only consistent issue I have is the games performance. This has got to be the games greatest hurdle, and the only one I would ask for them to prioritize for the sake of their devoted players (and many more who could potentially come, but are barred by this hurdle.)

 

If they aren't prioritizing this already, here's to hoping they do!

 

The poster of the above comment has no official affiliation with Bioware, Electronic Arts, or its' affiliate's or contractors.

 

Any indication that such an affiliation exists and that the a fore mentioned non existent affiliation is in any way, shape, or form the reason for the poster's glowingly positive opinion of Star Wars The Old Republic, Bioware, Electronic Arts, or it's affiliate's is baseless and actionable slander.

[Faeldawn]

Your computer sucks. How is that their fault. I mean, I'm running a 5 to 6 year old machine with 3 gig of usable ram and I'm not experiencing this at all, nor have I heard of this from anyone. I'm also leading 8 man raids with zero lag, zero delays, zero problems. My loading screens, except for Quesh, take a matter of 10 seconds or less, to the point where I cannot believe that people will actually complain so much about something that one may experience maybe once or twice a day while visiting a new planet. The game closes in about 10 seconds for me also.

 

Maybe it is you, just as that purple color you are using makes it difficult for people to read your posts. ;p

 

Different combinations of components seem to produce different results. My PC is 3 years old and while i don't know your spec, mine was very high spec back then and my loading screens take so long sometimes i go and make a cup of tea while waiting.

 

My PC plays Skyrim on max without a stutter, it plays pretty much anything on max without an issue for that matter, but SWTOR i have to run on minimum settings to get any kind of performance thats playable. Tried changing drivers, no improvement. AA is another problem altogether.

 

My problem might well be RAM related and im considering upping it to 8gig if i choose to continue playing (but tbh i can't really see that improving much), if i plan on gettiing serious im also considering a SSD, but with a PC far over the recommended specs which otherwise runs pretty much perfectly, i struggle at times.

[Pathlight-]

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

 

Exactly what I think.

[UCKFred]

As far as loading times go, some users have found out that it has to do with the number of learned schematics you have on your character and crafting materials you have in your inventory or cargo bay. The quick fix is to send all your crafting mats to an alt, but nothing can be done about your schematics unless you choose to unlearn it. I haven't tried it yet, but I'll get around to it.

 

Your computer sucks. How is that their fault. I mean, I'm running a 5 to 6 year old machine with 3 gig of usable ram and I'm not experiencing this at all, nor have I heard of this from anyone. I'm also leading 8 man raids with zero lag, zero delays, zero problems. My loading screens, except for Quesh, take a matter of 10 seconds or less, to the point where I cannot believe that people will actually complain so much about something that one may experience maybe once or twice a day while visiting a new planet. The game closes in about 10 seconds for me also.

 

Maybe it is you, just as that purple color you are using makes it difficult for people to read your posts. ;p

Your attitude sucks worse. I think you're exaggerating about 10 seconds loading and just came to brag about leading raids, on two separate posts no less!

[RocNessMonster]

In fact, it's even worse.

 

Playing with two 560 GTX ti OC SLi on a Xeon 8core with SATA Raid 0 video editing hard disks at work and sometimes at home on a mediocre Laptop quadcore i5 with some nvidia mobile card.

 

 

This game doesn't care about your video card, I only have a 9600GT and I get no performance change despite graphic settings. All SWTOR cares about is CPU.

 

Coding used to be an artform, now they just try to brute force their way through hardware upgrades.

Edited April 27, 2012 by RocNessMonster

[Jederix]

I was waiting for a post like this!

 

/signed

 

Question: Are they able to revamp the engine to live up to today´s standards?

 

Of course you were. You are notorious for lurking these forums and posting in threads that concur with your narrow view of what you thought this game would be. Just quit already.

[Rikeryo]

I laugh at the guys saying they've got no problems on planets, fleet or in pve in general. obviously they've never participated in an ilum zergfest or a warzone. 80% of the performance problems are ocurring in pvp environments.

 

I can tell you that there is not a single person out there with a rig that meets the recommended system requirements of this game that can play any warzone with more than 10/20/30 fps. you need a 2012 €1500 dollar rig to get acceptable performance in warzones and STILL your fps plummets down to 40 or less in heavy fighting.

 

IN WARZONES.

 

40v40 Ilum zerg fests? I have yet to see a person with more than 10 fps. I had around 2-5fps and insane stuttering on a 1yr old €1000 gaming machine.

 

are you still thinking everything is fine with swtor? try renaming the "swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor" file in your game\ASSETS folder, start the game and play a warzone. you'll have perfect performance. but you won't see any particle effects. so, how can some simple particle effects aka lightsabers, blaster pistol fire, spell effects etc cut the fps in half?

