What if they used the Unreal Engine 3 ?

[Azhreia]

In hindsight choosing the Hero Engine might have been a mistake, but I doubt that using the Unreal engine would have had a major positive impact. People have been complaining about so many different things, that I don't think any single change could salvage the situation.

[Profyrion]

The engine is fine. I'm playing with all settings maxed. Please upgrade your computers.

[Daffy101]

The hero Engine was a poor choice done for monetary reasons as EA always does. Personally it feels more like a PC port of a console game than a PC Specific engine. Worst of all the hero engine used is indeed 6 years old with few of the recent updates. I would have said the amount of time it took then to develop the game surely they could have worked on their own engine but they seemed to have spent most of their time on the voice acting, if only the rest of the game were to the same high standard.

[Snorkle]

I don't think a different engine would change anything. At least to me I don't see how it would even affect me...

[Jalek]

Hero engine works fine for me, most complainers are people that haven't played since the updates a few major patches ago.

[Hellfury]

I don't think a different engine would change anything. At least to me I don't see how it would even affect me...

You would be able to do Ilum.

[Frostea23]

The engine is fine. I'm playing with all settings maxed. Please upgrade your computers.

See, my only problem with that quote is, although I had a 2.93 GHz E7500 Core 2 Duo CPU on my old comp, it was chugging so hard on SWTOR PvP and was always bottle-necked at the CPU. GPU was starved.

The only PC's I owned that could run the game were ones with a top of the line i5/i7 [The game itself is not very GPU intensive; my old 250 GTS did a fine job running it], IE the one I am typing this from is an i5-3570K. You should not need a $200+ top generation CPU to not be bottlenecked at the CPU for primary game content. The official minimum system requirements they have listed could ONLY play single player content. That bars you from PvP, the Fleet, and any crowded area.

[DanBowie]

This game has top notch graphics that blow other mmos away.

[woodydave44]

The engine is fine. I'm playing with all settings maxed. Please upgrade your computers.

please see my post on the first page

Note - I have an i7

[Victus01]

for a game that came out last year, the look of the game is still that of something you would expect from a 7 year old game....

this game eats so much gpu power and cpu power on my beefy comp and its not even that great looking... granted it is smooth but not as smooth as it could be with my system. if systems like mine have to work their butts off just to run the thing smoothly how can people near min spec run at low settings??


it states:

min spec:

cpu:
Pentium 4 3.0GHz
Sempron 3600+

gcard
GeForce 205
Radeon HD 6250

ram
1 GB

system
Win Xp 32
DX 9
15 GB

i find it hard to believe you can play this game with a single core cpu!!... so bs.. bait advertising. even a low level dual core has a hard time running the game.

had a 20 vs 20 in corellia black hole. game shat itself to pieces!!. 4 fps!! from everyone no exception!! it used up 100% of my cpu and my gpu. fans were going like mad. its costing me $15 a month + my hiked up electricity bill from always using 100% of my system.
i dont even see in any possible way Ilum open world pvp would work with 4fps... or any massive world pvp. (which was the main selling point for me).

dont know if its the hero engine or the people who worked on designing the game but the game is just a bag full of bad nuts.

[Jalek]

Did you guys play when WG came out in WoW? That chugged even worse. The game would be everyone running still then all of a sudden there would be text spam as the game caught up and one entire faction had been steamrolled during the lag.

There have been lots of FPS improvements too, what patch did you guys play on?

[Redblade]

Did you guys play when WG came out in WoW? That chugged even worse. The game would be everyone running still then all of a sudden there would be text spam as the game caught up and one entire faction had been steamrolled during the lag.

What does that have to do with anything, that's like 7 years ago and not on either the Hero nor the Unreal engine.

There have been lots of FPS improvements too, what patch did you guys play on?

Played beyond 1.2 and while the game got more and more optimized it never even came remotely close to Tera for example that is based on the Unreal engine.

[Victus01]

For a triple A title like Swtor you would have at least expected that they would develop their own propriatory game engine for the game :/

[Redblade]

For a triple A title like Swtor you would have at least expected that they would develop their own propriatory game engine for the game :/

Nothing wrong with using an already developed one if it fits your needs as they do tend to cost a lot to develop, the Hero engine, or what's left of it in combination with what BW developed it to just wasn't optimized at launch, hell it's not optimized now either or if it is it's simply not doing as good of a job as others. While I'm sure the Unreal engine has it's downsides optimization and ability to showcase amazing graphics isn't it, and from an outside view it would have been a much better choice based on comparison between existing titles on both engines.

[woodydave44]

Did you guys play when WG came out in WoW? That chugged even worse. The game would be everyone running still then all of a sudden there would be text spam as the game caught up and one entire faction had been steamrolled during the lag.

There have been lots of FPS improvements too, what patch did you guys play on?

Hardware 7 years ago =/= Hardware now

[Kelimbror]

Hardware 7 years ago =/= Hardware now

I think the point was that no matter what state technology is in, you are going to run into optimization problems with people. For this specific example, WoW is basically designed to run on a Graphing Calculator, but they still made a huge error when WG was released. Of course in this example, the problem was corrected fairly quickly, but the point remains.

