What the op said just proves the truth of what I and many others have said before.  The got bad source code of an unfinished engine, and they lack the expertise needed to optimize it correctly.

This made the game suck, and why the game will continue to suck.  The engine just does not work the way they needed it to to make good game play.  It is one of many reasons the game sucks but it sure is one of the main underlying issues.

Originally posted by grimal

I'd argue the average person knows a bit more about cars then they do about the fundamentals of game engines.

Listen, I have never had a problem running TOR.  I'm not arguing you or others did;  that sucks and I don't know what else to say.  The bottom line is, you can spout all these theories you want but it doesn't make any sense to me because of the two machines I use to play it, I have never had an issue.   I'm not just going to blindly agree with you because it may be the popular thing around here to hate on TOR.

I've had fps issues with numerous games over the years when too many characters fill the screen.  What caused that?  Not entirely sure, but I'm not going to make an uneducated conclusion that the engine itself is to blame.

Let me ask you this.  Have you worked with the engine?  I'm not talking about playing games on it.  I'm asking have you worked with its code and actually worked with it on a base level?

 

I havent repaired or built a car either and i can easily say when engine is malfunctioning/not working as it should.

My duties as a customer dont involve solving their problems or rewriting their code, seems you missed that.

When BW decides to hire me and unload hefty amount of cash on my account i will start to care about their problems and screw ups, until then i will just say (as every customer should) FIX your product that we have PAID for.

Thats all there is to it.

I thought this guy put the Bioware iteration of the Hero engine's performance in a colorful and amusing way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U74hW4_YwWc

With a wave of the hand, game director James Ohlen told Eurogamer that these aren’t the performance issues you’re looking for.

rofl.  Ugh, I remember the discussion with the Gamebryo Engine issues in WAR. I believe it's always constructive to bring up these nuanced discussions of the tech of MMOs as CRITICAL to the game's fortunes. Great read OP. MMORPG.com could do another feature series (as well as financials) on the engines in MMORPGs maybe?! 

The engine may be terrible but if you think this is what caused SW:TOR's demise, you'd be incorrect.  If you think lack of interesting combat caused it, you'd be incorrect.  If you think crappy space missions, slow levelling, bad balance or any other thing like that caused SWTOR's failure, I'm sorry to say you're wrong.

One thing caused SW:TOR's failure, and that is the lack of new story content.   No-one bought the game to raid or even PVP.  They bought it to play a Bioware/ Star Wars RPG.  You may have noticed that SW:TOR took far longer than other MMOs to crash, and the reason for that is that more players than ever before made it to max level.  And then there was nothing.  One month, two months, four months, six months, and no Act 4 or even new planetary storylines. 

People bought into the idea of a never-ending RPG.  Bioware couldn't keep up.  

Originally posted by BigAndShiny

The engine may be terrible but if you think this is what caused SW:TOR's demise, you'd be incorrect.  If you think lack of interesting combat caused it, you'd be incorrect.  If you think crappy space missions, slow levelling, bad balance or any other thing like that caused SWTOR's failure, I'm sorry to say you're wrong.

 

One thing caused SW:TOR's failure, and that is the lack of new story content.   No-one bought the game to raid or even PVP.  They bought it to play a Bioware/ Star Wars RPG.  You may have noticed that SW:TOR took far longer than other MMOs to crash, and the reason for that is that more players than ever before made it to max level.  And then there was nothing.  One month, two months, four months, six months, and no Act 4 or even new planetary storylines. 

 

People bought into the idea of a never-ending RPG.  Bioware couldn't keep up.  

Originally posted by BigAndShiny

The engine may be terrible but if you think this is what caused SW:TOR's demise, you'd be incorrect.  If you think lack of interesting combat caused it, you'd be incorrect.  If you think crappy space missions, slow levelling, bad balance or any other thing like that caused SWTOR's failure, I'm sorry to say you're wrong.

 

One thing caused SW:TOR's failure, and that is the lack of new story content.   No-one bought the game to raid or even PVP.  They bought it to play a Bioware/ Star Wars RPG.  You may have noticed that SW:TOR took far longer than other MMOs to crash, and the reason for that is that more players than ever before made it to max level.  And then there was nothing.  One month, two months, four months, six months, and no Act 4 or even new planetary storylines. 

 

People bought into the idea of a never-ending RPG.  Bioware couldn't keep up.  

What kind of kool aid have you been drinking?   They crashed less then 6 months out of the gate,  it not even been a full 10 months yet and they are already heading free to play.