Edited April 27, 2012 by Rikeryo

[Jederix]

The poster of the above comment has no official affiliation with Bioware, Electronic Arts, or its' affiliate's or contractors.

 

Any indication that such an affiliation exists and that the a fore mentioned non existent affiliation is in any way, shape, or form the reason for the poster's glowingly positive opinion of Star Wars The Old Republic, Bioware, Electronic Arts, or it's affiliate's is baseless and actionable slander.

 

He disagrees with you and has a different opinion on the game, so that automatically makes him a Bioware shill.

 

So very mature.

[Jederix]

I laugh at the guys saying they've got no problems on planets, fleet or in pve in general. obviously they've never participated in an ilum zergfest or a warzone. 80% of the performance problems are ocurring in pvp environments.

 

I can tell you that there is not a single person out there with a rig that meets the recommended system requirements of this game that can play any warzone with more than 10/20/30 fps. you need a 2012 €1500 dollar rig to get acceptable performance in warzones and STILL your fps plummets down to 40 or less in heavy fighting.

 

IN WARZONES.

 

40v40 Ilum zerg fests? I have yet to see a person with more than 10 fps. I had around 2-5fps and insane stuttering on a 1yr old €1000 gaming machine.

 

are you still thinking everything is fine with swtor? try renaming the "swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor" file in your game\ASSETS folder, start the game and play a warzone. you'll have perfect performance. but you won't see any particle effects. so, how can some simple particle effects aka lightsabers, blaster pistol fire, spell effects etc cut the fps in half?

 

Good. Who cares about PvP anyway. And not, it's not a significant portion of the playerbase; PvPers never make up a significant portion of any MMOs playerbase, despite their claims to the contrary.

 

You've been complaining on the forums for 2 months now. Isn't it time to move on?

[Rikeryo]

Good. Who cares about PvP anyway. And not, it's not a significant portion of the playerbase; PvPers never make up a significant portion of any MMOs playerbase, despite their claims to the contrary.

 

You've been complaining on the forums for 2 months now. Isn't it time to move on?

 

4. your research skills are as bad as your general knowledge about MMO's playerbases. and no, I won't stop.

Edited April 27, 2012 by Rikeryo

[mattgyver]

Of course you were. You are notorious for lurking these forums and posting in threads that concur with your narrow view of what you thought this game would be. Just quit already.

 

The gall of that guy posting on the forums! Who does he think he is anyway?

[Jenzali]

As has been stated before, this game is not optimized to use your GPU to its fullest extent. I believe that the best way to get a performance increase is to get a very powerful CPU. I'm not a hardware expert so please correct me.

 

My desktop PC is top of the line and can run this game in Warzones without a performance drop on max settings (however generating a massive amount of heat - I got 4 new fans installed into my case just so I could play this game without overheating). However, my laptop is a couple years old, was able to run Mass Effect 2 on max settings. But playing SWTOR on that laptop, I can't get more than 5-10 fps in Warzones or anywhere with more than a couple other players. I expected I would at least be able to run this game on medium to high without performance drops on that laptop, but was clearly wrong. It's funny though, on the lowest settings the characters look like cardboard cutouts from a 1998 game.

 

Looks like there's some weird quirks in the game engine that cause it to perform especially bad on some hardware setups.

Edited April 27, 2012 by Jenzali

[Dezzi]

I do. Smart people do. If I have a problem with my health then I want a doctor that knows what he is doing to tell me what exactly is happening, what's it called and how it's treated. These people in these threads are not game designers. They are not game developers.

 

And neither are you, but that apparently hasn't stopped you from having an opinion, has it?

[sambeta]

Your computer sucks. How is that their fault. I mean, I'm running a 5 to 6 year old machine with 3 gig of usable ram and I'm not experiencing this at all, nor have I heard of this from anyone. I'm also leading 8 man raids with zero lag, zero delays, zero problems. My loading screens, except for Quesh, take a matter of 10 seconds or less, to the point where I cannot believe that people will actually complain so much about something that one may experience maybe once or twice a day while visiting a new planet. The game closes in about 10 seconds for me also.

 

Maybe it is you, just as that purple color you are using makes it difficult for people to read your posts. ;p

 

So kindly explain how people who are able to run games that have far higher graphical specs on their PC's and aren't able to run TOR (which isn't even slightly graphically impressive) on their machines properly without having to upgrade fans, GFX etc. The recommended specs for this game are a joke. It is a broken engine to deny it would be blindly ignorent .