I have a much lower end computer than people posting about their i7s with SWTOR, but I honestly have no problems. Yes Ilum was unplayable, but it was terrible anyways. I don't lag on the fleet or anywhere else in the game and I have the settings, other than shadows maxed. Clearly it's a much more complicated issue involving various types of gpus and cpus and not some simple 'they made it stupid' answer.

[karumayu]

I have been noticing performance increase with each patch. At the release time, I could not do any Warzones due to huge drop in frames, but it has been constantly improved to the point that I'm running around constant 35-45 fps with most of settings on max anywhere (apart from Anti-alias which is set to low and no shadows).

On hindsight it could have been a good idea for them to have picked a "better" engine, but I would think changing from one engine to another is to scrap the whole game and start a new. Correct me if I'm wrong on this

As for now they are tweaking the engine to make sure it runs smoothly and I still have hope that it one day can accommodate large scale battles that many would like to see. Comparing WoW here is a bit unreasonable here, when I first started on wow with my that time lousy computer set up the taxi from Stormwind to STV consisted of 3-4 screenshots of me sitting on a gryphon over various zones. As time went by and with new system, it became progressively smoother over the years. I kind of expect the same here.

[Victus01]

Nothing wrong with using an already developed one if it fits your needs as they do tend to cost a lot to develop, the Hero engine, or what's left of it in combination with what BW developed it to just wasn't optimized at launch, hell it's not optimized now either or if it is it's simply not doing as good of a job as others. While I'm sure the Unreal engine has it's downsides optimization and ability to showcase amazing graphics isn't it, and from an outside view it would have been a much better choice based on comparison between existing titles on both engines.

yeah true,

but they did spend, on who knows what, was it $200 million?!??! 800 staff working on it for 7 years. with that much people they could have at least put in the effort to sort out the engine :/. even comparable / more quality mmo Rift, Tera, Gw2 spent considerably less. and gw2 has its own engine. granted its a heavily modified engine of gw1. rift and gw2 i believe only had 200+ staff working on the game. 800 for swtor.. wtf.. HR being happy go lucky?

[Frostea23]

I've tried the game in 4 different machines [out of frustration]; the GPU and CPU activity graphs clearly showed a bottleneck at the CPU for 2 of the computers in question.

Boiled down to, if you did not have a top 3-tier CPU, the game bottlenecked pretty bad in PvP, moderately in PvE multiplayer situations, and mildly in solo. An E7500 Wolfdale will choke at 95-99% utilization the entire time SWTOR is open. GPU activity in Warzones, even to this day, is below 50%.

3rd computer, laptop, has an i7-2670QM, which could handle SWTOR fine, but GPU was inadequate.

In the end required a new gaming machine, the 4th computer, with an i5-3570K + ATI 6850 to get it working properly; even then you can tell SWTOR is a CPU hog.

So many people claim: "Oh it works for me, your argument is invalid."

Just because it worked for you, does not mean everyone else is wrong. Argument logic by induction is a flawed method for RCA.

---------- Post added 2012-08-13 at 11:32 AM ----------

Did you guys play when WG came out in WoW? That chugged even worse. The game would be everyone running still then all of a sudden there would be text spam as the game caught up and one entire faction had been steamrolled during the lag.

There have been lots of FPS improvements too, what patch did you guys play on?

Yes, Wintergrasp was pretty bad, but at least that lag was mostly server side [if you had a high-end computer]. Elsewise, a poor to decent computer chugged in the rendering department; just too many players at the gates for example. Nevertheless, Wintergrasp chugged no where near as bad as Ilum, which had even the best of the best machines' CPUs on their knees trying to render frames. Note I said CPUs, not GPUs; top tier GPUs can render that easy; CPUs, however, could barely keep up with player locations.

SWTOR, Ilum being their World PvP zone, all the lag was located client side. The engine + client computer simply could NOT render that many players doing activities simultaneously. 20 v 20, the game could not handle it. That is terrible compared to the aforementioned WG, which could hold a maximum of 120 v 120 = 240 players after the population cap was implemented. BioWare did not make the engine to effectively pre-process that many player avatars in the same area prior to post-process rendering.

[woodydave44]

I think the point was that no matter what state technology is in, you are going to run into optimization problems with people. For this specific example, WoW is basically designed to run on a Graphing Calculator, but they still made a huge error when WG was released. Of course in this example, the problem was corrected fairly quickly, but the point remains.

I have a much lower end computer than people posting about their i7s with SWTOR, but I honestly have no problems. Yes Ilum was unplayable, but it was terrible anyways. I don't lag on the fleet or anywhere else in the game and I have the settings, other than shadows maxed. Clearly it's a much more complicated issue involving various types of gpus and cpus and not some simple 'they made it stupid' answer.

Again, I point to my first post in this thread. SWTOR is the only game where I have an "optimization problem" and anyone that says they ran flawlessly during the ilum days or in crownded areas are flat out lying. I ran guildwars beta weekends in WvW and tera pvp with max settings, with 100 people on screen, and barely had any of the issues that 30 people in swtor (a released game) caused me and my 2k machine.