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Why is there a copy protection system in the graphics, and is it crippling the game?


Tiron_Raptor

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If it is in fact to protect against "private servers", keep in mind with the way copyright protection is in some countries, they may need to protect themselves from someone else running their own bootleg SWTOR on a large scale.

 

I could also see how it could have been an attempt to make the game more accessible to lesser computers which would be pretty defensible too.

 

The short story being that we need to know more before we bust out with hangin' rope for LA/EA?BioWare.

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One test which could help to clarrify this question, would be to QoS your connection and compare fps. Would suggest trying in zoned locations which youve never been to before, to reduce the chances of caching.

 

Which also raises the question. Are they being cached per session or on-the-fly.

 

But as i've been playing since the official release, this information doesnt change the game and BW have already implied they are looking into performance issues. So I, like probably most people will continue to play until further 'official' information is available.

 

And if you dont want to wait for a fix then see my tag line.

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This is amazing.

 

In my experience, when a single answer explains lots of questions in the same time, in a beautiful way, is is true.

 

This also would explain why the huge variety of player armors were removed before release, leaving us with recolores mainly.

 

I wonder what their response on the high texture thread will be today. If they lie (again), I will forever stay unsubbed and will never in a million years buy another BW product in my life, the same way I'm staying away from SOE and DELL.

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Actually it makes perfect sense that the bulk of the information for cut-scenes is performed server side... think about it when you're grouping with different people and you are watching a cut-scene: all of the armors/details of that character have to be rendered from the server.

 

IMO, and as fellow developer, if this is the case, Bioware will not be able to develop a solution for the "ability delay" and HD textures any time soon. It simply is not possible unless they are planning to release a patch that will turn the game from 1.0 -> 2.0 just like Aion.

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The best part is BW trying to pull the wool cloth over our eyes and get these things by us. No one is going to just accept the game for what it is and not try to improve it the Star Wars name is not enough to ignore things like this.
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If it is in fact to protect against "private servers", keep in mind with the way copyright protection is in some countries, they may need to protect themselves from someone else running their own bootleg SWTOR on a large scale.

That sentiment itself is fine, but if it's substantially impacting performance for legitimate customers it's more trouble than it's worth

I could also see how it could have been an attempt to make the game more accessible to lesser computers which would be pretty defensible too.

It would HAVE to be rendering the stuff on the server to do this, which is an EXTREME technical challenge and would cost a tremendous amount of money server-side to support it.

The short story being that we need to know more before we bust out with hangin' rope for LA/EA?BioWare.

 

Dead on. We know very little as yet. What we need more than anything is to know more.

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If it is in fact to protect against "private servers", keep in mind with the way copyright protection is in some countries, they may need to protect themselves from someone else running their own bootleg SWTOR on a large scale.

 

I could also see how it could have been an attempt to make the game more accessible to lesser computers which would be pretty defensible too.

 

The short story being that we need to know more before we bust out with hangin' rope for LA/EA?BioWare.

 

There are plenty of more proactive ways to protect against private servers than actively worsening the visual quality and performance of the game. Unique server side queues for encounters are one of the ways that WoWs content cant be emulated by private servers. If anyone wants to simulate the encounters like they happen in the real servers they actually have to code the behavior in by themselves, which is incredibly time consuming and requires an outstanding degree of game programing knowledge.

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This is BORDERLINE class action lawsuit if this is true...

 

I've had 2 6870's Crossfire.. running perfectly.. NEVER had a problem with my cards... and when i started playing SWTOR one of my cards went bad since i started playing..

 

Coincidence? i just recently had to replace my card.. ;(

 

 

I keep hearing other input from the community about the game running SO HOT... if this is true, if it hasn't damaged your systems yet? it's probably doing it RIGHT now over time.. i was just an unlucky one and my cards gave up on my first before others...

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Actually it makes perfect sense that the bulk of the information for cut-scenes is performed server side... think about it when you're grouping with different people and you are watching a cut-scene: all of the armors/details of that character have to be rendered from the server.

 

IMO, and as fellow developer, if this is the case, Bioware will not be able to develop a solution for the "ability delay" and HD textures any time soon. It simply is not possible unless they are planning to release a patch that will turn the game from 1.0 -> 2.0 just like Aion.

