The thread title and first post raise the question, "Is this thing causing performance drops?"

 

No one knows, but these forums will (and have already, apparently) assume "yes".

 

When did the SWTOR forums become FOX News?

LOL....CNN my fren!!!

I mean, I've read most of it, but I'm trying to figure out where it actually started, originally. All I can figure is it was "someone said, he said, she said, they think" sorta deal.

 

-shrug-

Someone in the 'High Res Textures' thread dissected one of the DLLs in question and found it apparently halving texture size. It became the topic of discussion for a bit, and eventually someone put out that it was a copy protection thing, 'according to the documentation', with a blurb almost identical to the one at the start of the paper.

Then about six different things all went click in my brain at once, and it turned into one of those 'oh god' moments of pure horror.

To be frank, I'm hoping that it won't be long before I can pretty much spoiler-out the entire first post as wrong, with the corrections and explanations of what's actually going on edited in. Basically turn it into an info post.

"cause I really, truely, want not one bit of it to be true. But it in some ways it seemed to fit almost perfectly... much less so now, but it's not completely dead yet.

The thread title and first post raise the question, "Is this thing causing performance drops?"

 

No one knows, but these forums will (and have already, apparently) assume "yes".

 

When did the SWTOR forums become FOX News?

which is why there's large, red text at the top that basically translates to: 'don't panic'.

well im not sure anymore lol....been following this post all day lol...i bearly remember what the first page says lol

Go back and read it then, silly, tiron edited it alot, it also explains where the term came from and who found the DLL's that lead to the speculations.

So we cant have the high res textures for our characters regarding Stephens post...just great...

I understand why the use the low res textures on other characters out there, but if i loot a nice looking armor piece i want to see it on my character in full detail. Give us at least the option to show the high res textures on our own characters please!

Go back and read it then, silly, tiron edited it alot, it also explains where the term came from and who found the DLL's that lead to the speculations.

YEs...lol yes he did....its soooo long....by the time i come back from reading that there will be a page 95!!!! i remember the gerneal idea...i think we're all just waiting for a response form BW eh?

Is this to stop happening what happened to SWG and emulators being set up where they have no control?

So far, that's the only reason anyone's come up with as to why it might be worth doing. It's still pretty far out on a limb to be fair, and for awhile there was getting chunks knocked off it at a rapid pace.

YEs...lol yes he did....its soooo long....by the time i come back from reading that there will be a page 95!!!! i remember the gerneal idea...i think we're all just waiting for a response form BW eh?

More responses from bioware, or one of us figuring out what's going on well enough that we don't need one.

Go back and read it then, silly, tiron edited it alot, it also explains where the term came from and who found the DLL's that lead to the speculations.

Wait wait...Shananigan...im not the one asking about it.....it was "They"

So we cant have the high res textures for our characters regarding Stephens post...just great...

 

I understand why the use the low res textures on other characters out there, but if i loot a nice looking armor piece i want to see it on my character in full detail. Give us at least the option to show the high res textures on our own characters please!

i do not understand Biowares decision... let US decide if we want to run highres textures or low/medium ones... what the hell are you thinking?

other games offer their customers options (low/med/high/ultra/custom - mostly) so why is BW onlny offering low and wait... low?! we don´t want to play a ***** looking game just because some people use rigs from year 2005 - pc gaming was always top notch and people who could not afford a good rig played with low to medium options.... ***... you are treating us like console kiddys....

Added to OP, because it occured to me I probably should (I'm slow when I'm sleepy):

"Some examination of the activity of the processes so far hasn't show much of anything. The second process wasn't really seen to access game files in at least one case, though in another it was noted that there was a lot of cross-chatter between the two processes that was sometimes causing one to wait on the other. It's hard to judge for sure, but the results I've heard of so far don't really scream 'rendering stuff for the client"

i do not understand Biowares decision... let US decide if we want to run highres textures or low/medium ones... what the hell are you thinking?

 

other games offer their customers options (low/med/high/ultra/custom - mostly) so why is BW onlny offering low and wait... low?! we don´t want to play a ***** looking game just because some people use rigs from year 2005 - pc gaming was always top notch and people who could not afford a good rig played with low to medium options.... ***... you are treating us like console kiddys....

Because the way it's setup now, it takes an almost impossibly fast system to make it work. I used a trick with the launcher to get max-res textures just a few days ago. On the republic fleet, I ran into a crowd of people and ground to a halt, while my hard drive went nuts. (a WD Raptor-X 10000RPM, not exactly a slouch, and last reported 6% fragmented). It looked and acted like paging...I have 8GB of RAM, and SWTOR's memory usage isn't even near the 32 bit limit.

By Mr. Reid's post on the matter, it did that because it was trying to pull a lot of texture data off the hard drive at once and got bogged down while it was doing it, and even top-end systems have problems with it.

