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

It's like this, it just might because of different play styles. That some people don't notice the skill lag.

For example, I push myself to my gaming limits, even in MMOs... So when you're always pushing to the limits... You can reach failure points where little things make big differences and a small failure/lag can have disasterous consequences.

Losing to a 31 boss because you're a minimum level to accept the quest and you're waiting till the right time to fire a skill, you fire it and you get a big-fat-nothing is noticeable. That happened to me last night. Being 10%, 20% underpowered means you better be good because there is no margin for failure in your stratagy and tactics.

And even then it was so close... Corso was dead. I was down to a few percentage points and I almost got him as he was down to a few points, too. But my cover failed to fire on the "F" press and I couldn't get my '100% immediate on cover quick Charged shot' in and that was that...

OTOH I have fought that boss fight with multiple other properly leveled characters. Where I didn't skip a lot of side quests... Some of which are, frankly, some of BioWare's more defective character builds/concepts...

Now, if you're running into a 31-boss fight properly leveled for the encounter (ie level 30, 31, 32...), these issues wouldn't be noticeable because of game design. SWTOR is, effectively, a co-op CRPG and the boss fights are scaled to be just hard enough to be slightly interesting, the occassional death if things go horribly wrong, but you otherwise win with 50% HP, or more, remaining after a lot of flash/bang/sparkly eye-candy.

It's all designed by the game designer to make you feel like you've accomplished something... When, in fact, you'd have to work hard to fail...

As an Aggie, I was admittedly tempted to post some stupid comment about the University of Texas, etc etc, and the best I could do was to post this sort of apology. Gig'em Aggies.

I hand built my system. All cables run under the MB tray in my full tower rig. My PS is walled off to vent its own heat as well as all drives.2 High rpm server fans in the front, Huge exaust fan. My coolmaster tower has 2 120 mill fans, one pulling one pushing. My comp is a beast. and the temp it runs for SWTOR is just unacceptable for a game with mostly low res textures and blocky shadows. i have watched the temp with all settings off or set to low... with default driver settings and with the driver overriding SWTOR both high and to low. No setting changes the heat the game is causing. That is not normal. I want to know why.

Most likely what's happening during that first 30% is that the game is queuing up and putting any relevant scene assets in memory and then, during the last 70%, coordinating with BW servers for actor/quest data. This would explain why the HDD would show little activity because the assets are in memory and not on disk at that point.

@Tiron_Raptor I can force AA settings in the Nvidia control manager. This proves local rendering on my hardware is being done.

Also, You can monitor your bandwidth as you play the game, and if all assets including textures and animations were being streamed, you would see a constant 3Mb/s. But it is much lower than this, because it is only communicating standard game information (position, chat, actions... game state stuff, not rendering information, which is powers of 100 larger).

As someone already suggested, the remote renderer or the remote process you're so worried about is likely to do with the Hero engine's capabilities. It is a brand new engine with lots of features to assist development, like the ability for multiple artists to work on the same level concurrently, or the ability for someone to play the level and test it while someone else is modifying it.

This does not in any way imply that animations are being streamed.

'cuz this is just like that, right?

/sigh

Big difference there is these are customers of BW/EA and if they do not want to lose customers over something that may not even be true than it behooves them to explain. Failure to do so only allows rampant, potentially inaccurate, speculation to continue.

That said, I have no doubts they will address this with comment.

Maybe this will explain (when someone figures what is really going on) why the game looks very good on one of my computers and horrible on the other.

Have High settings on both and the game runs smooth too. This had me puzzled until I read this thread.

The rivalry is over! I don't know what to think anymore.

At some point in the process it also has to start loading characters and their various assets, as well as their locations (which are continuously updated once initialized).

It's a perfectly plausible explanation for the bandwidth spike, I have to admit.

Since you seem knowledgeable about such things, I'd like to be educated... Would you be kind enough (assuming you have the time and patience) to lay out a synopsis of the OP in layman's terms, and sort of shoot down the argument from there? I think it would help the thread quite a bit.

Also... Could this supposed "copy protection" not actually stream hi-res textures, but run some script or other that blocks them from working for the client?

Don't flame me too hard as I'm not computer savvy I'm looking to be educated on this, and too much technical stuff will go over my head!