The only other mmo that burnt quicker was dcuo.

Name me other AAA mmo's that died that quickly.

Most new MMOs, from Champions to STO to AOC to DCUO to Warhammer crash after the very first (included) month.

SWTOR took until February (3 months) to fail. 

Originally posted by BigAndShiny

Most new MMOs, from Champions to STO to AOC to DCUO to Warhammer crash after the very first (included) month.

SWTOR took until February (3 months) to fail. 

 

DCUO was the only one that failed quicker. Chapmions took over a year, sto over 1.5 years aoc 2.5 years.  So yes Only one of the 3 beet swtor, and we all knew that was comming.

Originally posted by BigAndShiny

Most new MMOs, from Champions to STO to AOC to DCUO to Warhammer crash after the very first (included) month.

SWTOR took until February (3 months) to fail. 

 

You may want to expand your horizons a bit.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm

Originally posted by BigAndShiny

Most new MMOs, from Champions to STO to AOC to DCUO to Warhammer crash after the very first (included) month.

SWTOR took until February (3 months) to fail. 

 

From the end of December to February is only 2 months!

WAR sold an inital 750k with 800k announced 6 weeks after launch and still had 300k subs after 6 months (source EA financial reports and press releases). To be as sucessful EA's last results would have to have announced 900k+ subs. AoC did even better. Both much better than SWTOR in terms of sub retention.

Even VSoH had better sub retention despite being bug ridden; arguably a better mmo though.

Champions (17 months), STO (23 months) and DCUO (8 months) - not sure SWTOR has fared better.

At the end of the day I think it is down to how good the game is along with the support & updates. And whether people believe that a subscription is worthwhile.

The IP helps sell the initial boxes. How good the game is determines whether players stay on as subscribers. I can remember saying the same about WoW when people were saying it was only sucessful because of Blizzard or the IP. Sales - sure; but (most!) people won't subscribe month after month to a bad game. They have to feel it is worthwhile / enjoy it. 

Good post, OP.

Many of us here appreciate the time you spent in putting all the information together to make it easily accessible for reading.

Originally posted by Karteli

Hi everyone, I just wanted to compile some information together, since there is some disparity about SWTOR actually having a decent game engine.

It's been talked about before, about how the game engine may or may not be OK, or just flat out SUCK.  Often times disputed by EA, and spoken to their fans, the whole idea is dumped back on the players, with reasoning that it's their customers machines, not the game.  Let's look into this.

 

Some time ago EA investigated the Hero Engine.  They loved what they saw, and, even though Hero was still in beta, they said, "we'll take it!".  Now the thing to walk away from here was that the Hero Engine was incomplete, by the very people who could have made it complete, but EA bought it "as is", saying they would fill the rest in later.  A Warrantee was void at this point.

Nowadays the Hero Engine is complete and other games are using it with full graphics capability.

 

Lets look back to what Hero said.  This response was notable only after EA said that optimization could not fully happen because of the Hero Engine limitations.  Hero has a way with words to defend their honor .. but then again I'd expect them to, since Hero is a principal to their company.

http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/

We showed the game to our friend Gordon Walton.  We had known Gordon for many years, back in the days when he worked for Kesmai, our late great competitor.  Gordon had since been with Sony for its Star Wars Galaxies game among other places.  He knows games, especially online games.

Not only did we show him the game, but because Gordon knew us so well we showed him the development tools we had built around our special process – building the game online, in realtime, with tools for the entire team all in one package.

“I need this,” said Gordon.  “I am about to start a special project and these tools will let us build and prototype fast and get something running in a hurry.”  Gordon is not an excitable guy by nature but this had his adrenaline flowing.  “This is just what I need!  I want to license your engine.”

We had thought about offering our engine and tools to developers but we had expected that we would have to actually ship a game first, like Epic did with Unreal Tournament before they licensed the original Unreal Engine.

“It’s not productized yet,” we told Gordon.  “There are whole sections of code that is only roughed in and not optimized for performance or security.  And there are very few comments and very little documentation.”

He didn’t care.  “We are going to have tons of engineers.  We can finish it ourselves.  We’re going to want to modify your source code for our special project anyway.”

Gordon Walton was General Manager of BioWare Austin, until early 2011, when he stepped down.  Perhaps to save his career after all the damage that was done?

