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Copy Protection System in Graphics / possible reason to many of the performance issues people are ha
JeroKane
Member EpicPosts: 7,098
NOTE: I am not the OP on the official forums. I merely copied the info over to this forum for your information! the OP on the swtor forums deserves the credit!
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A new thread has been started, as some interesting details have been discovered/uncovered regarding the missing High Resolution Graphics!
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=162079
the OP:
During the discussion about the high-res texture problems( http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=151787 ), someone discovered that a dll in the retailclient folder appeared to contain instructions to deliberately reduce the quality of textures. Further investigation revealed that the dll in question appeared to relate to a remote rendering system, specified as being for copy protection of 3D models. An honest to god research paper on the subject can be found here: http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/~tarini/pap0A/sigg04A.pdf Another thread, on the subject of swtor needing administrator privileges, seems to indicate that the mysterious second swtor.exe process is not the launcher but in fact relates to the remote rendering system. ( http://www.swtor.com/community/showt...=143859&page=3 )
The research paper lists a few methods for accomplishing remote rendering: several of them involve deliberately degrading the display to prevent an accurate reconstruction. All of them require that data be constantly sent from the server in order to display the model: some going so far as to transmit a pre-rendered image to be displayed.
It's entirely possible that the second process is the 'remote renderer', and is being used as a secure transmission and decryption method for the assets from the server. It's also possible that it's doing this using software rendering, due to it being considered more secure.
If it is in fact the case that assets have been deliberately withheld from the client, and thus have to be transmitted to the client from the server in some form, it goes a VERY long way to explaining most of the performance problems SWTOR has been having.
Delayed animations? It's having to send what you're doing to the server, and then wait for the server/the second process to render it and send it to the client.
Queues? They're apparently tying up a fair portion of their server resources and bandwidth doing the client's job server side.
Disabled High Res Textures? Sending the higher quality images would result in a tremendous increase in the memory load and bandwidth usage of the server. They could also just be too much for the remote renderer server to handle, and had to be disabled to prevent performance degradation.
Performance drop in areas with a lot of characters? The DLL Referenced in the textures thread appears, from what I can tell, to be specifically related to character models in particular, so it's logical that the performance hit from it would be worst when there are many characters on screen.
It makes so much sense, and potentially ties together a large number of the problems people have been reporting.
And for what? Copy protecting the models? Seriously?
Deliberately crippling the performance and appearance of the game for legitimate, paying customers in order to keep someone from being able to rebuild your 3D models? It has to be one of the most absurd things I've ever heard.
And yet, I can't figure out why, when I'm on the republic fleet and have a large number of characters on screen at once, it causes a system with 8GB of RAM to act like it's paging.
This needs some serious, detailed, answers as to what exactly this 'remoterender' actually does, and what benefit it provides to us as customers. At the moment it sounds like it may be substantially degrading our experience and providing no benefits to us in return.
Edited for clarity:
Addition:
One thing I've noted, is that the size of the beta client dropped by a tremendous amount, in excess of 10GB I believe it was, between the first and second beta weekends I participated in. At about this same time, the NDA was lifted. Things I've heard also seem to suggest it might've been about then when the high resolution textures were disabled.
This could suggest that the remote renderer was added at this time, a large portion of the assets were removed to the server, and the high res textures were disabled to aid the performance of the remote renderer. This would explain why people could run high quality textures no problem in beta, but have bioware disable them anyway.
Addition2:
Quote:
Originally Posted by myrmexaw go download netlimiter 3 and watch the second process ... it never access internet even during loading time so the only remote processing possible would be on 127.0.0.1 and that would be juts dumb... the amount of data able to pass trough the botttleneck that this create versus cpu--> gpu is astonishingly immense. The game loading zone are eating twice as much bandwidth than even 8v8 pvp (i would check ilum but dead server is dead). It's really odd during loading zone it stays at low download ( 5k/sec) then at the infamous30% mark ( where the small icon on the bottom right restart turning) it jump to 55k/sec for the reminder of the loading bar. This does seem to indicate transfer of texture in betwen the server and the client as there is absolutely nothing that require a 50k/sec bandwidth gameplay wise... Unless they reload the whole client database at EVERY loading zone... and even then. |
This seems to suggest that the second process isn't in contact with Bioware, but the main process has a huge spike in bandwidth usage at the infamous hitch during loading.
Comments
I am very interested to see with what kind of Official Statement EA/Bioware is coming up with today regarding the sudden absence of High resolution graphics and possible connection to current performance problems plague'ing a lot of people.
Nice writeup.