[Drakkip]

Good. Who cares about PvP anyway. And not, it's not a significant portion of the playerbase; PvPers never make up a significant portion of any MMOs playerbase, despite their claims to the contrary.

 

You've been complaining on the forums for 2 months now. Isn't it time to move on?

 

I play on a PVE server. I do enjoy the occasional PvP. However, when by count around 30% of the servers are PvP servers, I think that would qualify as significant. If 30% is not significant what would be?

[Andryah]

Different combinations of components seem to produce different results. My PC is 3 years old and while i don't know your spec, mine was very high spec back then and my loading screens take so long sometimes i go and make a cup of tea while waiting.

 

My PC plays Skyrim on max without a stutter, it plays pretty much anything on max without an issue for that matter, but SWTOR i have to run on minimum settings to get any kind of performance thats playable. Tried changing drivers, no improvement. AA is another problem altogether.

 

My problem might well be RAM related and im considering upping it to 8gig if i choose to continue playing (but tbh i can't really see that improving much), if i plan on gettiing serious im also considering a SSD, but with a PC far over the recommended specs which otherwise runs pretty much perfectly, i struggle at times.

 

The game does not hog graphics chipset performance as far as I can tell. It does however want lots of graphics memory and CPU. People with 1gig or more of dedicated video memory, a modern multicore processor and at least 4 gig of memory seem to do fine with this game, even with a midrange GPU (as long as you has shadows set to low or off).

 

People get all hung up about having the best and fastest GPU in their rigs, when in fact that does little to boost performance in this game. And the endless comparisons to FPS games is LOLz because the game dynamics do not compare at all, so the engines are not equatable at all.

 

Loading screen complaints have nothing to do with graphics and more to do with how the game loads and uses content for ingame play. There seems to be no silver bullet to solve this (including SSDs), but it's a one time event when entering a planet where most load time delay takes place so while annoying to some I really don't see a valid issue. Instancing load screens seem to be pretty fast in most places.

Edited April 27, 2012 by Andryah

[Jeedaix]

4 year old gaming computer , XPS 3.0 quad, 6 gigs of ram, 1- 9800 GTX. All settings max except shadows which I have set at zero. Btw, Shadows are a definite FPS killer, jes saying. Now not saying folks are not having issues, but I'm having none of those issues on a less powerful rig then some folks have. I don't know what that means either but wanted to report what I have seen.

[ADPowah]

I'd like anyone who doesn't have 1 minute or more loading screens to post their spec. I'm commonly at 5 minutes.

 

I don't have a great Laptop; i5 cpu (2 core), 310m Nvidia graphics card, 4gb of ram, 5400 rpm HDD. I keep my system clean, defragged and I use soluto to keep the running tasks down. I have to play on 1024 x 768, everything low or off to get around 30fps and my load times suck, yet I can run DCU on medium with 40+fps.

[Roechacca]

My computer makes a weird grumbling sound when SWTOR loads. True story. Can the OP fix my PC?

[GlowstickSwinger]

WALLS OF TEXT COMING TO A THREAD NEAR YOU

 

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.

 

It appears I've struck a vein with the community. Honestly, I did not expect this sort of thing to get to 20 some pages. I'm just a guy that likes the SW IP and I wanna swing glowsticks at meat bags >

 

Grammarye has a few points worth mentioning and I believe covering his points should cover most people's as well:

 

Of course this is hyperbole. Unless you are an employee of the product that has access to the VC repos, you're not going to be able to make factual claims about the software or its implementation. My hands are chained to the realm of hyperbole and conjecture, and since that is the stage I am occupying, I, the code monkey dance puppet, shall dance the dance of ancient hyperbole before me! So come and dance with me!

 

Short of sniffing packets and measuring time, (which I might do but I haven't researched if SW:TOR deploys rootkits/monitoring software.. you know what? Forget that. I'll setup a proxy on a box and sniff the packets there, screw you rootkit!) all I have is speculation. I even clearly alluded to that in the first post. I can't claim authority over the facts of the situation. But I can claim -some- authority on knowledge regarding situations that are very similar in terms of the fundamentals of network infrastructure. Take that for what ever it's worth, if you would be so kind.

 

The common conclusion to the slowdown problems is to throw more client side hardware. I've seen people claim to have outrageous SLI setups with SSDs all over the place still get hammered on load times. These are setups that could be part of legitimate cryptographic analysis operations and here they are, chugging along. Again, I have no hard statistics to back any of these conclusions, but if these tidbits was all I had to go off of (which it is), I would say that unless SW:TOR was actually just a cleverly skinned version of a real-time rendering version of Maya3D in disguise, that the problem is not the client hardware in most cases.

