Day/night cycle and random weather effects would be nice

That would be really cool!

riiiight. Because, as we all know, the people who work on the background graphics in a mmorpg are also exactly the same team who work on the character programming and stats.

 

Get a grip.

so true

To some it might seem like such a small thing; especially given how many players feel there are still glaring bugs that should be take priority above this sort of thing. However, to devote the time and energy to do the 'little' things like this shows that you guys care about your players and the worlds you've created for us to play in.

 

So on behalf of the players who do enjoy the game; to everyone here that runs the site and the forums, and to everyone at BioWare and EA and LucasArts; thank you for caring to give us updates like this.

Exactly what this guys said. Thanks for even the smallest of improvements, it shows you care about the game. There are always going to be bugs and glitches, but tweaking details such as this is what brings life into TOR. Thanks Bioware and all responsible!

Looks neat, but one concern does continue to crop up.

"No drop in performance".

That's what was said about the shadow update in 1.4.

(Edit - The developer blog entry said this: "Players with high-end AMD CrossFire or Nvidia SLI machines should notice a large improvement when running the game with the new shadow system.")

That update broke CrossFire completely, and all the testing was done on 8-revision-out-of-date graphics drivers.

I would devoutly hope that the new shader looks good, and can actually live up to its billing.

I would hate to see a repeat of 1.4 where we were promised a significant increase in performance in multi-GPU setups, and an increase in image quality, and got neither as the former breaking renders the latter unusable.

^^ I agree. At the very least this patch did fix a couple of issues that I was aware of. But why did those issues move to the top of the fix list? Drunkard's Vote Cantina on Coruscant still doesn't work when you need to speak to a companion (this has been reported after every single patch since launch). Our taxis still flicker like mad ever since you broke it a couple patches ago. The scenery in game is beautiful, but because of lag, latency and other issues I can't ever set my settings above extremely low, low or off. So making pretty grass that I won't see due is at the bottom of my priority list. Why not make the game FUNCTIONAL so we can use some of the higher graphics settings.

 

For all you haters that will point to all the various posts and articles about tweaks to make my game run faster, I have read them all and have implemented all of them that apply to my machine and OS. It works great if I don't need to see pretty grass. My machine is not the problem I am talking about. My rant here is about all of the bugs that have gone unresolved since launch, and all of the bugs that have been introduced because BW decided it is more important to bring in new content versus fixing the old. FIX IT FIRST, then give us pretty shiny new content.

You do realize that technical artists aren't bug bashers, right? I think maybe the only thing Ben could fix there is the taxi flicker. That's about it. If those bugs aren't getting fixed, it's because the programmers aren't fixing them, or are researching ways how. It has nothing to do with a technical art update, and the scheduling of such has absolutely ZERO impact on development scheduling. It's merely an inclusion to a much bigger package.

Lol, are you willfully ignorant? What about Rift? The amount of content that game received in the first 12 months blows this game out of the water.

Then go play Rift. No one's forcing you to be here.

Looks neat, but one concern does continue to crop up.

 

"No drop in performance".

 

**SNIP**

 

I would hate to see a repeat of 1.4 where we were promised a significant increase in performance in multi-GPU setups, and an increase in image quality, and got neither as the former breaking renders the latter unusable.

Ok, except that's not what was promised. My only concern is a "drop in performance." I was hit like everyone else in 1.4. While I get faster framerates, the camera hitches and stutters all over the place, despite my FRAPS benchmarking a 60 +/- 5 fps rate. The hitching makes it feel like it stutters +/- 20 fps. If 1.5's shader update breaks it further, I'm afraid this game could be headed for quite a tumultuous F2P launch.

I really hope this doesn't impact performance more.

I'm really not sure what's up with the graphics in this game but some places (Voss and tython in particular) have terrible framerates because of the shaders.

There's no reason for it, I run games like Skyrim, Half-Life 2, and other very intense graphics games without much framerate loss ever.

I mean this game looks good but it's not THAT intense. I do love the upgrades but I just hope that some of the issues can be roped in soon

And we have some even better improvements in the pipe for future updates

Like optimizing the craptastic engine you use?

Like optimizing the craptastic engine you use?

That would be a good start, but don't hold your breath. Those chose to license a crappy engine, knowing it was incomplete, and filled in the gaps themselves. It probably can't be optimized, much less actually upgraded/updated, without breaking things.

Ok, except that's not what was promised. My only concern is a "drop in performance." I was hit like everyone else in 1.4. While I get faster framerates, the camera hitches and stutters all over the place, despite my FRAPS benchmarking a 60 +/- 5 fps rate. The hitching makes it feel like it stutters +/- 20 fps. If 1.5's shader update breaks it further, I'm afraid this game could be headed for quite a tumultuous F2P launch.

Except that it is.

I quoted the developer blog post.

I turned on the new shadows with a pair of 5870s in CrossFire (which previously ran the game absolutely flawlessly at 1920x1200 with everything jacked up), and instead of the increased performance as promised, I got an unplayable stuttery lagfest with FPS no better than 10 FPS (a drop of over 100) when moving the camera or my character.

Which is exactly how things continue to be, as the only patch that was implemented may have had some benefit for SLI users, but none whatsoever for CrossFire.

However, to devote the time and energy to do the 'little' things like this shows that you guys care about your players and the worlds you've created for us to play in.

I'd rather they worked on 'little things' like the hood clipping bug that has existed since 1.2 and has yet to be fixed.

I really appreciated how he explained Shaders and showed side-by-side comparisons of his work. I had heard people mention the term Shaders a lot before, but I never really understood what it meant and I feel that now I understand it better.

Thanks, and the translucent foliage does look amazing.

- Kickimanjaro

I am glad to see little improvements to the game and improvements at all, this is one of the most fun games and best MMO in my opinion with the best days to come. Don't know why people got discouraged so early, with so much potential it can only be amazing in the years to come and people will flock back.

I'm sure the devs are also working on multiple different things at the same time to please gamers.

That being said I only worry about one thing and that is the hero engine. I'm afraid this might be the only problem going forward, I do not share the negative view of the past. its normal for gamers to leave in mass today most if not all games experience this then go back up.

What I'd like to know is whether it is even possible to change the engine in the future, I see hero is slowing down progress that can otherwise be made on the game. One such thing is the improved fps you were working on, but when seeing how jittery NPCs are at a distance it point to a graphic cheat or gimmick rather than a fix, this is a little worrisome imo as it tells me there are no final solutions with Hero but only patches so to speak.

Again can and will the Hero engine be replaced in the future?