 

Nothing should "have to be rendered from the server". The server should tell your PC what models to use and your PC then renders it. There's no reason to render things on a server and then send that rendering to a PC with this type of game other than DRM or to run it on a PC that couldn't do the work on its own.

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Finally a truelly good forum post with next to no trolling/flaming etc etc...

 

+1 OP for putting this into the forumites domain...

 

On a side note I run SWTOR on an HP DV9550 lAPTOP WITH 4gb Ram and a 256Mb Nvidia 7600GS video card.... I play other MMO with flawless performance, no heat issues and all but SWOTR I can run without an qualm on the Highest settings.

 

I played on BETA and it was smooth, but when loading up and playing SWTOR after launch.... the imagery was absurdly poor even tho the settings were set to high and FPS lag like I have never seen before.

So played with all the setting, got FPS lag down and incred FPS to around 25FPS.. not ground breaking but playable... with the exception of intensive combat in Black Talon or running round Kass city (the cantina being the most ridiculous of all).. where FPS drops to summing ludicrous again.

So I updated to latest drivers... and noticed str8 away low res images were much better, latest shader versions etc must of done the trick... and now get arouns 40FPS.. with the same areas creating dramatic drop offs.. as already highlighted by many others.

 

BUT the heat generation has definately gone up... not causing any issues like one other has stated, but it has risen beyond 60 degrees on quite afew occasions, even with a coling pad underneath it.

 

All that aside I can still have a relatively decent in game experience but there is defiantwely something not right thats causing such issues with performance in this game.. if this is indeed the reason or something related to it, then SWTOR owe its paying community an explanation and a ruddy good patch up to solve it.

 

i read the article re low end PC users and tbh I have to laugh ... minority no, subscritption busting... quite possibly cos if they stated a min spec to run the game and your rigs meet or exceed it.. then you should be able to run it or maybe their specs were just pie in the sky... or maybe, just maybe there is some truth here and things were indeed altered before pre-order launch.....

 

Hopefully BW will do the right thing and address this thread one way or the other

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Does seem make some sense to me. But I had performance issues during the beta as well. I've never been satisfied with the performance of this game. I don't know how many bug reports I submitted and feedback I submitted about terrible performance.

 

I actually like the game alot. The only complaints I have are from a technical point of view.

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Most likely it has to do with the preorder item for the remote camera that removes your UI and puts you in first person mode.

 

That kind of control most likely asks for a server call to make sure it is valid.

 

The high texture issue, is probably unrelated.

It could be turned off for several reasons, but the most likely is poor performance when enabled or an issue they couldn't find a fix before release, so they disabled it.

 

Complete tin foil on my part but who knows.

Conspiracies are always fun to read so carry on.

Edited by Korizan
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you good sur are one hell of a detective!!

 

read it and now that i bin reading it some things fall in place.

 

the sudon "no movement from mouth" from a voice animated cut scene. the riding the speeder with lightsabers still out. and the atack a crate/box for quest object and lightsabers still point in the air funny. could verry well explain it

 

if i take a still copy of a prerendert animation and apply the changes i would have exactly what you discribing if the render actualy comes from the server. ( granted the last thing with the lightsabers pointing in the air should have a fault in the coding then to render it back to full after the move ) its begining to look ..... grim i actualy like the game but not to that extend destroying a fairly new rig in the proces.

 

if its true what you say .... our graphiccards gonna burnout sooner are later due to high trafic.

cant imagine that this can be good for anycard the amount of data transmited!!! would be stagering

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Actually that does nothing to solve it.

 

I missed that one earlier, that's just the ability QUEUE. It lets you set how long in advance of the cooldown finishing you can push the button and have it go off. It sticks it in a queue to set off when the cooldown finishes. It does cause a SLIGHT delay, because its timing for when the cooldown ends is off.

 

'Ability delay' is really a series of different issues that all cause some kind of interactivity problem, and this really isn't the thread for a full discussion of it.

 

One of them, however, is animations taking some time before they start, and delaying each other...which could be explained by this remote rendering thing lagging up the process.