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/02/15/swtors-loss-is-playdoms-gain-gordon-walton/

 

Well it didn't turn out so good.  The performance of the SWTOR engine was awful.  EA's twisted version of the Hero engine is still incomplete.  SWTOR was nowhere near massively.  Multiplayer? .. ok, but with 16 players or less nearby to you.  16 players or more and the game showed it's "massively" weakness.  Hell 30+ players in Ilum turned the game into a slideshow, causing Ilum to be shutdown permamently (looking straight down didn't even help).  It wasn't because Ilum was a bad concept, it was because players went there and said, "wow this game blows" .. this was not the publicity EA wanted, so they shut Ilum down.

This ideology to sell a pile of poo with pretty wrapping doomed the game.  Who wants to play a AAA MMO that has a subscription fee, plagued by a horrible engine?

 

Well optimizations continue to happen.  I believe in 1.2 we saw a 10% performance boost.  At least that what the astroturfers on the SWTOR forums said.  I saw no increase.

EA Bioware recently came on to say (Aug 27, 2012):

Hey all, I just wanted to pop in and say we are actively working on various optimizations (both server and client) and will continue to do so. It's extremely important for us to continually make improvements to our technology so we can have users across a variety of system specs and support large living worlds for those users to craft their virtual lives.

ref: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5091079#post5091079

 

So this is essentially the same message EA spread from the start, but now they are still working on it.  DarthHater has been after EA to optimize from launch, and this is the response SW fans get.  /sigh

[side reference to the original DathHater interview: http://www.darthhater.com/articles/swtor-news/19981-guild-summit-interview-with-daniel-erickson/daniel-erickson-interview-part-2, see NOTE [1] at the end of this article.]

 

From a post-launch release:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/01/11/bioware-claims-swtor-performance-issues-are-being-blown-out-of-proportion/

[Star Wars: The Old Republic is no Witcher 2, Skyrim, or government-created missile targeting program. It doesn’t exactly look like it should be the Death Star to your rig’s Alderaan. And yet, many players have reported framerates that can barely keep their heads above 20FPS on machines that eat the aforementioned titles/missiles for breakfast. So, what’s the deal? Well, BioWare’s not entirely convinced there is one. With a wave of the hand, game director James Ohlen told Eurogamer that these aren’t the performance issues you’re looking for.

“The thing is, for the most part, 95 per cent – oh I can’t give you the exact percentage – most of our players aren’t really having performance concerns,” he said. “However, we know that it’s important that there is a smaller group of people usually with lower end machines that are having problems in some areas. And one of the most important things for us to grow our service is to continue to bring in more players, including those players who only have low-end machines.”]

Liars from the grand opening of this game.  Great start Bioware.  They even threw in a BS statistic.

 

This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Star-Wars-MMO_03. You're my only hope.

 

It should be noted that the same machine that gave 1-10 fps in a crowded environment with SWTOR gives 60 fps in GW2 and WoW.  Or close to it, even during massive PVP.

As a saving grace, SWTOR gives 60 fps when no other players are on the same map.  The only way to play this game is single player apparently.

 

---

 

[NOTE 1] referenced earlier

Guild Summit: Interview With Daniel Erickson

From http://www.darthhater.com/articles/swtor-news/19981-guild-summit-interview-with-daniel-erickson/daniel-erickson-interview-part-2

March 14, 2012

Where are you on game engine optimizations? Because I currently get about 5 to 10 frames per second on Alderaan and about 20 in Huttball and I have a PC that can run Crysis 2 at ultra. With no real explanation on what is going on.

Wow. You should do some investigation, because that is not typical. Where we are on game optimization in general is we’ve got some crazy, crazy options that you can turn on in 1.2. I played running around on several of the planets at fully acceptable wonderful running framerates on min spec machines now, which was the thing I wanted to see.

What we got right now is a big texture package pass, and we did it in both directions. So we can say, “Hey, you can take the textures way down, run around, the game works.” We’ve also said, “Hey, you know those textures people keep saying they like so much in the promotional videos? You can turn those on too now.” Because now we figured out how to do it in a small area so it doesn’t try to do it everywhere.
The next big thing we have to hit is effects, and that’s just a standard of what games do is say, “Hey, you know all those crazy crazy effects that everybody else is drawing? Yeah, maybe I don’t want to see all of your lightning storms all at once.” We have a programming team now that literally that’s their only mandate is game run better. Long term target is you should be able to play on your laptop, you should be able to play on your second and third machine in the house. And we are fiercely dedicated to that goal.

