Image Designer Archive
Thread: Image Designer Update for Publish 8
wow! Glad to see the ID changes coming in effect! looking good! Nevermind the GCW...... take care fo that later...lol... I made a smart choice today, and that was cancelling my account. Am I a troll / greifer? yeah probably. This kind of change is rediculous. Who cares about image designer changes when people are leaving this game by the dozens due to the broken GCW? I doubt you would have a mass exodus of people if the image designer profession stayed exactly how it is for the next ten years. I'm not understanding the priorities of the developers TH? I'm sure it is a rediculously complex task of re-vamping the GCW, but the time spent tweekig the ID profession IMHO can be better spent. "The greatest good for the greatest amount of people" method isn't in affect here i see. Maybe I'm mistaken, maybe there are more ID's than people who participate in the GCW.
LOL, you non-IDer complainers need to realize thatthese changeshelp more non-IDers then it does IDers. IDing is not a solo-able profession, ya there may be only a few IDers BUT there aretens of thousands of customers. These changes helps the customers more then the IDer, turning a player into a blue skin,red eye chiss only gives theIDer a few minutesof fun, butyou thecustomer will enjoy it for as long as you want.
Also do you release that there is more then one dev team?So just becausea non-combat professions is getting some dev time does not mean combat orGCW isput on hold.Plus RPers will love this upgrade and it will increase the SW feel byincreasing the number of weird alien looks you see.
Good glad to hear you are quitting. one less troll to deal with. ID is a somewhat borked profession in the fact that most people don't consider their skills 'necessary' like say a weaponsmith or a tailor. Any love the IDs get is good news to me.
boogie7776 wrote:
wow! Glad to see the ID changes coming in effect! looking good! Nevermind the GCW...... take care fo that later...lol... I made a smart choice today, and that was cancelling my account. Am I a troll / greifer? yeah probably. This kind of change is rediculous. Who cares about image designer changes when people are leaving this game by the dozens due to the broken GCW? I doubt you would have a mass exodus of people if the image designer profession stayed exactly how it is for the next ten years. I'm not understanding the priorities of the developers TH? I'm sure it is a rediculously complex task of re-vamping the GCW, but the time spent tweekig the ID profession IMHO can be better spent. "The greatest good for the greatest amount of people" method isn't in affect here i see. Maybe I'm mistaken, maybe there are more ID's than people who participate in the GCW.
Thunderheart wrote:
As far as "lag" goes, for most players (especially casual players) , they see any slowdown as lag, so when I say lag, Im addressing it from a general perspective. In this case, it is "bogging the client" and the combination of the particle effects and the little bit of extra data has a cumulative effect thats not acceptable.
As I'm sure you're aware, TH, any "lag" that's purely an issue of client-side rendering can always be tweaked on the client side. Like, for example, the level of detail on radial flora, or water.
Come to think of it, a VERY useful client-side feature would be an option to dynamically adjust the LOD to keep the framerate at a good place.If your framerate is plummeting because you're in the Coronet starport, dynamically turn the details down so you can still navigate comfortably. Once you get out into the wilderness and your machine can handle high detail flora and whatnot, the knob turns itself back up.
I actually do this manually if I'm going on long hunting trips, since I really like to look at the pretty landscape, but it's a bit of a pain in the butt to have to keep switching it out.
Anyway, if this were automatic, any issue of "too much of a framerate hit" becomes a complete non-issue. If the player has a beefy graphics card, or is looking at a relatively small number of particle-effect hairdos, the effect shows up. If it would be too much of a hit, it doesn't show up. Everyone is happy. Yay!
This is why it's important to differentiate between "network lag" (which can't be mitigated as easily) and "graphics lag" (which CAN be, very easily). Lumping it all under the heading of "lag" isn't a good way to approach it when you're deciding feasibility of implementation.
boogie7776 wrote:
wow! Glad to see the ID changes coming in effect! looking good! Nevermind the GCW...... take care fo that later...lol... I made a smart choice today, and that was cancelling my account. Am I a troll / greifer? yeah probably. This kind of change is rediculous. Who cares about image designer changes when people are leaving this game by the dozens due to the broken GCW? I doubt you would have a mass exodus of people if the image designer profession stayed exactly how it is for the next ten years. I'm not understanding the priorities of the developers TH? I'm sure it is a rediculously complex task of re-vamping the GCW, but the time spent tweekig the ID profession IMHO can be better spent. "The greatest good for the greatest amount of people" method isn't in affect here i see. Maybe I'm mistaken, maybe there are more ID's than people who participate in the GCW.
You said mini-publish ... when can we be expecting the full publish?? This has killed business for me because no one wants to get ID done until the new features come out. 
Also 90% of my customers ask about body tats and piercings, will those ever be available? 
Lastly - There are a lot of timeswith the hair styles that my customers can't get quite what they'd like. Is there anyway to make a mix/match feature? 