 

I personally have the lowest settings possible and my hardware is crap. I won't even bother putting the specs out there, it's pure garbage. But I can run Skyrim at full settings at 24-30FPS. Apples and oranges, you might say, and I'll take that, but there is one thing SW:TOR has that Skyrim does not: massive network i/o. Elephant in the room massive. Shirley Temple massive. (What does that even mean!?)

 

And then there is a dead give away: When wandering around and a person enters my LOS for the first time, I get a spike in lag. That says resource sync problems, and that gives away the whole shebang of their theory of asset management.

 

Don't tell me you think they have one machine with INT_MAX threads handling all client I/O. Chances are, they have a whole bunch of front-facing boxes for client i/o, routing all of those requests to a message queue, which pushes them to secondary processes (storage, analysis, calculation [You ever write an achievement engine before? it gets painful], etc) and the results are then pushed back down to the client i/o and then subsequently to the client. And they probably have an F5 or two in front of it. Lots of network i/o. Lots of potential bottlenecks. Because of these factors, you absolutely need every part of that system to handle requests when they can, not on-demand… and your code absolutely has to reflect this reality that a timely operation is not guaranteed. Therefore, based on the previous statements, it is my professional guess is they have quite a few on-demand processes gumming up the works.

 

Now, as per discerning what particular culprit it may be, I know for a fact that their client resource pulls are synchronous. If you walk into an area where you are requesting the attire of hundreds of people who are registered in a MQ channel, HOPEFULLY by an ID that a database is using as an index, you then have to hit the database for everyone of those people (unless you have their attire data in the MQ itself).. then you have to pipe down all of that data to -each- person that enters a room… then the client pulls uncached textures, light maps, and models to the RAM every single time you need they pop into client side LOS,... if any part of this process is blocking, you are screwed. Completely.

 

It is completely obvious that a client will have to wait until he gets all of the room data, then he has to pull all of those assets, then the engine has to render them… and then he gets to play. That's what a synchronous process does and that is very similar to what is going on with myself and other people with extremely high-end machines. The way to solve this is to make your asset strategy async. This is what every major player does because it works.

 

Every time a person changes their clothes? Moves? Presses a button that trigger an animation? I bet their servers aren't doing LOS calculations to figure out which people can see him do that to determine who to push to intelligently and reduce internal and external traffic. (Tree falls in the woods, does anyone ACK?) I'd be willing to bet that data just gets pushed down to everyone in the room.

 

EDIT: And I'd bet wrong. SW:TOR does AOS pushes, but is also have the client's physics engine be the authority on movement state... lolwat

 

Why do this? Because it works and it takes less time to develop. And that's what it's all about: Does it work? Yes? MOVE ON TO THE NEXT TICKET WOOOOOOOOOOO

 

Now as per business culture issues and why this setup is suffering, that is simple. Star Wars is a licensed IP of massive popularity. Licensed IPs of massive popularity are expensive up front (and above-the-line) and their ROI schedule would be completely insane make investors happy. Therefore, I'm almost certain that this product was ushered in via a pump-and-dump strategy with a very tight watch on the bottom line, mores than usual for other MMOs, with any programming concern that couldn't be solved in 5 minutes being put to a backlog to collect dust. Every possible corner was cut and it will always show up as technical debt, plain and simple.

 

This point is reinforced by their gimmicky marketing of the beads and blankets they are given to the rest of the tribe to extend the amount of money they can siphon without actually having to solve any of these technical (and expensive) shortcomings.

 

And, honestly, don't assume programmers are automatically axed from leadership roles. We got waves of brogrammers coming in, ready to drink with the rest of the Skull and Bones frats under the table!

 

Edited April 28, 2012 by GlowstickSwinger

[Roechacca]

WALLS OF TEXT COMING TO A THREAD NEAR YOU

 

 

 

It appears I've struck a vein with the community. Honestly, I did not expect this sort of thing to get to 20 some pages. I'm just a guy that likes the SW IP and I wanna swing glowsticks at meat bags >

 

Grammarye has a few points worth mentioning and I believe covering his points should cover most people's as well:

 

Of course this is hyperbole. Unless you are an employee of the product that has access to the VC repos, you're not going to be able to make factual claims about the software or its implementation. My hands are chained to the realm of hyperbole and conjecture, and since that is the stage I am occupying, I, the code monkey dance puppet, shall dance the dance of ancient hyperbole before me! So come and dance with me!

 

Short of sniffing packets and measuring time, (which I might do but I haven't researched if SW:TOR deploys rootkits/monitoring software.. you know what? Forget that. I'll setup a proxy on a box and sniff the packets there, screw you rootkit!) all I have is speculation. I even clearly alluded to that in the first post. I can't claim authority over the facts of the situation. But I can claim -some- authority on knowledge regarding situations that are very similar in terms of the fundamentals of network infrastructure. That that for what ever it's worth, if you would be so kind.

