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

I'm treating SW:TOR like an open source project.

You go to their github, you drop a ticket, you write down what you see, and if you know a thing or two, what you think may be the issue, and if you know enough, you branch off, fix it, then push back.

I can't do any of that for obvious reasons.

The next big thing I can do is make a stink until the Customer Support team, which has infinitely more influence over things than any of us, and actually may even participate in the dev standups, take notice.

Do you honestly think my email detailing all of these problems would have been picked out from the thousands of people requesting pony-shaped lightsabers, LFG for Ops, or wondering why their tauntaun pet can't be cut open for extra warmth?

As it turns out, this thread was moved to the suggestion box... which means someone saw it.

Of course, now this thread will die because that's where threads go to die... sigh...

Yeah, some moderator was probably told to do some damage control and moved this into the rubbish bin... urm, suggestion box. =/

Because it isn't an open source project.

No, the best thing you could have done is use the ticketing system and been infinitely more polite than you actually were.

Ultimately, the ends do not justify the means.

I don't care....?

*looks back at other posts that were kind and full of bunnies and rainbows and Skittles(TM) while offering a technical breakdown*

Nope, none of those exist.

*looks back at other posts that were kind and full of snide and sarcasm and big meanie meanness while offering a technical breakdown*

Hey, I found one!

It has 20k+ views.

Looks like my way works. Of course, you are free to post numbers, results, and a detailed history of such things that say otherwise.

Or stick to out-dated rules of thumb and pray for the best. That's cool, too.

Now you're just splitting hairs. Of course I mean outside the parameters of the typical 8-10ms latency that's not even detectable by the human eye. Typical latency will not be noticed. What you're describing only happens noticeably if the latency is outside normal operating parameters, and we're talking hundreds of ms. Only then will the block be noticed.

For example, I never notice the block-stops until, one day, I forgot to reschedule my virus scan. When that thing kicked up, then I noticed it. And I appreciate the block-stops, actually.

Like I said, once technology catches up to this coding, and is able to be "unfolded", we'll see the fuller potential of it.

...

The human eye is not even a valid point of reference when dealing with massive i/o systems. I am seriously starting to doubt your claim of having a background in technology.

That 8-10 millisecond is seek time PER SECTOR, not per file, and not per application operation and certainly not per HeroScript. And that's just the seek time, your not even accounting for rotation latency.

You do realize that the HeroEngine has a repository, which is a database engine that sits on top of file i/o requests, an that adds latency as well? And that these file i/o requests are pulling up a serious amount of textures, models, and other assets, resulting in a very high amount of sectors being called upon?

Once those sectors start adding up, a blocking operation can be crippling.

SOME MAFFS TO END THIS CHARADE

IF you are dealing with a HD that is partitioned to have its sector size to be 1024 bytes, operates at 10,000 RPM, and you are pulling up 4MBs (4096 sectors) of assets for the very first time mid-game operation via a blocking script, and perhaps those assets are fragmented all over the disk and you have to hop between them... check these times out

100% sector scatter: 12.28 seconds
75% sector scatter: 9.216 seconds
50% sector scatter: 6.14 seconds
25% sector scatter: 3.07 seconds
10% sector scatter: 1.228 seconds
5% sector scatter: 0.614 seconds
1% sector scatter: 0.1228 seconds (Does those dismount hiccups sound familiar yet?)

If just a mere 5% of those .DAT files do not have concurrent sectors on this setup.. THE ENTIRE GAME LOOP STOPS FOR OVER A HALF SECOND.

And I haven't even factored in any delays caused by any indexing the repository adds on top of that. AND I'm running this equation in an isolated environment where no one else is going near the hard drive.. not even the Operation System. This equation acts as if SW:TOR was the only application in the entire resource universe and didn't even have an operating system to get in the way!

That's not negligible!

You are saying that BW is on some cutting edge quantum computer stuff, and that we all need 40,000 RPM or not-invented SSDs in order to play the game! That's nonsense. Total nonsense. I'm never going to suggest that we, the consumers, subsidize their inability to embrace industry standard solutions. Accounting for latency in disk i/o has been a solved problem since the 1980s and you do it by having your game loop be event-driven.

A couple more things you should be taking into consideration, and don't seem to be:

First of all, the devs have mentioned that this engine has been modified by BioWare so extensively, that it's not even the HERO engine anymore, so any info you've gathered on it probably doesn't apply, and secondly, they built this engine to last the next decade, as per James Ohlen. The simple fact that it requires a dual-core processor already tells you there is more under the hood and waiting to implemented than the mere bare-bones engine we're seeing right now. In other words, you're seeing only the tip of the iceberg.

I admire what you're trying to do here, and it seems you have some analytical skills, but don't fall into the trap of disregarding clues and elements simply because they don't fit your theory. Make a theory that fits ALL the evidence, not fit evidence into your theory.

What is he disregarding that will make everything he has said and shown evidence for irrelevant?

I think he is spot on.

I read this whole post and all it seems that your trying to do is "be the bigger man" or "1-UP him". You probably agree with everything he says, your just too "proud" to acknowledge it.

I agree with much of his findings. I disagree that it's solely TOR doing it, or that there aren't some other things that seem to be exacerbating it (this is what he's disregarding). It's impossible to completely isolate what's causing the extreme latency. Also, because I have yet to experience these spikes, and I play 8+ hours a day since the first day of Early Access.

LMAO, built the engine to last the next decade? what are you smoking? it's based on directx 9 !!! they need to modify the engine to last the next 5 years if they want graphic cards to actually be compatible with their backwards decision making (directx 9 is emulated now, you actually need to dig thru the MS website to install it seperately lol. 10 years, man it's gonna be retired or something). They don't even have a 64 bit client? Who designs an engine for the next decade with a 32 bit client?!!?!? They have to create their own cache file on a HDD (detrimental to performance given the amount of times it's forced to be accessed) because their client has limited access to memory!!!

Seriously, they need to bring their code up to standards, and have better resource management. FTP MMOs have far better tech than they do! (and they have 100mil+ invested in dev). They're too management heavy, and need more capable coders. Maybe the EA cull will help with this? Then again, EA management is kinda useless these days.