There is a simple thing everyone can do to test this out, you can download a program called "3D Ripper DX" and run it while playing TOR.
The program rips 3d information (models, textures) directly from the running process (as long as its directx).
If this is really a copy-protection system it should be impossible to rip accurate (at all?) assets this way.
Could it be, not to copy protect the models, but to prevent Aion animation skip hack from happening?
I'm sorry pal, but this conspiracy theory is nuts.
Streaming a full rendered image (frame by frame) from server to client is insane for two reasons:
a) Servers would need to compute rendering for each client.
b) Bandwidth required to transfer those images.
Bioware is not OnLive, OnLive use a lot of video compression methods to allow streaming and still has lot of limitations; I can't play OnLive from region, I can play SWTOR. Those techniques are very early for massive use, and require very low-ping to work properly.
A separate process for rendering is still a possibility, but rendering does happen on the client machine.
I think its not what he means.
The process could just be streaming assets, not entire images. Assets can be far far smaller to stream.
Interesting read OP, back in beta i asked the same question about having two SWTOR.exe running in the program manager, never received a response from Bioware.
That sounds more likely. Rendering happens on the client machine, but they may want to obfuscate to make it very hard to exploit.
Do you actually follow the discussion in this thread? As of now, it's one of the fastest growing threads on the forum (even faster than the ability delay issue).
The fact is, that during loading screens, the first swtor.exe process is eating up twice as much network bandwith, than during gameplay! Which would also explain why the zone loading times are so frigging long lately!
Keep following the discussion in that thread.
No one is consipring. It's speculation at this moment, backed up with documented FACTs! Plus people have already run numerous tests on their systems and collected data that is actually confirming the OP.
Take this:
First half of Beta the client size was over 30GB! Performance was better according to most testers! AntiAliasing and High Resolution textures were enabled and working!
Then an new build came. Reduced more than 10GB in size! NDA gets lifted! And lo and behold! High Resolution graphics and AA is no longer working/dissabled!
And now with this information being discovered / uncovered! Add all the performance issues lots of people experience, including people with high end systems!
You do the math!
With both Electronic Arts and Lucas Arts involved with this game! I am honestly not suprised at all!
PS! I am not the OP on the offical forums who disovered this and posted it! I merely copied it over to this forum! Just to be clear on that!
the OP on SWTOR forums deserves all the credits!
Ahhhh!
Now I understand why they were constantly asking in the beta if the loading times were good or bad.
This has just been posted! And it's exactly what I personally experience most of the time when I switch to a new planet... that the loading bar stops at 30% and hangs sometimes for over 20 to 30 seconds, before continuiing! :
Originally Posted by myrmexaw
go download netlimiter 3 and watch the second process ... it never access internet even during loading time so the only remote processing possible would be on 127.0.0.1 and that would be juts dumb... the amount of data able to pass trough the botttleneck that this create versus cpu--> gpu is astonishingly immense.
The game loading zone are eating twice as much bandwidth than even 8v8 pvp (i would check ilum but dead server is dead).
It's really odd during loading zone it stays at low download ( 5k/sec) then at the infamous30% mark ( where the small icon on the bottom right restart turning) it jump to 55k/sec for the reminder of the loading bar. This does seem to indicate transfer of texture in betwen the server and the client as there is absolutely nothing that require a 50k/sec bandwidth gameplay wise... Unless they reload the whole client database at EVERY loading zone... and even then.
Server doing rendering is what is not possible.
Are they using an obfuscated (and slow) method for rendering? That's possible.
Could they be streaming media from server? Yeah, that's possible too.
Could they have reduced texture resolution to have a smaller installation? Yep, very likely.
But frame by frame transmission of rendered images is not what is going on behind the curtains.
Read my last post just above this one. People have already done some tests and confirms what I experience myself ingame!
They didn't confirm anything, just that its using bandwidth, not what for.
At 50kbs you wouldnt even get 1fps with serverside rendering.
Those tests only confirm two things:
- On loading the game is putting data into GPU (that's what any game does, including single player games).
- They are transfering a lot of data from server to client. (Assets? Textures? that's possible)
Does it mean the server does rendering? Nope.
Either way, there's a difference between streaming media assets on loading, and slow frame rate rendering, animation responses, etc. One thing is how the game gets the data, other is how the game renders the image and yet another how the gameplay mechanisms work.
Did you even read? It's downloading assets during Zone loading and it since launch it's taking way too long at times.
Why would a zone loading screen need to consume 55kb/s for over 30 seconds to load a planet, if all assets would be local on your harddrive? It would only need to load some zone info from the server, that's it.