 

editted to fix typos

SWTOR tuning your Software & Hardware for best Performance

Hard Ware

Hard drives:

1. If your hard drive is two to three years old you should replace it, you’re a gamer and you have been beating it to death. Hard drives do age mechanically over time.
2. Are you still using an IDE drive? Check your mother board you may have an ATA hard drive connector if you do go buy a faster hard drive and use that connector.
3. Do you have at least 25% free space on your hard drive? If not by a larger one now.
4. When was the last time you defragged your hard drive? If you don’t remember do it.

RAM:

1. If you have 2gig of ram upgrade to 4gig ram is cheap. Windows XP, Windows 7 32bit, and Vista 32bit can only use 4gig of ram.

2. If you have Windows 7 or Vista 64bit upgrade 12gig or 16gig check your mother board specs.

Windows Optimize Your Version

Windows XP:

1. Log onto Windows XP backup your data first.
2. Now do a clean install of Windows XP patch it up to SP3.
3. Load Microsoft Security Essentials (Free download).
4. Next download the latest Graphic drivers for your card, this is the perfect time to load the latest Graphics driver to have clean Graphics driver load with Windows XP.
5. Make sure DirectX 9.0c is loaded.
6. Install SWTOR.

Why would you do this? How does this help you? Who should do this?

Why: Windows XP sp3 will run noticeably faster after a clean install.

How: Well besides running faster any old apps you no longer use will not be on the PC, if you had any malware it will be gone. Also loading the latest graphics driver on a clean install will prevent any weird graphics issues due over lapping driver files or if you went from a NIVIDA to an ATI card.

Who: Only attempt this if you know what you’re doing and you have your restore disks or you’re PC has a restore partition on your hard drive. Otherwise you would need your mother board driver disk along with your XP disk.

Power Settings for Windows XP:

Open the “Control Panel” then click on the “Power Options Properties” under Power Schemes drop down menu and select “Always On”.

Why: You want you CPU running at full power and using all your CPU cores.

Windows 7 and Vista:

1. Log onto Windows 7 or Vista backup your data first.
2. Now do a clean install of Windows 7 sp1 or Vista sp2.
3. Load Microsoft Security Essentials (Free download).
4. Next download the latest Graphic drivers for your card, this is the perfect time to load the latest Graphics driver to have clean Graphics driver load with Windows 7 or Vista.
5. Install SWTOR.
6. Load Microsoft’s DirectX 9.0c otherwise DirectX 11 will run DirectX 9.0c in emulation mode.
7. Right click on the SWTOR icon on your desktop or in Start Menu program files, select Properties. In the window that appears select the Compatibility tab. Under Compatibility Mode check Run this program in compatibility mode for: From the box below select Windows XP (Service Pack 3) and then click OK (This setting is very important when your video card has less than 1GB of dedicated VRAM.)

Why run in XP SP3 mode?

---Technical Details---

Currently the engine/game is turning off the GPU RAM virtualization features of Vista and Windows 7 which is a major feature of the WDM/WDDM technology. This technology allows Windows to manage GPU RAM, by prioritizing textures and assets as needed without saturating the video card’s onboard RAM.

Quality Gain:

Allows medium and high resolution textures, better antialiasing, and various other features to remain enabled for a higher quality image on video cards with lower amounts of RAM. It also allows the higher quality textures to be used on objects in the distance which helps with the terrain, grass, building flaws as you are moving in the game.

Performance Gain:

Increases FPS even with higher Quality settings enabled and reduces the GPU stress by not having to load in and out lower resolution textures. This will even reduce GPU temperatures, as the Memory Controller on the GPU has to do less work with constant loading, unloading, and reloading of game textures and other assets.

Note:

By setting the game to Windows XP Service Pack 3 in the compatibility tab, the game/engine doesn’t override this feature of Windows, and this lets Windows manage the GPU RAM, and even if you have 256mb or 512mb of GPU RAM, Windows will tell the game you have 1024mb or more GPU RAM based on how much system RAM you have available and Windows can allocate to the game.

Windows 7 power settings:

This is big also, in the “Control Panel” make sure under “Power Options” it is set to “High Performance”.

Why: The CPU is OBLIVIOUS to your game or application settings. All it cares about is if whatever threshold of CPU activity that has been pre-determined by the power plan is reached. If that threshold is not reached, the CPU will NOT shift up to a higher clock speed. Hopefully Microsoft will fix this issue with a patch.

