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Technology where art thou
Meltdown
Member UncommonPosts: 1,183
Having a conversation with a friend I realized my complaints about loading time in SWTOR were quite reminiscent of my complainst about loading times from back when I played EQ in the late 90's. 56kbps connection on a 1Ghz processor and 0.5GB of RAM versus 100Mbps on a Quad-core 2.5Ghz processor with 8GB of RAM, yet nothing has technically changed, except the graphics are slightly less blocky, but hardly amazing compared to games like BF3/Skyrim.
So I ask... I have all this top of the line technology, connection rates 200x that of the previous generation. 15x the computing power and god knows how many times more memory, but I'm still sitting here staring at a loading screen for 30+ seconds.
This has been a beef of mine recently in all games though, not just SWTOR. I had really lost all faith in the gaming industry until Skyrim came out and FINALLY felt like a game that was fully utilizing the technology I have. So where is it in the MMOs we play? Xsyon probably had the most recent attempts to push the techonological boundries of an MMO and they ran into many data corruption issues with their original backup systems.
Are too many companies just playing it safe now? Maybe its a product of the poor economy, but I feel like 90% of the games are offering us the same gaming core as the games 15 years ago, with the increases in technology i feel like the sheer possibilities of diferent areas of development should be exponential... but still I'm here staring at "hints" in a loading screen that don't even apply to the current game (like the hint that talks about the respec button in the skill trees which does not exist).
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
Comments
Agree on Skyrim, finally something half decent looking (and even better after optimed for PC using the hihg rez packs you can download)
Some games have tried to push things, RIFT uses some nice high rez textures all over the place, just most systems will struggle when rendering 500+ people on the screen at the same time. AOC did really well, to much infact that it was too much for even average P's at the time. LOTRO online landscape was amazing in higher DX. Just failed with the characters.
SWTOR does baffle me as its not pushing any boundries and still seems to take an age to do much.. Think it muct be a really old engine.
One thing that really helps MMO'S and i would recommend to anyone is getting a SSD - It really does make loading times so much faster, RIFT was chopped from 25 sec to about 2! literally! MMORPGS have large Disc reads which shows. And this is where things have not changed much over the years, you can get the fastest processor out there but the same HDD's can only do so much.
Core i5 13600KF, BeQuiet Pure Loop FX 360, 32gb DDR5-6000 XPG, WD SN850 NVMe ,PNY 3090 XLR8, Asus Prime Z790-A, Lian-Li O11 PCMR case (limited ed 1045/2000), 32" LG Ultragear 4k Monitor, Logitech G560 LightSync Sound, Razer Deathadder V2 and Razer Blackwidow V3 Keyboard
Yea, I mean I was just QQing about the loadtimes as to what reminded me about the lack of technological boundries being pushed nowadays, but yea I should try moving SWTOR onto my SSD which currently only runs my OS, but my SSD is only 60GB.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
There's a good chance that you've gone from a 7200 RPM hard drive 12 years ago or so, to another 7200 RPM hard drive today. The latter is only marginally faster than the slower, which is why you still have to wait. A faster processor and more memory don't help if the processor and memory weren't the problem in the first place.
The good news is that the technology to not have to wait does exist. It's called solid state drives. If you're sick of waiting, then you might want to look into getting one. Just how fast are SSDs? This fast:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-special-sauce-sf1200-reviewed/6
See the Western Digital VelociRaptor down near the bottom of those charts? That's the fastest consumer hard drive available today. Meanwhile, the SSDs are older, slower models than what you could get today, as it's an old review. Newer reviews stopped showing hard drives for comparison, because they get clobbered so badly.
But those are synthetic benchmarks, right? What about real games? Well then, check here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-rift-ssd,3062-12.html
They put together a fairly high end system, with a Core i5 2500K, 8 GB of memory, a GeForce GTX 580, and some other good stuff. And they gave it both an SSD and a hard drive, and tried running the same programs off of both. And then they timed how long it took to zone in some games, including Rift. The results:
From an SSD: 4.88 seconds
From a hard drive: 23.3 seconds
Not a bad improvement, eh? Now, you might say, but it wasn't so dramatic in the other games. And indeed it wasn't. But the others are single player games, and there are a lot of tricks that single player games can use to improve loading times, but MMORPGs cannot. A single player game knows exactly what you'll need to load for a given level, but an MMORPG doesn't know months in advance which players will be in the zone you enter and what gear they'll be wearing. So I'd count on Rift being more representative of MMORPGs than the other games shown.
You posted that while I was working on my first post, so I should reply to that, too. An SSD only helps with the programs that you run off of the SSD. I usually recommend about 120 GB for SSDs, as that gives you ample capacity for whatever you run a lot to go on the SSD, and not just the OS.
I wish I had gone slightly bigger, I grabbed an offer on a £60gb that couldnt resist at the time. I only have my OS (and all the rubbish it collects over the years) and RIFT on it, only 6gb free now... RIFT Is expanding faster than I expected lol 9gb @ launch, now after 9 months 17gb!! only a couple left at this rate before i need to do something!
