Any plans to upgrade the game engine?

[SirMissingno]

If anyone is trolling, it's Bioware's so called "engineers".

<Redacted>

Edited February 7, 2013 by SirMissingno

[Durban_Monkey]

Yes they did. Remember when they also said that F2P games couldn't deliver what they could? Or when the said we'd have ranked WZ's BEFORE the next update? Or when they said Makeb would be a free content update? Or at E3 when they said Makeb would be released THIS YEAR?

 

They say a lotta things tbh...just be cautious what you believe.

 

With all the false advertising, is a class action lawsuit in order?

[Eurynamous]

Go wade through the hero engine forums. Look for questions pertaining to active on screen player count and large scale player engagement. It's filled with responses that state "these limitations are based on client trust, placement and placement predictions, all set and designed by the engineers for the respective clients. This engine is an mmo engine so your questions are unclear. It can handle mmo features and of your referring to fps player intera tion, we have hit boxes and vector arcs..."

 

 

Seems pretty much " don't look at the engine, look at the engineers and coders. We build engines that functions, not games that struggle". - my interpretation.

[MGriffith]

It needs to be done, when will you do it?

 

I wouldn't hold your breath.

It took Bioware (or in fact any MMO developer) about five years to take a stock engine and adjust it to suit their needs and to build and optimise the assets (animations, models and textures) for it.

Ripping out the engine and replacing it with something entirely new will take about as long, and that says nothing for those cases where the internal data is tied to the game engine (which happens a lot more than you might think), because there the logic of the game itself will have to be reworked as well.

Optimisation, by comparison, is easy and that is what they are gambling on.

Also, we don't know for certain if the problem is GPU bound or server bound. In the first case tweaking the engine and the client will help, in the second case though the entire server architecture will have to be rewritten to get better performance for large scale PvP (the most difficult thing to optimise an MMO engine for because players are inherently unpredictable in PvP scenarios, they have to be to survive the battle). And that are only the more common reasons for poor performance for an MMO engine. There are also external influences on the engine (e.g. security related issues that require more data validations and message acknowlegements, not to mention matching predicted to actual positioning and activities to spot robots and exploits). One thing that has already been hinted at is the use of hardware macros which spam the server with abilitiy activations, bogging it down for everybody because the server has to check each activation against cooldowns and prepare and send a 'cannot do that Dave' message to the client.

There are many other possible cases where the client or server is to made work needlessly hard that have to hunted down and fixed individually. And now real money rides on the integrety of the game security must be tightened up even more, which does not exactly improves performance in the short run.

[Marmerus]

Go wade through the hero engine forums. Look for questions pertaining to active on screen player count and large scale player engagement. It's filled with responses that state "these limitations are based on client trust, placement and placement predictions, all set and designed by the engineers for the respective clients. This engine is an mmo engine so your questions are unclear. It can handle mmo features and of your referring to fps player intera tion, we have hit boxes and vector arcs..."

 

 

Seems pretty much " don't look at the engine, look at the engineers and coders. We build engines that functions, not games that struggle". - my interpretation.

But Bioware bought a beta version of the hero engine. What is available today is very different from what was available 6 years ago.

[Matrxhasyou]

A little bit of insight here:

 

The ramdrive and the SSDs really help with the game's performance. The reason is, the game is not coded to precache dynamic assets like it should. Every new animation, character/object model, and ability effect has to be read from your hard drive every time it's used (this is why pvp slows down a lot). This has been tested. In situations showing large amounts of dynamic assets being called, there is major page faults and hard drive thrashing.

 

When you use the swtor unleashed utility, for example, and force all the dynamic assets into the ramdrive, you are essentially doing what the game should have been programmed to do from the beginning: precache dynamic assets into the fastest memory available for random recall.

 

SSDs improve performance because their random reads are tons faster than a typical hard drive. It's true, ramdrives should be a thing of the past. But unfortunately some games do not precache everything they should, and you end up with frame latency as a result.

[Brainiacblue]

When company plans to create MMO one has to look 3 things to start with:

1. "Borrow" game engine from other company who will aid as much they can to fit for needs

2. "Buy" game engine rights to modify it however MMO company pleases.

3. Build own engine from scratch.

 

Now if you know Bioware went with second option and that ment heavily modified themself game engine that was not built for that massive project back then. Even the detailed documentation wasnt ready. There has been TONS of articles and quotes that Hero engine developers said themself that their engine wasnt ready for that massive project back then when Bioware started. It was easy to make MMO (all the structures and landscape ect.) but in terms of optimization it never got to AAA MMO standard. It could be excusable if the engine was new at year 2011 but it wasnt. Hero engine 1 was as old as 4-5 years when Biwoware got hands on it.