It can almost certainly be fixed, but it's not going to be quick or easy if so.

Wait wait...Shananigan...im not the one asking about it.....it was "They"

LOL, oh sorry, "they" should go back and read it LOL

It can almost certainly be fixed, but it's not going to be quick or easy if so.

At least you are able to provide us with more information than BW, they seem very hush, hush, with information and all that does is lead to rediculous speculations, which doesn't help anyone.

More responses from bioware, or one of us figuring out what's going on well enough that we don't need one.

Which ever comes first.....in this case...to me....Cause and effect aren't as important as Solution...and a speedy one at that!

Edit

Wait this was a stupid thing to say....Cause and effect are as important as the Solution....an ignorant fool or a sleep deprived person would say such a thing.... im defiantly the latter! lol

This thread makes me sad. To find out that the game will never look as good during normal play as it does during cutscenes sucks. I'd honestly rather have the game consistently look the same through both normal play and cutscenes then being teased with these awesome high res textures everytime I talk to an npc.

I also don't understand why we can't have high res textures. I mean I read the explantion as to why but the thing is there are other mmo's out there with better graphics and higher resolution textures that run just fine. Plus those mmo's aren't as sharded as much as TOR is so you've got far more people playing in the same instances then you do in this game.

I love this game but I'm currently thinking I would have much prefered a Kotor 3 with multiplayer elements then an mmo at this point.

Which ever comes first.....in this case...to me....Cause and effect aren't as important as Solution...and a speedy one at that!

 

 

Edit

Wait this was a stupid thing to say....Cause and effect are as important as the Solution....an ignorant fool or a sleep deprived person would say such a thing.... im defiantly the latter! lol

LOL get some sleep this problem wont be fixed for a while, no need to harm yourself over it.

This thread makes me sad. To find out that the game will never look as good during normal play as it does during cutscenes sucks. I'd honestly rather have the game consistently look the same through both normal play and cutscenes then being teased with these awesome high res textures everytime I talk to an npc.

 

I also don't understand why we can't have high res textures. I mean I read the explantion as to why but the thing is there are other mmo's out there with better graphics and higher resolution textures that run just fine. Plus those mmo's aren't as sharded as much as TOR is so you've got far more people playing in the same instances then you do in this game.

 

I love this game but I'm currently thinking I would have much prefered a Kotor 3 with multiplayer elements then an mmo at this point.

I honestly don't understand why they can't have a "slider" for effects/other players, that would allow the user to have their OWN character be hi-res, and everyone else be set at a pre-determined level (name only, ultra-low, low, high-with a warning about system requirements)

LOL get some sleep this problem wont be fixed for a while, no need to harm yourself over it.

Cant....Someone has to build these god forsaken systems at work!

Just to clarify because someone cried foul a couple pages back. When people talk about the remote render or this possible second dll or process we are not assuming it is doing actual remote rendering per say. Meaning the primary process on our desktop / client to some remote Bioware server process and then back. Remote, distrubted, etc. I am pretty sure most of us are not implying that at all.

However what we are asking about the textures and this so-called second process that is running on your computer (start the game, enter game, escape to your desktop while still logged in, start task manager, and look at the processes running - you will see two). It appears that they are linked regardless of ones own personal opinion - again, task manager and look at the chains - they are talking.

Anything that makes a call to another process is a performance hit. No different than the number of hops it takes your desktops client request to make it to the Bioware server that the client is talking to.

I'd also like to point out that no one is saying this is in fact the de-facto problem. People are asking why are there two process, why are they communicating, and why on God's green earth are we not letting the end user dictate what textures they want to run.

For God's sake man, this is 2012! All of us have more compute than what we need...

It's kinda funny this is probably the thing that I will unsub for

Not the countless other issues ive managed to look past

Everyone, after discussion with the client team I'd like this rampant speculation (and in some cases, scaremongering) to stop now, please. After this post I'll be locking this thread to prevent further confusion.

Let’s give you a few details gathered from discussion with the client team:

- We are not using any form of 'remote rendering' as has been suggested in this thread. Nothing is being pushed from 'server farms' or anything similar. The research paper linked to in the original post is not related in any way to any aspect of our game client.

- The game client uses two processes that talk to each other. They do not communicate outside of your PC.

- None of these processes are for copy protection of any kind.

- The size of the client dropped during Game Testing as we optimized the client size, removing files that were not being used by the game, but were still in the client. This is a completely normal process for a game in development. With many people needing to download the game, obviously it’s in our interest to reduce the client size where we can.

I’d also like to state, for the record, that none of what is being discussed here is related to our texture rendering in-game. While I understand the temptation to try to connect two different things, it doesn't apply here.

Thanks for your patience while we looked into this.