Stephen, I have a Masters in IT - I can point you in the dirction of this particular piece of technology. If indeed it is being used, then this poses a lot of problems - not only redering isssues but placing pieces of software on people's computers that they are not aware of - there could be serious legal ramifications if the latter is the case...

Also Stephen, I am studying a Masters in Physics and Astrophysics, and intend on applying for a PhD in Quantum Dot applications to computing. With this in mind, if you are using a quantum computer to run game servers, I hope you aren't directly observing them or their quantum behaviour will stop.

since i know bioware for so long, actually they are 1 of the only company that ONLY THINKS FOR THE GAMERS, not for the CASH and thats practicaly proved by the years

 

Complete and total ********.

Having "A Masters in IT" makes me think you went to a national university and not somewhere reputable. That is also like Saying I have a masters in science, very non specific.

It doesn't matter, you can claim anything you want, why not claim something non-specific?

all i can say this thread is absolute lame, pull yourself together guys, stop speculating on things that are beyond you.

 

since i know bioware for so long, actually they are 1 of the only company that ONLY THINKS FOR THE GAMERS, not for the CASH and thats practicaly proved by the years

 

althou with EA involved they might turn bioware visions into the $$$, i just hope they will keep their spirit up and dont give up to EA greediness

 

and i`m certain if anything stupid like this as the OP suggest is involved Bioware 10000% will first talk to the gamers about this before anything else

 

what i can say... lame thread is lame

Did you not play the cash grab that was Dragons Age 2?

The "smell test" of conspiracy theories is to answer a single question: WHY?

 

Why would BioWare put all this nefarious code in place? Why would they create high-quality textures and then not use them? Not only not use them, but attempt to cover them up?

 

They're a business. They want to make a profit. That is their only driving force.

 

Please answer the "WHY?" question within that context.

Because people running private servers that can be logged into for free reduces the need to give them money to play on their servers. The Chinese in particular seem to have a thing for doing this.

By removing some critical assets from the client, and preventing them from being reconstructed, you could make private servers at the least difficult to create, and at the worst nonfunctional or at least missing important assets.

It might also be easier to demonstrate code theft, if the private server guy somehow got ahold of the 'secret' part of the equation.

Having "A Masters in IT" makes me think you went to a national university and not somewhere reputable. That is also like Saying I have a masters in science, very non specific.

They guy you quoted said he did NOT have a masters in IT.

Well the decryption would be on-the-fly, so only as needed. And it's quite possible, especially with caching and pre-loading. You can encrypt entire hard drives boot an OS on them, decrypting/encrypting as you go.

 

I'm not aware of any other MMO doing this but there's always a first with new copy protection methods.

It would drag the game performance to a halt. Your OS takes 5 minutes to boot if its doing decryption on-the-fly, and it doesn't have 3D real-time graphics in the back ground to worry about.

Maybe it is just me, maybe not but most of us, if not all, have more compute under our desks than what we went to the moon with. Just food for though /rollseyes

I mean seriously - don't be BIG BROTHER here. Let the people choose what options they want to set. If they want eye candy in its full glory let them pay the price either in performance or computer upgrades. Hell, you are doing your part by helping the economy (and we all know what mess that is in the U.S. huh?). If the end user wants performance but doesn't have the horsepower then let them turn off some stuff.

Then let your development team go off and play with higher performing clients that you can roll out in later patches. But this shouldn't be a issue with todays hardware. Even if we have older gen Intel or AMD cpu's we can spend 80 bucks, buy a SSD, install the game there, and thus removes any bandwidth limitations on moving textures between CPU, GPU, and what not.

I'm not even going to get into the whole computers have this wonderful thing called CACHE or how much memory the GPU's have today. Don't be shy - use it.

It doesn't matter, you can claim anything you want, why not claim something non-specific?

I went to YALE kind Sir! and got a PHd in Flame Reduction.

This thread is the worst example of mob mentality I have yet to see on the general forum. One person makes an unsubstantiated claim and it turns into a 50 page nightmare with an official response from the moderator.

So many good threads just die because of garbage like this. As always mob rules and calm, rational thinking takes a back seat.

The speculation as the moment is that it's an attempt to break private servers, by essentially making some of the assets unavailable to them: It's the only plausible thing anyone's come up with to explain why you might do such a thing.

 

I can't see simple encryption accomplishing that, however. With access to the client, which we all have, you could pretty easily break the encryption.

 

There'd have to somehow be some kind of element that wasn't present in the client necessary to the process.

It would be primarily to protect local art assets, so like you said to prevent private servers, also to prevent theft of art assets by other games. It could also improve security by essentially checksumming assets on-demand.