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Actually that does nothing to solve it.

 

It really doesnt, what this does is set a time for the client to "hold" the next attack you press so it does it after finishing the last attack. I dont even know why they even implement it like this instead of doing the more conventional method of half or full like LOTRO and RIFT. I guess that in their desire to be different they opt for a more convoluted measure.

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An interesting, well thought out post with a lot of detailed information, thankyou.

 

I understand that no one really has any answers for this at the moment but if this was the method in which Bioware were rendering some of the 3D models, this would cause a significant strain on bandwidth, correct?

 

Now hopefully I'm not coming across as "one of those guys" here but my brother who isn't really an online gamer but loves StarWars is playing this with me on a fairly equally specced system but using a budget option 2mb internet line whereas I'm using 50mb. Our computers pretty much handle the game identically - would this theory not suggest that he would have more issues than I do due to his line speed being significantly slower?

 

Secondly, and in the same vein. SWTOR opens up US and EU servers for anyone who wants to play on them despite them being physically located in different parts of the world. I'm from the EU but my gameplay experience (minus a slight hitch in latency) is no different when I opt to play on a US server - wouldn't such a system have a harder time downloading and the rendering the data from the other side of the Atlantic?

 

Just thoughts. Keep up the discussion!

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I was trying to imagine what could possibly be the explanation for their reluctance to allow the option of high res textures. If it causes client instability/low frame rates on slower machines, the option should at least be there for those of us with high-end machines. To add to the mystery, Stephen Reid has admitted that they are not available and late last month called it a 'bug.' This week, however, he has been cryptic about an official statement that requires multiple sign-offs before we can see it.

 

I'm afraid that the idea of some sort of absurd copy protection that is bottlenecking the system makes perfect sense. I can only think that it is LA that is the culprit, as Bioware wouldn't want their game to look like garbage, and would turn this off or at the very least allow for an optional, locally stored, high resolution texture pack for those of us that care about how our characters look.

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I KNEW something was wrong. There is noway that the game runs at 100+fps (which it should on my rig) then drops down to 20, 30, 40 in some areas. it chugs like its a paging issue when I go to the imperial fleet

 

In some cases im on my mount and my fps will drop by 50 and pause, go, pause go....

 

Im running an I-7 920 Overclocked to 4.3Ghz

16 Gigs of Ram

2 EVGA 460's in SLi

 

I can run Battlefield 3 maxed out at 1920x1080 at over 70fps and swtor runs at 20fps in some areas? no way... like I said i knew something was horribly wrong.

 

This all makes sense with what the OP has posted. I was wondering what that 2nd process was.

 

I remember high res textures in the early beta. I had no idea why, even with nvidia console the game still looked bad. All makes sense now.....

 

Also if the server is sending out clients Textures and game data because its being rendered on their end, how will this affect my bandwidth? I need to check out netlimiter and see what the total bandwidth is here because some of us (in canada) has bandwidth caps.

 

noway in hell im stayed subbed if this game eats away at my monthly bandwidth cap.

 

Hopefully Bioware will response to this

 

Love this game but

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Just because it's called "remoterenderer" it doesn't mean that it's rendering running on the server side. It seems more like a different process on the same machine. The term "remote" is often used to refer to communicating with a different process running on the same machine.

 

Even if some (or all) rendering is done by a separate process it doesn't mean that a lot of data is being exchanged between the client and that process. I've been looking at RemoteRenderer.dll in a disassembler and judging by the function it exports, it directly initializes a directx renderer in a provided window handle.

 

Still it is unclear what role that remoterenderer.dll plays in the client, and it is still difficult to believe that the overhead of involving inter process communication in the rendering wouldn't have some significant performance cost.

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I didn't want to spend too much time on studying how client works and what happens with 2 different swtor client processes. Just run swtor on customized virtual machine and sniff what is getting in and out from that machine.

 

If OP claim stands, this definitely increases needed bandwidth for this game. And it will increase data inflow for game, meaning that game will "download" more data than other games. What makes sense if you take in consideration how they complicate things about ISP and connection to server.

 

As I said, it's not up to me, but if they aren't careful enough, they might loose more than win.

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