 

So to anser your question OP, yes Bioware has to upgrade game engine at some point or they will be left in dust in upcoming years compared to other MMO's or new ones coming out next year. Can this engine be "optimized" - i doubt it as all the attempts we seen so far have been total let down, thats the easiest way to put it.

There are too many flaws with engine to fully be ready to support MASSIVE scale combat and interactions for time being.

 

This is all the response I need, in fairness to them, my fps has increased by about 2 in each significant patch so it is painfully improving. A lot of it has to do with hardware and Internet connection quality - the latter is rather bad for me (never go to British Telecoms for Internet). They will need to gradually shift the game, server by server, to a new engine in the future, though.

[Glorthox]

But that is like asking them to FIX all of the bugs that they are already choosing to ignore fixing! If they don't truly care about the game, shut the damn thing down then. Or get off your lazy butts and FIX the outstanding issues people are experiencing!

[xorcist]

The main problem as I see it, is that they don't have anybody who can do it. They have maybe one guy: 01000010 01101100 01100001 01101001 01101110 01100101

And I doubt any of them can just read what I wrote except that one guy.

 

01001001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 00100000 01110011 01100001 01100100

 

I don't know if Blane has any say in the matter, and it is sad, yes.

 

01010000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01100110 01101001 01111000 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100101 01101110 01100111 01101001 01101110 01100101 00100001

Edited December 29, 2012 by xorcist

[Jerro]

Just wait till launch of the GTX 780 and we'll all be playing warzones in 100+, raids in 100+ and the fleet in 180+. The GTX 680 already pulls of 60+, 60+ and 100+ in those areas anyway.

 

Hardware resolves a lot of performance issues.

 

well computers built a year after release runs this game just fine (err for most people, not everyone). but shouldnt it be the other way around? like computers built one year Before the release of this game should run it really good? heck its an mmo and BW need people to play it, so even a 3 year old computer should run it well?

[MGriffith]

well computers built a year after release runs this game just fine (err for most people, not everyone). but shouldnt it be the other way around? like computers built one year Before the release of this game should run it really good? heck its an mmo and BW need people to play it, so even a 3 year old computer should run it well?

 

That would be ideal, yes, but the developers have to pick a projected average capability when they start the project. That is they have to guess at the start of development what kind of computers players will be using in 6 years time. Sometimes they miss the mark a bit.

[Rogoo]

Just wait till launch of the GTX 780 and we'll all be playing warzones in 100+, raids in 100+ and the fleet in 180+. The GTX 680 already pulls of 60+, 60+ and 100+ in those areas anyway.

 

Hardware resolves a lot of performance issues.

 

This post just shows that you have no idea what you're talking about.

 

It's an MMO. As such, it's CPU bound.

 

GTX 980 will NOT help with performance.

[Fornix]

This post just shows that you have no idea what you're talking about.

 

It's an MMO. As such, it's CPU bound.

 

GTX 980 will NOT help with performance.

 

Read my follow-up post, as I already stated I simplified it. The point wasn't so much a single hardware upgrade to make the major difference, just the natural flow of newer hardware to naturally resolve a lot of the performance issues as seen with just about all MMO's so far.

 

 

well computers built a year after release runs this game just fine (err for most people, not everyone). but shouldnt it be the other way around? like computers built one year Before the release of this game should run it really good? heck its an mmo and BW need people to play it, so even a 3 year old computer should run it well?

 

You would like that yes, but there are some issues in the design of MMO's which come in to play here. The problem is usually not so much to get a good performance when you're alone or in a small party (flashpoint), but performance goes down as the number of people increase (e.g. RvR PvP, high number raids, crowded city areas, etc).

 

The reason to that are differences to traditional multiplayer games which set the MMO genre apart.

 

In terms of RvR there's a high number of units, something which is frequently seen in RTS games as well, but then without the performance issues. The major difference is the level of detail in individual characters, and beyond that the fact that RTS units contain a lot of graphical clones rather than unique designs. This means a lot of additional work GPU wise. This problem can also be seen in crowded city areas.

 

A secondary issue which MMO's suffer from primarily as they seek to appeal to those older computers is the fact that the CPU load is too high. DirectX 9.0c and older have terrible multi-core capabilities and additionally perform quite a bit of its workload CPU wise. DirectX 10 started changing that, DirectX 11 truly pushed that further.

 

In other words, if you leave the rest untouched, but just use DirectX 11 rendering rather than DirectX 9 rendering, you can observe quite the performance benefit as you let your GPU do more of the work:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/world-of-warcraft-cataclysm-directx-11-performance,2793-7.html

 

This causes the ideal to stick to trying to let older hardware play it as well, to ultimately be its main bottleneck. As you may have a 4- or 8-core CPU of which roughly 25~50% of the CPU is effectively used, yet you run into CPU bound limitations. Beyond that you may have your GPU which has a lot of raw processing power free on top of that, but you're running into GPU bound limitations primarily due to memory capacity being filled.

