Oh, I'm not trolling, I'm just trying to inform some people who seem misguided, may have misinterpreted some stuff, or are ignorant of certain realities facing game design.

"Fixed a bug that allowed cutscenes to display high res textures, cutscenes now properly display medium textures"

 

 

 

Fixed a bug that allowed cutscenes to display high res textures, cutscenes now properly display medium textures

 

Fixed a bug that was causing certain abilities to have delayed and laggy casting times, all abilities now have delayed and laggy casting times

 

Alien dialogue subtitles were disappearing before players could finish reading them, all alien dialogue has been replaced by english voice acting from Jimmy the Intern

 

Excessive sharding was dispersing the player population, resulting in empty and lonely zones. Randomized NPCs resembling other players have been inserted into phased areas. They will automatically /wave at you when approached.

 

A bug was causing glitched green laser effects to appear above most settlements. The green laser effects are now called "Galactic Auroras" and given a codex entry explaining how they are a good luck charm if you spot them!

Apologies in advance to those patiently waiting here.

 

I won't have a response for you today, but will tomorrow.

 

This shows as being posted yesterday at 7:22 pm EST. So I thought we would see an answer today, or at least another response here.

Like they have done with many other MMO's in the past!

 

Hoping valid issue threads like these getting closed due to their trolling!

 

And so Effectively, due to their actions they are basically actively helping running this game into the ground, by making tons of people quit!

 

Worked great in warhammer... they can just open the closet at Bioware-mythic and ask the last remaining employee how that will work out.

Yeah, because when a man in Central time, USA, posts at 1:22AM, he is really speaking about Australian time.

 

I'm sorry you can't tell time. If you look at the posts being made right now, I can promise you that the time displayed on the post is not the actual time. I'll edit in a reply with clarification.

 

For reference, my forum display is one hour later than my current time. It's 6:20 eastern, 5:20 in Austin, and on my particular forum display it is showing 7:19pm.

 

The "I'll have your info tomorrow" post is tagged, for me, on 1.9.12 at 8:22pm. Drop off the same two hours for display error and that likely puts his comment at around 6:20p.m. EAware time.

 

I can assure anyone here that I did, in fact, read his post yesterday, real-yesterday, as in before 12:01am 1.10.12. I couldn't say when I read it down to the very minute, but I know it was yesterday.

Edited January 10, 2012 by Unruhe

Fixed a bug that allowed cutscenes to display high res textures, cutscenes now properly display medium textures

 

Fixed a bug that was causing certain abilities to have delayed and laggy casting times, all abilities now have delayed and laggy casting times

 

Alien dialogue subtitles were disappearing before players could finish reading them, all alien dialogue has been replaced by english voice acting from Jimmy the Intern

 

Excessive sharding was dispersing the player population, resulting in empty and lonely zones. Randomized NPCs resembling other players have been inserted into phased areas. They will automatically /wave at you when approached.

 

A bug was causing glitched green laser effects to appear above most settlements. The green laser effects are now called "Galactic Auroras" and given a codex entry explaining how they are a good luck charm if you spot them!

 

ha thats funny

http://i.imgur.com/9ZzCs.jpg

 

http://i.imgur.com/bsEEq.jpg

 

Dunno, man!

 

Your time settings have to be off, can you go check them? Go to My Account, and then to Basic Information.

 

Developers do not post on these forums at outlandish times like 1 AM and 5 AM.

I have determined my forum times are screwed up. :x

http://i.imgur.com/9ZzCs.jpg

 

http://i.imgur.com/bsEEq.jpg

 

Dunno, man!

 

Again you are assuming he is based off your timezone assuming you changed your timezone to match yours which he is not located there. He is in the states which if he is located in the Bioware studio which is CST it was 6pm where I am located and I have my TImezone set on my account settings.

 

 

4pm PST, 6pm CST, 7pm Est. Take your pick.

This shows as being posted yesterday at 7:22 pm EST. So I thought we would see an answer today, or at least another response here.

 

Don't hold your breath. As I said in the earlier posts, if he doesn't already have an answer the communication process between the art department, build deployment and community relations is irrevocably damaged.

Would like to see this high-res texture bug fixed. It probably wouldn't be TONS better looking than what we have now but it would still be better.

 

I was clicking on my holo terminal today on a new ship and my gear just had so much more detail. With AA being added later on as well, maybe I can finally enjoy the game graphically.

 

One reason Bioware could be hesitant to fix this issue is because then people would be complaining more about how the game is poorly optimized to run on PCs. I mean, with high settings pretty much turned off currently (including shadows, they look horrendous being cast on characters - pretty much just big jagged edges) and all the instancing we really should be getting better performance at this point.

 

Perhaps Bioware should have launched Dec. 20, 2012 and just polish the game a bit more. I don't think anyone here can honestly say that there isn't at least one thing about SWTOR that disappointed them and should have worked better.

 

I don't know, maybe 1 more year in development could have fixed a lot of these current bugs and apply a bit more polish to the features.

Don't hold your breath. As I said in the earlier posts, if he doesn't already have an answer the communication process between the art department, build deployment and community relations is irrevocably damaged.

