Will the game / engine ever be fixed ?

[jdi_knght]

You shouldn't need a cpu that wasn't even concieved when the game was released to play without hiccups.

 

I recently did a test on ESO and had over 150 people on screen, solid 50 fps. You get 16 on screen in this game and it slows down to 15-20 fps sometimes. No matter the cpu.

 

A couple links that might help explain the discrepancy you're seeing:

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/05/25/why-the-elder-scrolls-online-isn-39-t-using-heroengine.aspx

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,1034123/The-Elder-Scrolls-Online-Improved-effects-with-DirectX-11-Exclusive-Tech-Interview/News/

[Malastare]

The problem as far as i haver understood, is that the game engine cant handle all the game.

 

Trying to be nice, yet blunt:

 

You don't understand all that much about the game and its engine.

 

Virtually everyone who comments on "the engine can't handle the game" is illustrating their lack of understanding of software and game design.

 

In SWTOR, there are three main parts of "the game": The engine, the graphical/sound resources, and the server-side quest scripts. There is no replaceable part which is "the engine". It's essentially all of the game code running on the client and the server.

 

But with that being said. I think it's crazy they keep adding new content and trying to attract more players when the engine obviously can handle it.

 

Quite frankly: You lack the knowledge to make that statement.

 

Obviously the engine can handle it because it is handling it, for thousands of players. As with all software, there will be issues and stability is never a 100% thing, but loads and loads of players play through all the content 24 hours a day and the engine handles it.

 

The fact that it doesn't have the performance you or I might want is a separate concern. The engine handles it, but it doesn't have the performance we might want. Don't say the former if you mean the latter.

 

Just think if they succeed and make it so every planet has around 100 - 200 people on it, it will be like being on the fleet all the time.

 

No.... The fleet's performance issues aren't due to the size of the instances (Tython and Korriban have high populations, but rarely see performance issues), but rather the density of player characters in visual range. Its a huge number of textures and animations to load, and a lot of overlays. It's way more work to draw player characters than NPCs, but simply having players on-planet but not visible isn't much work at all.

 

But it's like asking a wooden plank to hold a some weight and then just keep on adding weight, sooner og later, it's gonna break.

 

That's a pretty bad analogy for software. That's not how this works. The game isn't running on some guy's PC in Austin. Its run by a number of server farms. As they add more players, they can add more servers. Remember now, that while we call "Shadowlands" a "server", its actually quite a few hardware hosts, and there may be twice as many hosts backing Shadowlands than are backing Prophecy of the Five.

 

Really hope someone from the Development team reads this and makes raises this as a remark in the office and hopefully something is done about it asap!

 

I can guarantee that nothing you said here is new or terribly interesting to the development team. They know far more about this and its scalability than you or even I know.

 

And back to the original point: They continue to upgrade "the engine" with each major release. It's not some static thing. It's the core game code and they are making changes to it all the time. That's how we got things like the reworked shadow code, texture atlasing, armor dyes, starfighter, mega-servers, etc. Those are all based on engine improvements and added capabilities. They've always been upgrading the engine. Most players simply don't even realize it, sometimes because they simply don't notice, but more often because they never really understood what "the engine" was or what it did.

[ikinai]

Strange I am running an i3 with a GTX 460 at max settings without issues. Guess I'm lucky, or I built a computer with the appropriate hardware to compliment each other. Meaning the motherboard was designed to handle the i3 and the RAM I use in it, so on and so forth. But that can't possibly have any effect what so ever on how a program runs on a computer. So it's obviously the game engine just loves me, it really loves me!

[Orizuru]

I don't know if changing a game engine after a game has been released has ever been done, but I wouldn't know if it had. If it is possible it would take an awful lot of work and money, I'm sure. If it were possible, I don't think EA/BW would do it if they were making a billion dollars a day. I think they care about the game, just not as much as the players wish they would.

 

It's quite rare. I only know of 1 game that succeeded with this type of change, and it was a very special situation. Final Fantasy XIV had an initial launch that will always be remembered as an abysmal failure. The game had a good enough engine performance-wise, but the game mechanics and combat systems had critical failures that resulted from poor decisions made when designing the game engine. They made the game free to play and took the game back to the drawing board with a completely new dev team and one of the first decisions made was to replace the game engine.

 

However, it's important to note that the first launch of the game had a game engine the studio had built in-house specifically for the game. The engine that replaced it was also designed in-house, so it was fairly easy for them to design a new engine that included most to all of the original features, but with significant improvements and extensions. This allowed them to pull the old engine and plug in a new one rather easily.

