Will the game / engine ever be fixed ?

[akdonkey]

You will get the new game engine with the next new game.

[KyaniteD]

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

 

Well, I didn't ask it, but since it came up I thought I'd share since people seem to be more likely to take a (reported) devs word than 100 players telling them the exact thing as the dev.

[MillionsKNives]

Well, I didn't ask it, but since it came up I thought I'd share since people seem to be more likely to take a (reported) devs word than 100 players telling them the exact thing as the dev.

 

Ah ok. Well then tell that guy that I could have told him that and saved him the hassle.

[MuzluPasta]

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

 

No, we obviously need official confirmation for everything because official.

[jdi_knght]

Well, I didn't ask it, but since it came up I thought I'd share since people seem to be more likely to take a (reported) devs word than 100 players telling them the exact thing as the dev.

 

But now people can just say:

 

"The developers recently confirmed that they currently have no plans to address the fundamental limitations of the game engine. Thus, your options appear to be (1) deal with the game as-is, or (2) send your sub money elsewhere."

 

...which means we'll miss out on the joys of:

• "its the engine"
  
• "its not the engine. u dun even no wut a engine is."
  
• "it works fine for me. problem must be on ur end."
  
• "you've obviously never tried 16-man ______"
  
• "its probably latency. that is from the distance between your computer and the server. you should fix that and the game will be fine for you then at 60fps."
  
• "engines have pistons. i'm a racecar!"
  
• "upgrade ur computer. its obviously too slow"
  
• "then why do i get 60fps in all the other MMOs that look 10x better than swtor"
  
• "like i said its the engine"
  
• "its NOT the engine"
  
• "i think its the new particle effects they added in the recent patch. things got worse for me then."
  
• "r u for real!? the game plays waay better for me this patch."
  
• "guys stop making threads about this it comes up all the time"
  
• "then maybe they should fix it?"
  
• "its too much work to fix"
  
• "other games do it"
  
• "go play the other games then"
  
• "clean ur computer"
  
• "did u defrag? that helped me. oh and update your drivers it helps!"
  
• etc...
  

 

Oh well...

[DOHboy]

But now people can just say:

 

"The developers recently confirmed that they currently have no plans to address the fundamental limitations of the game engine. Thus, your options appear to be (1) deal with the game as-is, or (2) send your sub money elsewhere."

 

...which means we'll miss out on the joys of:

• "its the engine"
  
• "its not the engine. u dun even no wut a engine is."
  
• "it works fine for me. problem must be on ur end."
  
• "you've obviously never tried 16-man ______"
  
• "its probably latency. that is from the distance between your computer and the server. you should fix that and the game will be fine for you then at 60fps."
  
• "engines have pistons. i'm a racecar!"
  
• "upgrade ur computer. its obviously too slow"
  
• "then why do i get 60fps in all the other MMOs that look 10x better than swtor"
  
• "like i said its the engine"
  
• "its NOT the engine"
  
• "i think its the new particle effects they added in the recent patch. things got worse for me then."
  
• "r u for real!? the game plays waay better for me this patch."
  
• "guys stop making threads about this it comes up all the time"
  
• "then maybe they should fix it?"
  
• "its too much work to fix"
  
• "other games do it"
  
• "go play the other games then"
  
• "clean ur computer"
  
• "did u defrag? that helped me. oh and update your drivers it helps!"
  
• etc...
  

 

Oh well...

 

4 years of forum discussion in one tiny post...minus the whole interns are on it.

[KyaniteD]

...which means we'll miss out on the joys of:

 

LOL, thank you for that summary. We can now just copy & paste your post into any future thread about this issue and maybe shorten the thread significantly. < /wishful thinking>

[Shirx]

Completely changing to a *different* game engine, certainly very rare after launch (I can't think of any examples off the top of my head). A switch mid-development, sure (Duke Nukem Forever being the most popular example!).

 

Major changes/modifications to an engine though... Blizzard's made vast improvements and modifications to the engine behind WoW throughout the years. It started off as a modified version of the Warcraft 3 engine. Today it's a completely different beast.

 

 

^THIS^.....the amount of work to actually overhaul the entire game engine (btw I wonder how many people really understand that the game engine is well beyond just "the pretty graphics") is just incredible. I think that's a major reason why in some franchises you won't see a new engine until they release a sequel or whatever.

 

But the engine can be improved / patched / modified....as the person I quote correctly stated that's what happened in World of Warcraft over the years....one of the most significant things they did over at that game was increase polygon counts and I believe they upgraded to shader 3.0. some years ago.

[jdi_knght]

LOL, thank you for that summary. We can now just copy & paste your post into any future thread about this issue and maybe shorten the thread significantly. < /wishful thinking>

 

Oh, but I do enjoy all the rigorous discussion! Well, most of it anyway.

 

And to some extent, the multiple lengthy threads (even if drawn out across years) should aid BioWare in seeing where some of the larger issues (or largest perceived issues) affecting players are. Even if it's not something they're going to act upon anytime soon, there's always the chance it may come into play way off in the distant future.

[GinnoTaki]

What puzzles me all these years is - how this engine has passed through the technical expertize?

I REALLY REALLY like Hero Engine from the aestetical POV, but technically - this is the most horrible game-engine for MMO i ever saw.

Edited August 6, 2015 by GinnoTaki

[RAVM]

• "its the engine"
  
• "its not the engine. u dun even no wut a engine is."
  
