Your technology needs help... lots of help... lots and LOTS of help. :(

WALLS OF TEXT COMING TO A THREAD NEAR YOU

It appears I've struck a vein with the community. Honestly, I did not expect this sort of thing to get to 20 some pages. I'm just a guy that likes the SW IP and I wanna swing glowsticks at meat bags >

Grammarye has a few points worth mentioning and I believe covering his points should cover most people's as well:

Of course this is hyperbole. Unless you are an employee of the product that has access to the VC repos, you're not going to be able to make factual claims about the software or its implementation. My hands are chained to the realm of hyperbole and conjecture, and since that is the stage I am occupying, I, the code monkey dance puppet, shall dance the dance of ancient hyperbole before me! So come and dance with me!

Short of sniffing packets and measuring time, (which I might do but I haven't researched if SW:TOR deploys rootkits/monitoring software.. you know what? Forget that. I'll setup a proxy on a box and sniff the packets there, screw you rootkit!) all I have is speculation. I even clearly alluded to that in the first post. I can't claim authority over the facts of the situation. But I can claim -some- authority on knowledge regarding situations that are very similar in terms of the fundamentals of network infrastructure. Take that for what ever it's worth, if you would be so kind.

The common conclusion to the slowdown problems is to throw more client side hardware. I've seen people claim to have outrageous SLI setups with SSDs all over the place still get hammered on load times. These are setups that could be part of legitimate cryptographic analysis operations and here they are, chugging along. Again, I have no hard statistics to back any of these conclusions, but if these tidbits was all I had to go off of (which it is), I would say that unless SW:TOR was actually just a cleverly skinned version of a real-time rendering version of Maya3D in disguise, that the problem is not the client hardware in most cases.

I personally have the lowest settings possible and my hardware is crap. I won't even bother putting the specs out there, it's pure garbage. But I can run Skyrim at full settings at 24-30FPS. Apples and oranges, you might say, and I'll take that, but there is one thing SW:TOR has that Skyrim does not: massive network i/o. Elephant in the room massive. Shirley Temple massive. (What does that even mean!?)

And then there is a dead give away: When wandering around and a person enters my LOS for the first time, I get a spike in lag. That says resource sync problems, and that gives away the whole shebang of their theory of asset management.

Don't tell me you think they have one machine with INT_MAX threads handling all client I/O. Chances are, they have a whole bunch of front-facing boxes for client i/o, routing all of those requests to a message queue, which pushes them to secondary processes (storage, analysis, calculation [You ever write an achievement engine before? it gets painful], etc) and the results are then pushed back down to the client i/o and then subsequently to the client. And they probably have an F5 or two in front of it. Lots of network i/o. Lots of potential bottlenecks. Because of these factors, you absolutely need every part of that system to handle requests when they can, not on-demand… and your code absolutely has to reflect this reality that a timely operation is not guaranteed. Therefore, based on the previous statements, it is my professional guess is they have quite a few on-demand processes gumming up the works.

Now, as per discerning what particular culprit it may be, I know for a fact that their client resource pulls are synchronous. If you walk into an area where you are requesting the attire of hundreds of people who are registered in a MQ channel, HOPEFULLY by an ID that a database is using as an index, you then have to hit the database for everyone of those people (unless you have their attire data in the MQ itself).. then you have to pipe down all of that data to -each- person that enters a room… then the client pulls uncached textures, light maps, and models to the RAM every single time you need they pop into client side LOS,... if any part of this process is blocking, you are screwed. Completely.

It is completely obvious that a client will have to wait until he gets all of the room data, then he has to pull all of those assets, then the engine has to render them… and then he gets to play. That's what a synchronous process does and that is very similar to what is going on with myself and other people with extremely high-end machines. The way to solve this is to make your asset strategy async. This is what every major player does because it works.

Every time a person changes their clothes? Moves? Presses a button that trigger an animation? I bet their servers aren't doing LOS calculations to figure out which people can see him do that to determine who to push to intelligently and reduce internal and external traffic. (Tree falls in the woods, does anyone ACK?) I'd be willing to bet that data just gets pushed down to everyone in the room.

EDIT: And I'd bet wrong. SW:TOR does AOS pushes, but is also have the client's physics engine be the authority on movement state... lolwat

Why do this? Because it works and it takes less time to develop. And that's what it's all about: Does it work? Yes? MOVE ON TO THE NEXT TICKET WOOOOOOOOOOO

Now as per business culture issues and why this setup is suffering, that is simple. Star Wars is a licensed IP of massive popularity. Licensed IPs of massive popularity are expensive up front (and above-the-line) and their ROI schedule would be completely insane make investors happy. Therefore, I'm almost certain that this product was ushered in via a pump-and-dump strategy with a very tight watch on the bottom line, mores than usual for other MMOs, with any programming concern that couldn't be solved in 5 minutes being put to a backlog to collect dust. Every possible corner was cut and it will always show up as technical debt, plain and simple.

This point is reinforced by their gimmicky marketing of the beads and blankets they are given to the rest of the tribe to extend the amount of money they can siphon without actually having to solve any of these technical (and expensive) shortcomings.

And, honestly, don't assume programmers are automatically axed from leadership roles. We got waves of brogrammers coming in, ready to drink with the rest of the Skull and Bones frats under the table!

Stop talking and go fix this game superman! I mean "Clark Kent"

I have no idea what your saying but you say it so well I'd hire ya to fix me dish washer about now. I'd just throw ya the keys at EA and say "It's the room with all the blinking lights that says "Star Wars" N stuff". Do ya thing...checks in the mail.

BW please hire this guy, he knows what he is talking about.

Now with numbers!

http://www.swtor.com/community/showt...40#post4176540

I read that somewhere once. I don't remember where.

I just want to chime in and say that the polygon counts on WoW models are insanely low, which is a big reason why that game does so well with performance. It wasn't always like that, though, with older computers. Lagrimmar and Ironlag where common names for some cities known for serious, well, lag.

SWTOR has some issues, that's for sure, but I've been impressed so far with how Bioware has prioritized the updates.

I recall that, as well, and that problem was fixed by moving to a dynamic asset loading strategy. When applied here, it will fix a myriad of problems. Getting 10 packets every second per player is the fastest way to obliterate your servers and your clients... which explains the Ilum fiasco.

From what I understand about networking, your logic and explanations (I also read your 2nd technology post) seem right but it's the way you say it that bothers me. Maybe it's just me but it sounds "rude" and "condescending".

Hell yes.

I don't understand how SWTOR can push my GPU to 70C with an absurd amount of load screens, and most stuff hidden behind instances.

Can you please explain why the hell SWTOR throws up a load screen when I launch my TV tuner or my email while I'm standing in the fleet doing nothing?

Playing TERA with it's beautiful Unreal 3 engine is like waking up from a nightmare, and it never taxes my GPU past 60C, and there isn't a single load screen unless you teleport.