 

There was another MMO that used a third party engine in the same fashion that SWTOR does that attempted this type of engine replacement, but 7 years later there were still working on the project with no end in sight. I can't remember the name of that game for the life of me.

 

Suffice it to say thought, that an engine replacement for SWTOR is most likely never going to happen.

[Rafaman]

Well, I find a change of oil does wonders for it. Just recently put in a new timing belt though, and no more lag on the fleet!

[jdi_knght]

Meaning the motherboard was designed to handle the i3 and the RAM I use in it, so on and so forth.

Would you care to cite an example of where somebody used the wrong CPU or wrong type of RAM in their motherboard? Ideally, one which booted fine (we're also assuming they didn't bend pins and cut slots to make a CPU "fit") , and resulted specifically in performance issues with SWTOR?

 

I'm very interested.

[ikinai]

Would you care to cite an example of where somebody used the wrong CPU or wrong type of RAM in their motherboard? Ideally, one which booted fine (we're also assuming they didn't bend pins and cut slots to make a CPU "fit") , and resulted specifically in performance issues with SWTOR?

 

I'm very interested.

 

Of course I can't cite an individuals computer specs that isn't mine, since it isn't mine, but you can put together components that don't work together. It will boot but you will have problems, so I made sure I didn't do that. So yes, it can happen, is that what is happening here? Possibly, it's something to look at.

[PavSalco]

The engine cannot be fixed. They would need to replace it which is impossible. They would need to spend years on converting all data and all objects (thousands of armors and npc etc.) to a new engine.

[Malastare]

It's quite rare. I only know of 1 game that succeeded with this type of change, and it was a very special situation. Final Fantasy XIV had an initial launch that will always be remembered as an abysmal failure. The game had a good enough engine performance-wise, but the game mechanics and combat systems had critical failures that resulted from poor decisions made when designing the game engine. They made the game free to play and took the game back to the drawing board with a completely new dev team and one of the first decisions made was to replace the game engine.

 

This gets brought up often with this subject.

 

The important detail that's left out was that the bulk of the game was left unchanged. The graphical engine and UI was replaced, while the core client-server portions remained with some new logic running inside it. It's a "new engine" but the bulk of the code (including things like the data storage and dev tools) remained. They then made a bunch of changes to the code that remained, iterating on it and improving it just like any studio would improve core game code for feature upgrades. They were just able to make more changes in a short period of time because they didn't have to handle production-compatible release schedules.

 

So, yeah. FFXIV "replaced" its engine, but it replaced it with an upgraded, partially-rewritten version of the same engine.

[tjmck]

This always comes up probably once a month or so...you cannot simply change the game engine. When Swtor was being developed they bought a beta version of the Hero engine, and modified it so much to do what they needed it to do that it no longer is compatible with any version of the Hero engine. To 'fix' the problems with the engine or even going so far as to port the game over to a new engine like say the massively better Unreal engine, they'd need to remake the game again. Even to do something like re-engaging the high end graphics that were in the game at beta and shortly after launch would probably require some game downtime. Which they won't do as that would mean lost revenue. Since probably most of the original development team who designed the engine and graphics and who could actually fix the problems are long gone from Bioware/EA, I would doubt that other than minor tweaks, this is what we are stuck with.

[Orizuru]

This gets brought up often with this subject.

 

The important detail that's left out was that the bulk of the game was left unchanged. The graphical engine and UI was replaced, while the core client-server portions remained with some new logic running inside it. It's a "new engine" but the bulk of the code (including things like the data storage and dev tools) remained. They then made a bunch of changes to the code that remained, iterating on it and improving it just like any studio would improve core game code for feature upgrades. They were just able to make more changes in a short period of time because they didn't have to handle production-compatible release schedules.

 

So, yeah. FFXIV "replaced" its engine, but it replaced it with an upgraded, partially-rewritten version of the same engine.

 

The part of my post you didn't quote made similar points. I just didn't feel like explaining the technical jargon and dumbed it down a bit more.

[Malastare]

The part of my post you didn't quote made similar points. I just didn't feel like explaining the technical jargon and dumbed it down a bit more.

 

Ahh. Understood. And I didn't mean for my post to come as a correction to your info, rather I was just filling in the extra information.

 

Keep up the fight, informed person!

[Malastare]

Since probably most of the original development team who designed the engine and graphics and who could actually fix the problems are long gone from Bioware/EA, I would doubt that other than minor tweaks, this is what we are stuck with.

 

I don't think that's true.

 

When games are made, loads of people are brought in to get the work done as quickly as possible. After the first release, the amount of developers who can be kept busy is drastically reduced, simply due to the fact that a live game cannot sustain the rate of change that a full dev crew can supply. So, its common --even necessary-- that those developers move on to other projects (or employers). This sort of turnover is very common in game development. You don't build a game with 100 developers and then have those 100 developers spend the next 5 years supporting it.