And encryption done correctly can be very difficult to break. What this boils down to is a form of code-signing a la consoles. Remote authorization is required to access game assets on a regular basis. (Speculation!)

So high quality textures on the character is bad because MMO engines cant handle it, or just ToR's engine, here in 2012?

At least add it to the preferences->graphics menu so that those with better PCs can enjoy it.

It would drag the game performance to a halt. Your OS takes 5 minutes to boot if its doing decryption on-the-fly, and it doesn't have 3D real-time graphics in the back ground to worry about.

Full drive encryption, whichever sort comes packed in with Fedora anyway, doesn't cause this sort of an effect. Once the key is entered it's pretty much completely transparent. What kind of general performance impact it has I've never measured, but it doesn't dramatically affect boot up time.

So high quality textures on the character is bad because MMO engines cant handle it, or just ToR's engine, here in 2012?

 

At least add it to the preferences->graphics menu so that those with better PCs can enjoy it.

Because your hard drive can't read it out fast enough to get it into the memory where it can actually be used in a timely fashion.

This can almost certainly be compensated somehow or another, eventually, but it's not going to a quick or easy thing to do.

I went to Oxford and got a doctorate in underwater basket weaving

So I think I'm qualified to say that BW will fix this

Full drive encryption, whichever sort comes packed in with Fedora anyway, doesn't cause this sort of an effect. Once the key is entered it's pretty much completely transparent. What kind of general performance impact it has I've never measured, but it doesn't dramatically affect boot up time.

Full drive encryption can increase boot time substantially, but once the main system files are cached things are about normal.

That said, this encryption would be on specific assets, not runtime files (which are susceptible to such disk encryption slowdown). The bulk of required assets can be decrypted during the long planet load time. There are several large cache files in the game that have very high disk i/o during load times.

I went to Harvad and got a PhD in Social Psychology and I can say that with all of my education and learning considered, this is a 50+ page troll thread.

Social Psychology? You enjoy working in Mcdonald's?

Well - is it speculation? You do have mods replying.

I mean you or I can start the client, pull up a process list, and see what is running. Most people with any common sense could deduce that two processes talking to one another on the same system has overhead.

In regards to the possible theory that it is done to prevent private servers. Other mmo's face this issue. I think they took the higher road though and just built a better game or added content. Use any search engine you want to and you will see them out there. Yet some of those games still report large number of subscribers.

Private servers are unsecure and allow cheating. Not much fun depending on yoru play style. Other servers are running because the games are no longer being maintained, released, or supported. Take your pick but in the end it comes down to the development team and publisher.

Build a good game and people will pay to play.

Full drive encryption, whichever sort comes packed in with Fedora anyway, doesn't cause this sort of an effect. Once the key is entered it's pretty much completely transparent. What kind of general performance impact it has I've never measured, but it doesn't dramatically affect boot up time.

Full-drive encryption, like BitLocker, is dependent on special hardware that performs the transformation.

But since he said they aren't, your point is moot.

Not necessarily... companies say a lot of things to cover their assets Look at Adobe. They are famous for putting "viruses" on your computer all in the name of DRM.

Don't believe everything that you hear just because a company rep says so... We all need further investigation into this.

Full drive encryption can increase boot time substantially, but once the main system files are cached things are about normal.

 

That said, this encryption would be on specific assets, not runtime files (which are susceptible to such disk encryption slowdown). The bulk of required assets can be decrypted during the long planet load time. There are several large cache files in the game that have very high disk i/o during load times.

Interesting, but if they were being decrypted and loaded into memory during the load time, it shouldn't cause any further performance issues. The second process doesn't generally use enough memory for it to be storing a large amount of assets, so if they were, for example, being unpacked into it and then rendered into the client as we've been discussing, it'd have to be a relatively small proportion of the total assets at worst.

Could the high disk i/o be connected with the texture difficulties Mr. Reid explained earlier?

Actually, by the sounds of it, this could actually go a long way to making the game MORE playable on lesser PCs, since the strain of rendering is on the internet connection, and not the local graphics card.

Yeah, maybe if you have a 5 gigabit/s Internet connection

all i can say this thread is absolute lame, pull yourself together guys, stop speculating on things that are beyond you.

 

since i know bioware for so long, actually they are 1 of the only company that ONLY THINKS FOR THE GAMERS, not for the CASH and thats practicaly proved by the years

 

althou with EA involved they might turn bioware visions into the $$$, i just hope they will keep their spirit up and dont give up to EA greediness

 

and i`m certain if anything stupid like this as the OP suggest is involved Bioware 10000% will first talk to the gamers about this before anything else

 

what i can say... lame thread is lame

BW has their hands tied - why? EA owns them. They bought BW a long time ago...