 

Ultimately, peformance isn't gained by trying to optimize for older hardware, but rather it's achieved by optimizing it for current day hardware. Unfortunately, the PC gamer market has drastically changed over the years, and the number of players with current day hardware has become the bare minimum.

[ARCCommanderDan]

After being on this website for over 3 years...you learn to lever trust anything EAware says anymore unless they post a legit news article about it (but even then they've had their moments where they didn't keep their promise after posting an article). I really hope this happens in 2013 though...I just can't stand these pathetic bugs anymore. The engine is over 5 years old for pete sake. Maybe if they updated the engine they wouldn't waste their time gathering a butt-load of players to test an update that still has bugs after it's released.

[Rogoo]

Read my follow-up post, as I already stated I simplified it. The point wasn't so much a single hardware upgrade to make the major difference, just the natural flow of newer hardware to naturally resolve a lot of the performance issues as seen with just about all MMO's so far.

 

Allright, in that case, I apologize.

 

HOWEVER, I still have to disagree. It's an MMO built on a VERY dated engine. The minimimum system requirements are a LIE.

 

How is new hardware going to help ? How will adding MORE CORES to a game that CAN'T UTILIZE multicore processors in ANY efficient manner going to help ?

 

If my CPU usage hovers around 40% there is A LOT of spare processing power just sitting there being unused.

So if I buy a newer CPU (I have a Phenom II X6 @ 4GhZ) SWTOR still will NOT use all that processing power.

Edited December 29, 2012 by Rogoo

[Marmerus]

Allright, in that case, I apologize.

 

HOWEVER, I still have to disagree. It's an MMO built on a VERY dated engine. The minimimum system requirements are a LIE.

 

How is new hardware going to help ? How will adding MORE CORES to a game that CAN'T UTILIZE multicore processors in ANY efficient manner going to help ?

 

If my CPU usage hovers around 40% there is A LOT of spare processing power just sitting there being unused.

So if I buy a newer CPU (I have a Phenom II X6 @ 4GhZ) SWTOR still will NOT use all that processing power.

No but you can upgrade to a more efficient cpu like the 4 core intel ones. They are in total performance equal or slightly better than your hexa core and in single threaded applications they are faster.

[Rogoo]

No but you can upgrade to a more efficient cpu like the 4 core intel ones. They are in total performance equal or slightly better than your hexa core and in single threaded applications they are faster.

 

But if I use my PC for multithreaded applications (like 3D modellers, renderers and Photoshop) that would actually be a DOWNGRADE for me.

 

Or in the best case, NOT MUCH of an upgrade for a LOT of money.

[Marmerus]

But if I use my PC for multithreaded applications (like 3D modellers, renderers and Photoshop) that would actually be a DOWNGRADE for me.

 

Or in the best case, NOT MUCH of an upgrade for a LOT of money.

Look from the bright side. You probably get 2 or 3 more fps in SWTOR!

[TheSkate]

A little bit of insight here:

 

The ramdrive and the SSDs really help with the game's performance. The reason is, the game is not coded to precache dynamic assets like it should. Every new animation, character/object model, and ability effect has to be read from your hard drive every time it's used (this is why pvp slows down a lot). This has been tested. In situations showing large amounts of dynamic assets being called, there is major page faults and hard drive thrashing.

 

When you use the swtor unleashed utility, for example, and force all the dynamic assets into the ramdrive, you are essentially doing what the game should have been programmed to do from the beginning: precache dynamic assets into the fastest memory available for random recall.

 

SSDs improve performance because their random reads are tons faster than a typical hard drive. It's true, ramdrives should be a thing of the past. But unfortunately some games do not precache everything they should, and you end up with frame latency as a result.

 

QFT.

SSDs increase your load speeds.

SWTOR Unleashed will make a difference in loading times even for users with SSDs. The ram-drive caching of the dynamic assets can made a huge difference for slower machines or machines with mechanical drives.

[CritasStorm]

the Game engine is the hero engine alpha version no im not f------ kidding , its not even the beta version let alone the regular version or the hero engine 2 now out.

 

That being said even if wasnt the alpha version it would still be 1 the worst game engines for even couple million dollar small, niche mmo, let alone a AAA mmo that cost from 250-300 million closer to 300 million.

 

How the hell did they skimp on the game engine to save money when you blow 300 million?

 

If I owned a company was the CEO and im spending 300 million for MMO, then If It cost me another 25-30 million for real game engine even if we had to build it on house at Bioware we would do it.

 

What we would not do is get a game engine for 300 million dollar MMO out of cracker jack box!