 

So, of course the development team is smaller. It likely grows and shifts a bit between expansions and other tasks, but its guaranteed that its going to be smaller and that's totally healthy. However, it doesn't mean that there's no one around who knows how to make changes to the core game. That's a silly idea. They've made loads of changes to the core, including rewriting the shadow system and rewriting many of the lighting shaders and the inclusion of dyes. Those are fairly complex, fundamental changes to the graphics code and they were all made after the initial shrinking of the development team.

 

There are definitely people on the dev team who can make changes. However, you can't make huge sweeping changes to the core game without making thousands of cascading changes all over the place. All of those changes put a ton of work on every development group, and twice as much on your testing group. It's not developer competence that keeps them from making huge engine changes, its code complexity, resource management, return-on-investment, testing time, and defect-level maintenance that keep them from doing it.

[JaHakk]

every drop in FPS, every dc, every glitch, man made global warming, the 60's are all blamed on the game engine because people have no idea what the game engine does, nor what it takes to "fix" it. So it becomes the proverbial whipping boy of the internet developer and all the games and worlds problems get lumped into "fix the engine".

 

car wont start...fix the engine

car wrong color...fix the engine

bought a pickup...fix the CARS engine

space aliens stole the car..fix the engine

you replaced the engine...fix the engine

 

I don't seem to be having those proplems

[Malastare]

I don't seem to be having those proplems

 

Just because you have a great car doesn't mean that Bioware shouldn't pay to replace the engines in everyone else's car.

 

/s <---- Avoiding Poe's Law

[MuzluPasta]

SLI not working...check

Nameplates still bugged...check

Slideshow 16m operations...check

PC resources not utilized...check

 

If the game engine could be dressed up with armors from the cartel market, it would have been fixed before the game went F2P.

[JaHakk]

Just because you have a great car doesn't mean that Bioware shouldn't pay to replace the engines in everyone else's car.

 

/s <---- Avoiding Poe's Law

 

Maybe you should buy a new car?

[RAVM]

The engine cannot be fixed. They would need to replace it which is impossible. They would need to spend years on converting all data and all objects (thousands of armors and npc etc.) to a new engine.

 

Could you explain this more? Art assets are created in a separate program to begin with..

Edited August 6, 2015 by RAVM

[mmmbuddah]

Good for you.

 

Now stop whining and get a better computer.

 

What a constructive and insightful comment!

[DOHboy]

What a constructive and insightful comment!

 

about as useful, constructive, and insightful as "replace the engine"....

[cach-x]

SLI not working...check

Nameplates still bugged...check

Slideshow 16m operations...check

PC resources not utilized...check

Pretty much this. The technical inferiority of this game's engine is evident to anyone with 2 eyes and some experience playing games.

 

To their credit, over the years the devs have managed to pull off some nice effects and make some improvements, but the overall product is still sup-par.

 

The fact that some people keep going 'nananana facts don't matter' is always both hilarious and sad.

[DOHboy]

Pretty much this. The technical inferiority of this game's engine is evident to anyone with 2 eyes and some experience playing games.

 

To their credit, over the years the devs have managed to pull off some nice effects and make some improvements, but the overall product is still sup-par.

 

The fact that some people keep going 'nananana facts don't matter' is always both hilarious and sad.

 

and very little of that is on the actual "engine" like we've been saying since start of this thread. Every and any issue someone has with the game...blamed on the engine.

 

sli not working exactly how is that an engine problem?

PC resources again engine?

clipping..not an engine problem.

bugs...not an engine problem.

glitches...not an engine problem.

global warming...not an engine problem.

[KyaniteD]

We asked that question tonight at the Cantina and it looks like we'll be stuck with the engine in its basic form. KotFE will see some improvements, but addressing some of its more fundamental limitations would amount to building a new game and there are no plans to do that.

[DOHboy]

We asked that question tonight at the Cantina and it looks like we'll be stuck with the engine in its basic form. KotFE will see some improvements, but addressing some of its more fundamental limitations would amount to building a new game and there are no plans to do that.

 

we know, so why do people even keep asking this question. its fundamentally obvious to be a wasted question.

 

get one and only one question to the president....why do they call it the white house?

[MillionsKNives]

We asked that question tonight at the Cantina and it looks like we'll be stuck with the engine in its basic form. KotFE will see some improvements, but addressing some of its more fundamental limitations would amount to building a new game and there are no plans to do that.

 

I could have told you that, and saved you the hassle.