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

Maybe Gaikai is a better example?

Yup. I'm sitting here quietly hoping someone will, and wishing I had a clue how to go about it. Unfortunately I'm Computer Systems Support (Tech), not CIS (Programmer), so I don't know that much.
To be fair, it's only been two and a half hours. It's already explosive and heading for 'Threadnaught' levels at a record pace, so I'd wager someone over there is panicking appropriately.

"streaming assets from the server", if it does happen, is not something that requires a second process, or to be rendered separately from assets loaded from the hard disk.

There's absolutely no reason to believe that any software rendering is involved anywhere.

All we possibly know is that there is a separate process (running locally) that might be doing some rendering.

The ability QUEUE is adjustable, the ability delay you experience in game most definitely is not.

Seriously? Jeez it's bad around here.

Yep. And that it doesn't talk directly to the server, apparently.

The 'might be using software rendering' thing comes from the paper: it's suggested as the best way to secure the process, by preventing a hardware bypass of the protection.

NO. I read the paper, I understand the concept.

Several of the claims being made are VERIFY-ABLY false.

High res images are indeed in the game. Click on your intercom, there they are.

SO THAT RIGHT THERE IS A LOAD OF BALONEY.

"its clear that only a small part would need to be subject to this remoting"

I just went and read that entire paper just to be sure. NO. NONONONONO.

You don't seem to understand what you're saying. There's only a few ways this could be done:

You can render the whole scene remotely, which is what the paper describes. You use a low-resolution version locally, and when you stop moving the image, you send your viewpoint settings to the server, and the server renders THE WHOLE IMAGE. So in this way, the server would have to render EVERY frame of EVERY scene for EVERY user, in real-time. This would be the equivalent to playing SWTOR on OnLive. This would require a VERY, VERY large number of servers (we're talking about a server for every 5 people, or something, so thats like 100,000 servers. ABSOLUTELY INSANE. There's no way that EVERY SINGLE USER of SWTOR is playing OnLive style. Bioware would have a hard enough time setting up the 200+ servers for the game connectivity, much less handle ALL the rendering on their side).
In this method, you'd only be streaming the screen picture, the final image. That wouldn't be too infeasible bandwidth wise, it'd be the same as OnLive or Neflix movie streaming. But again, the server infrastructure is BEYOND IMPOSSIBLE.

The other way, as what you SEEM to THINK they're doing (but the paper does not talk about this AT ALL, in fact) would be to send the animation data over the wire, and have the home machine render the scene. This would be pointless to security on many levels, (You could collect the animation data as it goes over the wire, you could hack the rendering software, as the paper itself admits) AND it would be IMPOSSIBLE with current latency and bandwidth.

Imagine each time you tried to hit an ability, your computer started a 2MB download. When it finishes, you get to see the animation. Its going to be MUCH, MUCH MUCH MUCH longer than what you're seeing in game.

You're wrong, you don't know what your'e talking about, or you're trolling.


PLEASE, DO NOT GIVE CREDIT TO THIS INSANE IDEA. TOR IS NOT STREAMING TEXTURES OR ANIMATIONS. THIS IS BONKERS WRONG.

No, this is not possible. See my above post. This is completely crazy. There is absolutely NO WAY WHATSOEVER.

The 'idea' has nothing to do with textures or animations: it is specifically designed to protect models, and as such would only affect the textures and animations as side-effects, either because of resource use problems or lag introduced by the sheer difficulty of the process.

We also suspect the 'remote' rendering is being handled by the second swtor.exe process, as it seems to be related to a file with the name 'remoterendererserver'

if this is true, then it might explain why SOME people have amazing FPS at like 4am in the night or something.

but at peak hours fps drops to 10 fps in warzone or something.

i myself noticed something similar.

i had a day off at work, and logged on the game at 07:40

i got into a WZ, and for some reason, i felt that the game ran waayyy smoother.

later at the day, it's back to it's old usual 20fps