[Rogoo]

Yes they did. Remember when they also said that F2P games couldn't deliver what they could? Or when the said we'd have ranked WZ's BEFORE the next update? Or when they said Makeb would be a free content update? Or at E3 when they said Makeb would be released THIS YEAR?

 

At this point, Bioware has ZERO credibility. I do not believe any of their PR babble.

 

Stopped reading Q&A's, stopped reading interviews. It's all worthless speech.

[Fornix]

Allright, in that case, I apologize.

 

HOWEVER, I still have to disagree. It's an MMO built on a VERY dated engine. The minimimum system requirements are a LIE.

 

How is new hardware going to help ? How will adding MORE CORES to a game that CAN'T UTILIZE multicore processors in ANY efficient manner going to help ?

 

If my CPU usage hovers around 40% there is A LOT of spare processing power just sitting there being unused.

So if I buy a newer CPU (I have a Phenom II X6 @ 4GhZ) SWTOR still will NOT use all that processing power.

 

The engine itself isn't so much dated, it's the rendering engine which is a big part of the issue by sticking to a roughly decade old version of DirectX which lacks multi-core capabilities and lacks a lot of direct GPU interaction but rather handles it as follows SWTOR --> CPU --> GPU (obviously redundant).

 

New hardware in that does help though as it's not so much the more cores which help, but the improved CPU architecture. A single i7 core @ 3 Ghz for example is faster than a single core2duo core @ 3 Ghz, and a next gen CPU will gain even further speed beyond the increment in cores.

 

However, that still does not take away that there is a lot of performance which could be won if they'd implement DirectX 11 support in order to reduce needless CPU load, and further enhance multi-core capabilities.

 

Keep in mind however, that even with DirectX 11 in place and multi-core usage optimized, it's unlikely for a game client to ever reach 100% CPU usage till the day comes multiple cores can do tasks for a single thread. The reason behind this being that in a game there are few components which in a thread have high CPU usage. Splitting these up on traditional dual cores was logical. With quad cores you're already finding difficulties what to split off (especially with the latest DirectX as the GPU takes over a lot of the heat). And with 8 cores, there's simply not enough CPU usage in a game to even imagine sensibly filling that up.

 

The solution to that is not to come from game developers, but from hardware designers. Intel for one was (is) busy with Anaphase for that purpose. What that essentially would do is let a single thread be ran on multiple cores (rather than the current thread per single core style). This could achieve major performance benefits as those 3 major threads normally running on just 3 cores, could several years from now for example be executed by all 24+ cores you have by then.

 

And with that the circle of hardware improvements rounds up once more, as not only would the newer hardware by then improve single core clock speed, it would also introduce a hardware-wise improved overall CPU usage. Sort of a reversed hyper-threading by manner of speech.

[Rogoo]

@UP: Nicely written, but that still does not change the fact that the game performs like utter crap. We have the hardware that we have, multicore processors were around when the development started, end the developers just failed to create anything that could resemble a decently performing game engine.

[Danbuterx]

Why on earth would they fire the good programmers and leave the bad? Has the game not gotten better? Did you see lots of terrible bugs last patch?

 

 

I see you've never worked in corporate America. And maybe you haven't noticed how unify colors was broken in 1.6.

Edited December 30, 2012 by Danbuterx

[Fornix]

@UP: Nicely written, but that still does not change the fact that the game performs like utter crap. We have the hardware that we have, multicore processors were around when the development started, end the developers just failed to create anything that could resemble a decently performing game engine.

 

Boiling down to the fact that way too many developers are too conservative when developing their games, sticking to ancient versions of DirectX, ensuring it's compatible with 5 generation old graphics cards, etc. All of that which in turn is a choice based on the fact that hardware surveys amongst gamers show that there's still a significant portion using that dated trash.

 

It's a vicious circle which is ultimately hurting PC game development and hardware development. As it's no longer industry standard to push the limits. There's very few titles which remain to do so.

 

The only way to truly break the circle is for game developers to get the balls and simply say "You know what, our next title will be a DirectX 11 exclusive title, our next title will be 64-bit exclusive. Those who do not yet have the capable hardware will be unable to play our upcoming game". However, in a business where it's all about sales, very few want to go for that route.

 

Only just now, EA is slowly moving away from DirectX 9. With BF3 for example being DX10+ as their Frostbite 2.0 engine is dropping DirectX 9 support. It'll be interesting for example to see what response Dragon Age 3 will get to that next year if it sticks to that. As many players who played Dragon Age 1 and Dragon Age 2 with DX9 only capable systems will now most likely be forced to upgrade their hardware.

 

Personally I think we can only hope they'll keep pushing the enveloppe further, but it'll require a major change in PC gamer mentality for it to work out well.