 

That's fine. I just used the tracker and saw he's made posts today. He should pop in and say something, anything. It would be the right thing to do?.

 

Personally I can wait for the fix. The game just needs good communication on issues early on is my main concern.

Oh, I'm not trolling, I'm just trying to inform some people who seem misguided, may have misinterpreted some stuff, or are ignorant of certain realities facing game design.

 

I love how people claim to know something about software design. You nor him probably know anything about the process.

 

I wouldnt bother going into software design and how crappy it is.

 

But I CAN tell you about customer service.

 

We have about 12 million folks using the software we design and implement.

 

And we get calls every day about problems.

 

THe differrence is we dont try to mislead or use vague wording in things like our patches or TBs. They say EXACTLY what they are there for. If it isnt clear enough we fix it right away so that the documentation is spotless. Every UI change, every single tiny little thing.

 

If I showed my software using 3d full motion video in the advertising and pictures you can damn well bet if someone bought it and it didnt do exactly that they would be pissed off about it. When you see screenshots of our software you see exactly what a regular user would see.

 

 

But this is all beside the point.

 

I know SR said he would get us an answer and he probably will.

 

But I also know that as has been shown many times since launch, right now the customer service for this MMO is absolutely HORRIBLE.

 

Tickets that go unanswered for weeks.

 

The fact that James Ohlen had time to answer some questions for a Eurogamer article about performance issues but there hasnt been a response to the thread on their VERY customer service forum in a long time.

 

I mean the customer service forum is straight up junk IMO.

 

Why even bother having one when you never, you know, perform any customer service on it?

 

Thats consdiering the fact that this is BY FAR the WORST forum setup I have ever seen for a major studio. Really, no search function?

 

Its not so much that high textures are broke that has a lot of folks upset. Its the "so far" what many consider to be poor customer relations and customer service for the product.

 

 

SR is great and all, but its obvious they need to hire some more folks to deal with the community, he isnt superman after all, and he cant handle everything.

From what I can tell, regarding the timezone and the post, there's another 6 1/2 hours of the promised "tomorrow" left, since it's apparently ~5:30 pm in Austin now.

 

The fact that James Ohlen had time to answer some questions for a Eurogamer article about performance issues but there hasnt been a response to the thread on their VERY customer service forum in a long time.

 

Don't forget the important aspect to that interview - where he alludes that everyone with a performance issue is a liar.

Edited January 10, 2012 by FlawlessSoul

From what I can tell, regarding the timezone and the post, there's another 6 1/2 hours of the promised "tomorrow" left, since it's apparently ~5:30 pm in Austin now.

 

The work day is pretty much over, but who knows, maybe Mr. Reid will post here later tonight while he's in his pajamas with his laptop.

I don't know, maybe 1 more year in development could have fixed a lot of these current bugs and apply a bit more polish to the features.

If they'd waited through one more year of beta and launched there'd still be something that requires polish. Every MMO launches with things that are lacking, whether it be stuff their predecessors have had for a long time but they do not (WoW and RIFT having LFG, for instance) or things that no one has had but most will come to realize were good additions later on (like when WoW added Dungeon Finder).

 

All told, SWTOR has had perhaps the best launch of any MMO to date. They get better each time (generally speaking..) so this was to be expected, but there were no terribly game-shattering bugs such as those that plagued previous releases. People who think SWTOR's was really all that bad were either part of a relatively small few who encountered some unfortunate issues, which happens with any game, or are misremembering the launches of previous games through rose-colored glasses or simply don't recall them at all.

 

Anarchy Online, for instance, had people falling through the world for weeks. En masse. This was not the exception, but the norm. One might have said that if you were on normal ground at this point, YOU were bugged.

 

World of Warcraft had criiiiiiippling server stability issues that had many people up in arms. What was the point of a stress test, they'd ask, if apparently no changes were made to deal with the stress of launch? Servers crashed, stayed down, crashed again, and those that actually managed to stay on a server were plagued by horrible lag and an inability to loot creatures for hours at a time (consider: looting X Warthog Eyes from creatures was a primary method of completing quests in WoW).

 

Age of Conan.. let's not even touch it.

 

 

In comparison, SWTOR has had remarkably few launch bugs. Server stability was actually pretty strong. Lag was the exception, not the norm. I don't recall servers dropping out of the sky. The biggest complaint was excessive queue times on some servers (reaching several hours). Warzones lag for some people, having shadows enabled caused slowdown for others, but other than that.. very little that stopped people from playing. And only two quest hiccups that prevented the progression of class quests.

The actual high-res textures look so much better than the medium option it's not funny.

 

Until VERY recently, you get partially get the high textures by running the client in XP Compatibility mode. Even that isn't working now.

 

That combined with the PTR changing medium to be the new high suggests that the entire thing is the result of a deliberate design decision to not allow us to use the high res textures for some reason or another, and they're trying to cover it by changing medium be the new high.

