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

Depends on how it works, exactly. If it's just sending the assets from the server, it wouldn't cause all that much of a bandwidth hit, and this is far more likely to be the case as a result. It costs them a LOT less to have your system do the 'remote rendering' in that second process using assets streamed from the server, since they don't need the power to do the rendering or the bandwidth to send fully rendered video streams.

Or something like that at any rate.

/subbed

Lucas don't want nobody making mini Star Wars movies for youtube.

As a software developer I would just like to throw in my 2 cents:

The concept that all animations being rendered on your computer are being streamed from TOR servers is LUDICROUS. BEYOND IMPOSSIBLE. You guys have taken a little bit of information and just ran with it, snowballed into something completely absurd.

Textures are not being streamed. High-res textures are on your hard-drive and are constantly available; they are used during conversations. Go click on your intercom; for a second everything gets higher resolution and bump mapping turns on. There is *no* way this much data is being downloaded in the tenth of a second between my clicking the intercom button and seeing the response.

Animations are most certainly NOT being streamed. Do you know how big animation data is? You're suggesting that Bioware's servers are doing ALL the rendering for EVERY client? Are you MAD? Do you have ANY, ANY idea of the SCALE of what you are describing, WHATSOEVER?

First, this is just infeasible on the scale of the number of users. There are a million plus subs to TOR right now. Concurrent of up to 350,000+ users. THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND. Do you have any concept of how many servers it would take to render all those animations constantly over the wire???!?!?!?

NEXT, lets consider latency. If the server were rendering every animation for you, the amount of time it would take to see a response would be MUCH, MUCH longer. You guys have taken a small problem with ability queuing and animation delay and have somehow assumed that those animations are being DOWNLOADED? Uh, noooooo. No. nononono. There's no freaking way.

I don't think Google's servers could handle 350,000+ concurrent downloads of animation data in real time.

This suggestion is absolutely bonkers, and any of you who are giving it any credence need to go learn some computer science.

Animation data is exponentially larger than texture data. This just isn't possible, guys.


EDIT: Also, this does nothing to stop people from recording youtube videos, as A ) it would be about the source models and textures, not the resultant rendered image, B ) there are already videos on youtube of SWTOR...

PLEASE THINK, people! Uggh. I feel like this whole thread is trolling.

ok, how do you subscribe to a thread, havent figured this one out yet

very interesting read.

I know about the 2nd swtor.exe, found it by accident and wondered what this is about. Also, I have noticed the heatspike. Not as bad, but tor causes around 5°C more on my graphic card than the other games I'm playing.

Very interesting indeed.

There's also a remoterendererclient.dll and Remoterendererserver.icb, the last of which based on that other thread appears to be related to the second swtor.exe process.

It's far more likely that SOME of the assets are streamed from the server and rendered via the second process, possibly using software rendering (which would be terrible).

I did update the OP to try to make that clearer too...

If this is true it is outrageous i dunno what to say the Origin affair with Bf3 was bad enough but this is on a whole new level.

I'm pretty sure they wouldn't do ANY rendering on the game server. That would be ridiculous by any standards. not just because of increases bandwidth, but because of increases server CPU cycles to actually have to render something rather than just server out information about where things are located and what they are doing. Though they may hold the data needed to render full models on the server, and transfer that to the client as needed, in a secure way. But even this is only a guess unless confirmed.

While everything you said is true, that's not what is being theorised.

Read the paper that guy dug up, it's clear that only a small part would need to be subject to this 'remoting' to achieve the 'protection' being talked about, yet big enough to cause the huge FPS and lag problems prople are seeing.