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

In Game rendering is done by Bioware's own code.
Hero Engine is nothing but a glorified World Editor in regards to SWTOR.

Interesting read, I hope Bioware responds with a full explanation. Low framerate is ruining my SWTOR experience and, quite frankly, will make me unsubscribe if not addressed.

If it is true, then this is one of the biggest development fails in recent memory... Copy protection on a online game... now that is new to me.

Sadly I wouldn't be surprised at all if they attempted to use this form of copy protection despite such huge drawbacks.

Actually it's very easy, from a procedural perspective. You attach a debugger and watch what is being stored in memory. Essentially, whenever a comparison is done with data, that data is stored in memory and you can look at that data with a debugger. You then watch this entire process and game it a bit like provoking specific actions and seeing what happens to learn how it works. Using this, it's only a matter of time to figure out things like descryption keys because somewhere there is a line of code that says "does this passed in key equal the real key" and that's where the real key is stored in memory somewhere and you see it using a tool like this. That's why, ultimately, DRM is a joke. It's only a matter of time before someone finds the address where an application stores its key.

I just picked up a Radeon 7970. Can't wait to install it after work Should be interesting to see just how much performance I get.... or not

OP Modified: Additional text added:

"it has been stated further on, but not confirmed, that the 'RemoteRenderer' is just part of the normal rendering system, and may be a renaming of or replacement for an original Hero Engine Component: The name may just be a coincidence. Hard data needed."

Thats it I'm calling George Lucas! I cant play warzones because of copy protection issues?! Whata joke.

If what you suggested was at all the case, there'd be a performance difference for me connecting to US vs EU servers. There isn't.

If what you suggested was at all the case, people with 20mbs connections would have better performance than people with 1mbs connections. They don't.

Transferring animations or textures in real-time to EVERY game user is physically impossible. They do not have the computers neccesary to handle that amount of bandwidth, not even google does.

They could do what Gaikai and OnLive does, which is to render everything and stream the video, but the fact that I can turn on AntiAliasing in the graphics control manager proves that local rendering is being done.

You can watch a youtube video of somebody playing a game, and turning on force AA will not effect the video. AA requires depth data. But you force AA on, and SWTOR is AA'd. Ergo, it must be rendering locally.

You suggested that maybe just character models or animations are being streamed. Again, they don't have the number of servers necessarily to pull something like that off. Google doesn't. That is just SO MUCH traffic, think about it. 350,000 concurrent users downloading, say even 1 megabyte of data per second.

Then there's the fact that during gameplay, your transfer is usually in the kb/s range, not hte mb/s range, which the game would require for Gaikai / OnLive style play, MUCH LESS actually streaming models and animations or textures which would require upwards of 16MB/s to even get close to realistic (still not going to happen, animations are even bigger than textures).

You can verify these things yourself.

All of these points have been made at least 3 times, by myself, in addition to others.

And now Bioware has come out and admitted what is going on, addressed the issue, and nowhere was any sort of streaming or local server or decryption or bandwidth or server issue mentioned. We have a perfectly, 100% logical explanation for why high resolution textures are not available.


PLEASE MODIFY YOUR ORIGINAL POST.
THESE ARE NOT THE DROIDS YOU ARE LOOKING FOR.

That may be true, but [citation required] ?