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

While everything you said is true, that's not what is being theorised.

Read the paper that guy dug up, it's clear that only a small part would need to be subject to this 'remoting' to achieve the 'protection' being talked about, yet big enough to cause the huge FPS and lag problems prople are seeing.

This is one post I would LOVE a memeber of the dev team come in here and explain or answer a few of the questions.

As a software developer I would just like to throw in my 2 cents:

The concept that all animations being rendered on your computer are being streamed from TOR servers is LUDICROUS. BEYOND IMPOSSIBLE. You guys have taken a little bit of information and just ran with it, snowballed into something completely absurd.

Textures are not being streamed. High-res textures are on your hard-drive and are constantly available; they are used during conversations. Go click on your intercom; for a second everything gets higher resolution and bump mapping turns on. There is *no* way this much data is being downloaded in the tenth of a second between my clicking the intercom button and seeing the response.

Animations are most certainly NOT being streamed. Do you know how big animation data is? You're suggesting that Bioware's servers are doing ALL the rendering for EVERY client? Are you MAD? Do you have ANY, ANY idea of the SCALE of what you are describing, WHATSOEVER?

First, this is just infeasible on the scale of the number of users. There are a million plus subs to TOR right now. Concurrent of up to 350,000+ users. THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND. Do you have any concept of how many servers it would take to render all those animations constantly over the wire???!?!?!?

NEXT, lets consider latency. If the server were rendering every animation for you, the amount of time it would take to see a response would be MUCH, MUCH longer. You guys have taken a small problem with ability queuing and animation delay and have somehow assumed that those animations are being DOWNLOADED? Uh, noooooo. No. nononono. There's no freaking way.

I don't think Google's servers could handle 350,000+ concurrent downloads of animation data in real time.

This suggestion is absolutely bonkers, and any of you who are giving it any credence need to go learn some computer science.

Animation data is exponentially larger than texture data. This just isn't possible, guys.


EDIT: Also, this does nothing to stop people from recording youtube videos, as A ) it would be about the source models and textures, not the resultant rendered image, B ) there are already videos on youtube of SWTOR...

PLEASE THINK, people! Uggh. I feel like this whole thread is trolling.

This is one post I would LOVE a memeber of the dev team come in here and explain or answer a few of the questions.

Ok listen the game isn't downloading any texture or streaming any animation to you because the game never takes more than 55k/sec of bandwidth during loading and rarely over 10k/sec during playing ... For consideration 7.5k/sec is the usual upload+download of a fps game such as bf3.

So no they are not copyrighting their texture and letting you download on the fly what you see ... But there is definitely something going on during loading where the bar stop at 25-30% and simply stand there while the date spike to 55k/sec for the reminder of the loading bar .

also during loading bar the 2nd process seem to process more than usual and suggest that the remote renderer is simply what we all tought ... Hero engine gimmicks multi core support by directing more data thread to another process who then use the other avalaible core.

This is BORDERLINE class action lawsuit if this is true...