It would give players a littlemore individuality and make ID a little more competitive in the sence that some IDs are better at making your style look good. Also I get lots of requests for highlights and streaks, will those be available anytime soon?? That too would be nice to have mix/match. 
KB
(ooo nice smiley)
Veldcath wrote:
Okay, I'm obviously not a developer, but I've paid some attention to my machine as I go running around from place to place. The graphics bogging has a few causes that I've noticed.
1: RAM. The more RAM you have, the more the game can keep resident in memory (fast) as opposed to loading on demand from the hard drive (slow). Pay attention to your HD light (or sound of it seeking) and you'll notice that as you come into Theed or Coronet it's thrashing away, grabbing textures and models off the drive.
I had 1024 MB RAM in my machine for a bit. The second 512K stick was bad, so I had to take it back out, but when it wasn't rebooting, load times between planets were decreased and frame rates in Theed and Coronet were somewhat higher.
2: Hard Drive Speed. There're threefactors that come into play, here. What kind of drive and IDE interface you have (ATA/66? ATA/100? ATA/133? Some kind of RAID? SCSI? LVD SCSI?) makes a big difference. Many off-the-shelf computers use ATA/100, which is decent, but not great. Next is the spindle speed of the drive. Many inexpensive computers ship with 5400 RPM drives. Faster spindle speeds mean data comes under the read heads more quickly. I refuse to install software on a 5400 any more - 7200 all the way. I'd go 10,000 if I could afford the hardware. And third, have you defragmented/optomized your hard drive recently? If all the Star Wars Galaxies data is on one chunk of the hard drive, the read head won't have to seek as far to get to what it needs.
3: CPU and GPU. I know someone who has a decent GeForce card but is running it on a Pentium-3. He's fine in the wilderness but a medium tatooine house will bring his machine to its knees (1-2 fps) and trying to move in Theed will dump him right off the game.
4: Network Congestion. I full well believe the developers have worked hard to mitigate this, but the fact is, when you speed into Coronet on your swoop, your computer suddenly needs to receive data for 50 players. You're all IDs... you should remember how many variables there are. Eye shape, eye size, eye angle, nose width, nose protrusion... All those are numbers. Every one of those variables has to be transmitted to your client. No, it's not a lot of data, but remember that you're also being told to load buildings, vehicles, creatures, NPCs, effects like explosions and smoke (on vehicles abandoned outside the starport, most often). PLUS position, facing, names, moods, profession tags, which animation to play, if they're moving - how fast... It can very, very quickly become more complex than you think. Oh... Add clothing/color to that too.
A couple other things... Now people are thinking of adding particle effects, tattoos... If your character has multiple tatoos, there's at least a position key (left upper arm) and image key (it's that heart one), plus possibly a color key (in green #3)... Times the number of tattoos times how many players in the area...
As for particle effects, let me mention that particle effects are about the hardest basic rendering thing a video card can do. Smoke is usually done with particle effects. I play a flightsim - I sometimes fly through smoke rising off a target I just slaughtered with the A-10's cannon... I get a respectable 18-25 fps at 1280x1024... until I fly through smoke. Then I'll have a couple of seconds when the smoke fills the screen... 1-3 FPS. Now, when it's in small places on the screen, it's not bad, but what if you came into Coronet when everyone had something going? It's in 30 small places at once, which takes up a lot of screen space overall. Which will pretty much kill everyone's machines as they try to render it.
Finally, a thought for the developers: I do some work in database modelling and using data out of files and databases concurrently. Not exactly the same thing as what's being discussed here, but I have a thought that might help with some of the character-loading/network congestion issues at least.
Why not set up a 'cache' on the player's machine (if they turn the option on) where each character'sID settings would get written in a little file. These records would have a player-id or character-id key and a timestamp (unix timestamp would work well enough). Then when you're running into Theed, the server sends out "character 20756, updated 1077122801, clothing:...". The client looks at the record... If 20756 doesn't exist, it requests the ID info. If it DOES exist, all you need to to do is load the models and textures off the drive. Doesn't exist? Client requests full info and caches it. Also makes the request if the updated date is greater than the cached date. Finally, you can help keep the cache clean by purging it of every record that's older than... oh... say 604800 seconds (one week). This could even be user-selectable... Clear characters from cache every: 1 day ..... 7 days) or like IE options... don't allow the character cache to grow beyond: 5 MB - 20 MB)...
-V
Thats a great idea! Sign up for SoE lol
Um... thanks.. but no. I rather like the job I have now (I develop web-delievered solutions, not windows applications), I don't really have the skillset required to write any piece of something like SWG... and I rather like to have my sanity (or lack thereof, whichever you prefer to think of it as.) But above all, I'd hate to be on the team that takes as much flak from as many sides as the SOE developers do, regardless of how much of that flak is just or un.
-V