 

Seriously Bioware, we're not so dumb as to fall for that: You've got, and already included, MUCH better looking textures than you're letting us use. The cat's already out of the bag: at this point, if you're not going to let us use them, you are, one way or another, going to have to admit that and face the consequences.

 

Personally, you'd be better served to let us choose what we run the game at. If it runs poorly as a result that's our choice, you could even put out a note to the effect that the high res textures can make it run poorly and let people choose.

 

That's really what this is about more than the looks: people don't like having choices taken away from them, especially when it's done without explanation in a sneaky manner.

And still no answer... this is very dissapointing.

 

"I dont have an answer for you now, maybe later today"

 

"I dont have a answer today. maybe tomorrow."

 

"High resolution textures will be released with the upcoming addon..."

 

Right.

Bump

Bump

 

Its useless. this Mr Reid or whatever he's called is just telling us what we want to hear, im sure. or what his superiors tell him to tell us. it makes little difference.

Edited January 10, 2012 by fredspekvet

Auuug.

 

Anti Aliasing DOES NOT fix bad textures.

 

I swear to god. Some people have no idea what they are talking about.

 

No amount of AA is going to make a muddy blurry texture look magically better.

 

If ANYTHING AA is only going to make jaggy polygons look smoother.

 

On the OTHER hand

 

Anisotropic filteringCan help with textures.(My bad, fixed)

 

But it basically takes samples (of which you can change the multipliter) of pixels and aggregates colour values to smooth them out.

 

High levels of AF can make things look very blurry.

 

So with AF enabled your bad textures will just look like blurry bad textures.

Edited January 10, 2012 by Oddzball

Auuug.

 

Anti Aliasing DOES NOT fix bad texture.

 

I swear to god. Some people have no idea what they are talking about.

 

No amount of AA is going to make a muddy blurry texture look magically better.

 

If ANYTHING AA is only going to make jaggy polygons look smoother.

 

On the OTHER hand

 

But it basically takes samples (of which you can change the multipliter) of pixels and aggregates colour values to smooth them out.

 

High levels of AA can make things look very blurry.

 

So with AA enabled your bad textures will just look like blurry bad textures.

 

Wrong. conventional AA doesnt blur textures, only the edges surrounding the polygons. removing the jigsaw effect , or as some people call them "jaggy's" . has nothing to do with the actual textures themselves.

Hey all, I am here to apologize again... the good news is we have a draft of our response (you might be able to guess it's not a sentence or two) but I am circulating it internally to ensure my technical details are correct.

 

To give you an insight into our process here... as the Community team does with most big replies, I tracked down a variety of people on our client and art teams to get the facts on how the game works before putting the post together. As I'm representing those teams publicly, I want to ensure they're happy with what I'm saying on their behalf before I post it. They're busy people, so I'm just waiting on their sign-off right now.

 

I appreciate your patience and assuming we have sign-off this evening, you'll get our response tomorrow. If not, I accept the incoming rotten eggs.

I can take a stab as to why, from a design and testing perspective, (ultra) high res textures might exist but not be put in:

 

Compatibility testing and narrowing down issues.

 

There's a sizable number of people reporting slowdown right now for one reason or another. Maybe it's only in Warzones, maybe it's only with shadows on, maybe it's only with certain cards or hardware configurations.. but to fix any one specific problem for these people, you've got to rule out all the other causes so you can find what is actually the problem.

 

If we had textures twice the size of what's currently in, live, I would bet you cash-money that there would be more people complaining of graphical bugs, slowdowns, crashes, or just an inability to play the game. It'd be terrible. Only some of those would be the cause of the increased texture resolution, but for anything else, an immediate response would be "have you tried lowering your graphical settings", even if the issue winds up having nothing to do with that.

 

From a debugging perspective, the fewer potential causes you have in the mix, the easier it is to figure out what's wrong. High and ultra-high resolutions are just more potential causes. You might think you're smart enough to know when the cause of your particular problem is textures your PC might not be able to handle, but remember that there are two million other people playing, and some of them are probably idiots or liars. Pulling everything back to bare bones graphics, fixing what issues remain, and putting in the improved graphical capability only once you've ironed out the existing kinks means you can iron out the new ones even faster.

 

There are already people complaining that they can't run the game in its current Medium texture mode without slowdown, despite having computers that should chew Crysis 2 up and spit it out. They're all over the forums. They can't wait for a driver update and are demanding BioWare fix that now; can you imagine if there were even more of them?

 

 

The focus of the game should be on stability and performance for the largest number of people first, not graphical quality. Thankfully, that seems to be the tack BioWare is taking. I'd rather deal with some muddy textures for a month or two and lose the weirdos who are so off-put by any period of graphics that do not mirror the stuff they see outside their windows, than I would with playing this in Ultra High and losing a great many more to performance issues or other game-breaking bugs.

Hey man, Bioware just said on eurogaming that 95 percent of people get good fps in this game.

 

Why are you guys surprised?

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-01-10-bioware-most-people-arent-having-swtor-performance-issues

 

We're not.

 

They can say whatever they want, it doesn't make it true.

 

But of course some people will believe it, some people will believe anything.