 

The common conclusion to the slowdown problems is to throw more client side hardware. I've seen people claim to have outrageous SLI setups with SSDs all over the place still get hammered on load times. These are setups that could be part of legitimate cryptographic analysis operations and here they are, chugging along. Again, I have no hard statistics to back any of these conclusions, but if these tidbits was all I had to go off of (which it is), I would say that unless SW:TOR was actually just a cleverly skinned version of a real-time rendering version of Maya3D in disguise, that the problem is not the client hardware in most cases.

 

I personally have the lowest settings possible and my hardware is crap. I won't even bother putting the specs out there, it's pure garbage. But I can run Skyrim at full settings at 24-30FPS. Apples and oranges, you might say, and I'll take that, but there is one thing SW:TOR has that Skyrim does not: massive network i/o. Elephant in the room massive. Shirley Temple massive. (What does that even mean!?)

 

And then there is a dead give away: When wandering around and a person enters my LOS for the first time, I get a spike in lag. That says resource sync problems, and that gives away the whole shebang of their theory of asset management.

 

Don't tell me you think they have one machine with INT_MAX threads handling all client I/O. Chances are, they have a whole bunch of front-facing boxes for client i/o, routing all of those requests to a message queue, which pushes them to secondary processes (storage, analysis, calculation [You ever write an achievement engine before? it gets painful], etc) and the results are then pushed back down to the client i/o and then subsequently to the client. And they probably have an F5 or two in front of it. Lots of network i/o. Lots of potential bottlenecks. Because of these factors, you absolutely need every part of that system to handle requests when they can, not on-demand… and your code absolutely has to reflect this reality that a timely operation is not guaranteed. Therefore, based on the previous statements, it is my professional guess is they have quite a few on-demand processes gumming up the works.

 

Now, as per discerning what particular culprit it may be, I know for a fact that their client resource pulls are synchronous. If you walk into an area where you are requesting the attire of hundreds of people who are registered in a MQ channel, HOPEFULLY by an ID that a database is using as an index, you then have to hit the database for everyone of those people (unless you have their attire data in the MQ itself).. then you have to pipe down all of that data to -each- person that enters a room… then the client pulls uncached textures, light maps, and models to the RAM every single time you need they pop into client side LOS,... if any part of this process is blocking, you are screwed. Completely.

 

It is completely obvious that a client will have to wait until he gets all of the room data, then he has to pull all of those assets, then the engine has to render them… and then he gets to play. That's what a synchronous process does and that is very similar to what is going on with myself and other people with extremely high-end machines. The way to solve this is to make your asset strategy async. This is what every major player does because it works.

 

Every time a person changes their clothes? Moves? Presses a button that trigger an animation? I bet their servers aren't doing LOS calculations to figure out which people can see him do that to determine who to push to intelligently and reduce internal and external traffic. (Tree falls in the woods, does anyone ACK?) I'd be willing to bet that data just gets pushed down to everyone in the room.

 

Why do this? Because it works and it takes less time to develop. And that's what it's all about: Does it work? Yes? MOVE ON TO THE NEXT TICKET WOOOOOOOOOOO

 

Now as per business culture issues and why this setup is suffering, that is simple. Star Wars is a licensed IP of massive popularity. Licensed IPs of massive popularity are expensive up front (and above-the-line) and their ROI schedule would be completely insane make investors happy. Therefore, I'm almost certain that this product was ushered in via a pump-and-dump strategy with a very tight watch on the bottom line, mores than usual for other MMOs, with any programming concern that couldn't be solved in 5 minutes being put to a backlog to collect dust. Every possible corner was cut and it will always show up as technical debt, plain and simple.

 

This point is reinforced by their gimmicky marketing of the beads and blankets they are given to the rest of the tribe to extend the amount of money they can siphon without actually having to solve any of these technical (and expensive) shortcomings.

 

And, honestly, don't assume programmers are automatically axed from leadership roles. We got waves of brogrammers coming in, ready to drink with the rest of the Skull and Bones frats under the table!

 

 

Stop talking and go fix this game superman! I mean "Clark Kent"

[Roechacca]

I have no idea what your saying but you say it so well I'd hire ya to fix me dish washer about now. I'd just throw ya the keys at EA and say "It's the room with all the blinking lights that says "Star Wars" N stuff". Do ya thing...checks in the mail.

[Lord_Ravenhurst]

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

[GlowstickSwinger]

Now with numbers!

 

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