• "it works fine for me. problem must be on ur end."
  
• "you've obviously never tried 16-man ______"
  
• "its probably latency. that is from the distance between your computer and the server. you should fix that and the game will be fine for you then at 60fps."
  
• "engines have pistons. i'm a racecar!"
  
• "upgrade ur computer. its obviously too slow"
  
• "then why do i get 60fps in all the other MMOs that look 10x better than swtor"
  
• "like i said its the engine"
  
• "its NOT the engine"
  
• "i think its the new particle effects they added in the recent patch. things got worse for me then."
  
• "r u for real!? the game plays waay better for me this patch."
  
• "guys stop making threads about this it comes up all the time"
  
• "then maybe they should fix it?"
  
• "its too much work to fix"
  
• "other games do it"
  
• "go play the other games then"
  
• "clean ur computer"
  
• "did u defrag? that helped me. oh and update your drivers it helps!"
  
• etc...
  

 

Oh well...

 

Nice!!!

[CasperAndersen]

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.

 

Now see this is all i needed to hear, a statement from the officials, that it is not going to happen, but that they will continue to work on it and improve it. Thanks for telling me

[CasperAndersen]

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

I will admit i dont know anything about game engines. But i am a programmer and have some a pretty good idea at how it all works, granted im not sure if what i am going to say now is the game engine, but im pretty sure it is.

 

One of the reasons why it lags a lot on the fleet for an example, are all the players that get loaded, the problem here is that a player needs to be fully loaded before it is shown on the screen, where as in wow they load parts of the body and show each part, this leaves the buffer ready for input and reduces hang times. So when SWTOR needs to load 50 chars at GTN it is loading a lot of data in big chunks. If data should get corrupted or not get loaded, this presents some issues, this is the reason why torrents for an example dont just download an entire file, but rather breaks the file into small chunks, sends them, and the user then downloads small chunks and assembels them at his end when the torrent is finished

[masstan]

I am a programmer

 

Isn't everyone on this forum? It certainly was my impression.

[AshlaBoga]

Isn't everyone on this forum? It certainly was my impression.

 

I must be the exception then, I only do QA Software Testing.

[jedidar]

The problem as far as i haver understood, is that the game engine cant handle all the game. I know they made some modifications, but its still based on the Hero Engine. I think it's cool they keep adding new content, and it makes me more reasured that the game wont die anytime soon.

 

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. 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. Ofc this will be good for the game and for all the players since more people meens more action.

 

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.

 

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!

 

Stuff that doesn't need to be fixed won't be fixed, like a wise man once said. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

[GinnoTaki]

Stuff that doesn't need to be fixed won't be fixed, like a wise man once said. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

But it's broken, actually. That's why Ilum WZ is no more, as well as no sieges, no largescale open world PVP/GvG warfare and many other things which are the backbone of any successful MMO.((

[Pagy]

The problem as far as i haver understood, is that the game engine cant handle all the game. I know they made some modifications, but its still based on the Hero Engine. I think it's cool they keep adding new content, and it makes me more reasured that the game wont die anytime soon.

 

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. 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. Ofc this will be good for the game and for all the players since more people meens more action.

 

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.

 

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!

for starters, they dont own the game engine.

 

but most importantly, we're talking about bw, a group of devs that is small and incompetent and realese content at a snails pace not to mention cannot fix any in game bugs. their idea of development is reskinning items for sale in the cartel market.

[DOHboy]

for starters, they dont own the game engine.

 

but most importantly, we're talking about bw, a group of devs that is small and incompetent and realese content at a snails pace not to mention cannot fix any in game bugs. their idea of development is reskinning items for sale in the cartel market.

 

yet you are still here paying...we appreciate your continued support of a company you obviously have much disdain for.

[Pagy]

yet you are still here paying...we appreciate your continued support of a company you obviously have much disdain for.

correction: paid, not paying

[Darth-Rammstein]

I would say subs are around 200k (last mention was around 250k as far as i know, and well, more and more servers go light) and the only thing that keeps this game running is the CM. EA needs profit, so not every $ a game makes goes back into that game.

 

Yeah, I don't know if anyone has actual numbers but a lot of the servers are light and the rest are usually just standard with the exception of the harbringer and one other server on the EU being heavy. I agree that the cartel market as much as I was against it at first is the only thing keeping this game alive.

[Pagy]

this entire kotfe quest chain patch was genius.

 

overhype a tiny patch and new quest line, bait people into subbing for months in advance of the release, then only deliver half of it and bait people into subbing longer to see how it ends.

 

i'm not holding it against EAware at all, i think this entire campaign is so creative and smart.

[Orizuru]

Isn't everyone on this forum? It certainly was my impression.

 

Technically, all you need to be a programmer is Notepad and an internet connection.

[DOHboy]

this entire kotfe quest chain patch was genius.

 

overhype a tiny patch and new quest line, bait people into subbing for months in advance of the release, then only deliver half of it and bait people into subbing longer to see how it ends.

 

i'm not holding it against EAware at all, i think this entire campaign is so creative and smart.

 

tiny patch..where did you get that information since it hasnt' been released yet.

if you are so dead set against the expansion and as you have already said are no longer continuing your sub. why do you continue to post?

[MillionsKNives]

tiny patch..where did you get that information since it hasnt' been released yet.

if you are so dead set against the expansion and as you have already said are no longer continuing your sub. why do you continue to post?

 

To troll.