Your Welcome Ajax!!!

This game runs better than wow does on my high end PC.

Originally posted by ajax7

*Clipped a big list of stuff**

Your Welcome Ajax!!!

This game runs better than wow does on my high end PC.

That's a nice list, but I'm pretty sure a whole lot of people on high end PCs tried even more vigorous things to attempt to get a decent lag free., stutter free, high fps SWTOR experience to no avail.

If you want to add the latest FOTM on the SWTOR forums; all people experiencing any problems have underpowered power supplies apparently. 500 watt is too low, you need 750 to run SWTOR.

Of course maybe you have stumbled on the sevret sollution to SWTOR's engine's problems. You should share your findings with Bioware.

Better yet, load up FRAPS and make a video demonstrating your high fps on a crowded fleet. I'm sure it will run better then WoW.

But maybe you are right.

If someone wants to play SWTOR, they could buy a high end PC and go through your 99 step plan to run SWTOR (with its 2007 graphics)

or just buy any other mordern MMO, install it, and press play.

If you were just trolling for fun, you got me.

It's been a long day, I can't tell anymore.

http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/didnt-read-darth-vader.gif

No, but seriously. Nice research.

Originally posted by tiefighter25

Originally posted by ajax7

*Clipped a big list of stuff**

Your Welcome Ajax!!!

This game runs better than wow does on my high end PC.

That's a nice list, but I'm pretty sure a whole lot of people on high end PCs tried even more vigorous things to attempt to get a decent lag free., stutter free, high fps SWTOR experience to no avail.

If you want to add the latest FOTM on the SWTOR forums; all people experiencing any problems have underpowered power supplies apparently. 500 watt is too low, you need 750 to run SWTOR.

Of course maybe you have stumbled on the sevret sollution to SWTOR's engine's problems. You should share your findings with Bioware.

Better yet, load up FRAPS and make a video demonstrating your high fps on a crowded fleet. I'm sure it will run better then WoW.

But maybe you are right.

If someone wants to play SWTOR, they could buy a high end PC and go through your 99 step plan to run SWTOR (with its 2007 graphics)

or just buy any other mordern MMO, install it, and press play.

 

If you were just trolling for fun, you got me.

It's been a long day, I can't tell anymore.

My daughter had stopped playing do to the bad performence she had. When I visited her I tried to play under my ID. Wow bad performance issues she had were many.

1. Not enough drive space. "Bought her a New terebyte WD drive black."

2. She had never ran defrag ever. "Defraged the new drive after reloading everthing."

3. Loaded the latest graphics drivers from Nvida.

4. Put the game into XP sp3 mode.

5. Loaded DirectX 9 under windows 7 so both were loaded.

Now I logged into the game and Her Core2 3.00ghz unit with four gig of ram and 1gig of video ram ran 100% better than it did before. The lag was gone, I set the settings to High.

She is now playing again and enjoying the game.

Try it it works:

Originally posted by mmojunkie5000

Originally posted by Phry
the whole Hero engine thing has been done to death already, i think by now the general consensus is that it isnt worth using in MMO's, too late for Bioware perhaps, but hopefully an important lesson is learned..  the hero engine probably would have been okay in a single player game though.

 

why comment if you haven't even read the OP?

why?

they bought a completely unfinished version and couldn't finish/optimize it for their purposes.

 

this is not the stock hero engine, which may still suck, but since this whole damn article was about how Bioware even fucked up the purchase of a 3rd party engine and was too incompetent to handle it....

 

pls read before you comment

Yup,and this time it had nothing to do with EA,they came along later.

So much for the "it's all EAs fault" shouters.

Not gonna really get into this again but here goes...

There is nothing wrong with the proper version of the hero engine its very very capable and one of the best off the shelf engnies for any MMORPG developer out there. Its cabable of many different things from fps style combat to massive seamless worlds and i mean massive.

Sure it only supports dx9 for now but it support normal mapping on the terrain and other textures so it can be made to look pretty good. Sure of course this texture is not tilied but i was just testing what kind of things the engine could do so i quickly imported some wood texture and made a quick normal map for it again not spent any time but the engine is capable of good things,

Also for a company it makes working togeather really easy, each client can connect to the world and work on it in real time..

Bioware had a very early version of the engine and never realyl updated it or they just tried to update it themselves. They noly have themselves to blame...

Anyway check out the repopulation if you want to see what can be done with the current version of the hero engine..