The only thing lacking in this theory is "motive". What has Bioware to gain with streaming 3d assets and what does it have to lose?
To lose:
- a metric ton more traffic and bandwith requirements = lots of moniez
- potentially severly impacting the smoothness of gameplay and graphic performance = unhappy customers
- making things much more complex for their tech department
To gain:
- People not stealing 3d assets? (you can't really stop people to steal anything made up of bits and bytes but if they do and try to make money out of it, you can sew them anyway).
- Prevent certain exploits? (Could be a reason but they wouldn't want to sacrifice so much for that I reckon).
i.e. It doesn't make sense to me.
p.s. The performance issues might be linked to this but on the other hand: they might not. Apparently it's a new engine with still plenty of optimization work. Could be anything or more than one thing. Don't put your tinfoil hats on just yet.
p.p.s Would still be nice to hear what Bioware has to say about this though. So far they told us that they are aware of the problem and will react soon. *curious is*
My brand new bloggity blog.
Read the OP. It's not live stream rendering during gameplay! It's remote streaming/loading of art assets (textures)!
Which would explain many of the performance issues people are having, even with high end rigs!
People can have a high end rig, but if they have ISP / bandwith issues, this might precisely explain why they are suffering low FPS performance issues they should not be having.
The most interesting will be EA/Bioware's response! As a can of worms has sertainly be opened. And seeing EA's and Lucas Art's track record and horrible reputation. I would be not be suprised at all, if this is going to be the first MMO with DRM in place!
It would need to download data for every other player in the zone: names, levels, equipment, position in the zone, plus any other dynamic content - mobs, resource node state; some of this gets loaded afterwards, which is why you often see players fade in after the zone has loaded, but not all of it.
Electronics Arts is well known for their controversy regarding DRM!
Lucas Arts is also well known for their extreme paranoia!
Bring those two together and people shouldn't be suprised to discover that SW:TOR is the first MMO with a DRM system in place.
We all know it's retarded, just like the whole Spore Secu:ROM debacle (if people remember) and any other DRM crap consumers have been put up with in the past!
This decision most sertainly hasn't been made by developers or most probably Bioware itself even, but more likely some stupid suits suffering paranoia and desilusion at EA and Lucas Arts HQ that forced this into the game!
And as some other people have suggested. There are many motives as to why they would go through these lengths to put such a system in place, like for example, preventing people from reverse engineering the game code and start running private servers. Just to name one.
The other one, is the most obvious one and the most likely real reason, protection of Art Assets! Which is still dumb, as every other MMO company covers this in their EULA and threatens with a Law Suit if people steal and reuse their Art Assets!
But like I said... we are dealing with both EA and Lucas Arts. So don't be so suprised really.
Thanks for the clarification, from the first post I was understanding that :P
However, unless the engine is bad coded on that aspect, loading data should not be related to low frame rates, specially with multicore processors everybody has in our days.
This is what triggered my "nuuuuttzzz!" alert:
Quote:
It's entirely possible that the second process is the 'remote renderer', and is being used as a secure transmission and decryption method for the assets from the server. It's also possible that it's doing this using software rendering, due to it being considered more secure.
Both no and Yes (people with ISP problems and bandwith restriction might, even if having a high end PC itself), but it DOES explain why at a sertain point during Beta the new build of the client was suddenly more than 10GB less in size and High Resolution textures later (together with AA) being dissabled and still is up til this day!
The textures are the same now as they were during beta, parts of the client were compressed or cleaned out is all. AA was disabled due to severe problems when used on Ati cards, a problem that still persists and you would see if you stepped on to the test server. Lee Harvey Oswald is not to blame.
Still crazy and like you also point out: no good motive at all. Also it's far fetched to say that EA or Lucas Arts would jeapordize people's enjoyment of the game for a silly reason as artwork protection. How evil or unethical they might be; you don't kill a hen laying golden eggs for you like that, unless you're a veritable window licking waterhead.
It's like NASA packaging their next Space Shuttle in a mock-up exterior so the Russians won't steal the design and never mind about the damn thing blowing up upon re-entry due to that.
Either:
1. You are jumping to conclusions that whatever this service does is the also the thing that impacts performance for a lot of people.
2. It is in fact an unneeded service impacting our gaming. In which case I'll be the first to join you on the barricades.
We shall seeeth
My brand new bloggity blog.
I don't know nearly enough about networks and game processes to comment on that part
But I could definitely see EA and LA hampering performance to protect their assets.
They knew the game was going to sell like hot-cakes anyway, and since it leans more towards the CORPG model, private servers would be popular. Why pay for something that runs like crap and doesn't involve much interaction between other players?