I have tried clensing as much space from the OS as poss (64bit 7 seems to take so damn much)
Core i5 13600KF, BeQuiet Pure Loop FX 360, 32gb DDR5-6000 XPG, WD SN850 NVMe ,PNY 3090 XLR8, Asus Prime Z790-A, Lian-Li O11 PCMR case (limited ed 1045/2000), 32" LG Ultragear 4k Monitor, Logitech G560 LightSync Sound, Razer Deathadder V2 and Razer Blackwidow V3 Keyboard
Yea I was going for an economical buy at the time i made my PC and the 60GB SSDs were good. Now I would definately spring for a 120GB SSD.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
no you are absolutely correct they are offering us the same junk. Just look at SWTOR and how themepark WoW like they are. Take out the VO's and it's the same game complete with poor pvp (i blame this on pvp design by them not learning from the mistakes of other games and not separating the pvp and pve skills to balance the game more efficiently but even rift didn't do this so) and a global cool down on skills. Even WoW to this day with the upstream truncation turned on to minimize it will glitch out and not do a skill when you are frantically pushing the button because of 1: GCD and 2: poor upload timing.
The load screens are completely the fault of the gaming industry as it shouldn't take any info from the server to load where you are in the mmo. I remember gaming companies actually trying to change the loadscreen so that i happened seemlessly, the next zone would load WHILE you were getting close to the invisible boundry. Wonder what happened to that tech.
It takes more memory to do that, and it's also very hard to cover up hard drive accesses effectively. Having some brief loading screens now and then sure beats having constant hitching problems.
But haven't you read the thread? The problem is usually loading data off of your hard drive, not downloading data from the server. Some stuff does need to be downloaded, such as the specific locations of the mobs and players in the zone. But that usually doesn't take very long.
I think Vanguard actually did that for the majority, you did still experience a kind of stuttering while going over "zone lines"
Core i5 13600KF, BeQuiet Pure Loop FX 360, 32gb DDR5-6000 XPG, WD SN850 NVMe ,PNY 3090 XLR8, Asus Prime Z790-A, Lian-Li O11 PCMR case (limited ed 1045/2000), 32" LG Ultragear 4k Monitor, Logitech G560 LightSync Sound, Razer Deathadder V2 and Razer Blackwidow V3 Keyboard
Vanguard was worse than that. When you crossed a zone line, it froze the screen for a while to load the next zone. It was just like having a loading screen, except that it kept the normal game window showing instead of bringing up a loading screen.
The trouble is that that wasn't the only zoning problem in Vanguard. Trying to load things from the hard drive on the fly would cause stuttering even when you weren't zoning. I didn't have an SSD at the time when I played Vanguard, but people said that you basically needed either an SSD or a ramdisk to fix the stuttering.
When EQ1 released there were singleplayer games which blew its graphics out of the water -- just like Skyrim.
Load times are kept vaguely constant as technology increases, because players accept a reasonable load time -- because a reasonable load time usually gets them substantially nicer looking graphics than they would get otherwise.
If technology's only goal was improving load times, we've have near-instant load times and EQ1-like graphics...but nobody actually wants that out of games.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Games with a MMO-client never load graphical stuff from anything else but your own system. Problem is while technology went faster and bigger, so did our expectations. Our playing field has become bigger. We wanted real looking items, nature, flora, water. We want fire that looks like burning something, water that runs as a real fluid and bullets going ballistic as in real life.
Graphical "beauty", spectacular effects comes with a price. That price is a +30 seconds loading time. Meanwhile the nature of the games, at its most basic of core mechanics did stay the same.
Revolutions don't come overnight. And game-companies have to make profits else they are very revolutionary but will fail in their financial core.
Rated M for Mature - May contain content inappropriate for children
what you say is really true but it does come with a few points.
1. MMOs specifically are about 10 years behind the technology curve when compared to single player games
2. although the demands for detail are much higher they also have better tools to automate that stuff.
That all said your right, the benchmark for entry for an MMO now has a LONG list of features and graphic requirements to be taken at all seriously
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Good to see people joing the conversation. As for the 30 second load times in SWTOR, I'm fine with that. There seems to be a bug where certain zones take 5-10 minutes to load for certain people. Unfortunately I am one of those people, its sad when restarting the entire game is faster than waiting for the loading screen to finish (heck with my OS on the SSD restarting my computer is faster than that loading screen).
But that is a bug... a bug that made me think about technology, and the existance of loading screens in the first place. There have been some advancements in other areas. Direction based action combat (VIndictus, Dragonnest, TERA?, AoC). Dynamic worlds (Xsyon, Rift).
But someone (SeanMcad) hit the point exactly, MMOs are like 10 years behind when it comes to single player game technology. Realistic inputs like Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, DDR, or Sing Star. The Kinect, Wii and Playstation Move and the hundreds of games based on these motion based technologies. Social technology integration (facebook pushes for achievements, and I think Rift start dabbling with this?). Battlefield 3 admittedly not a true single player game, but hardly an MMO, pushed the limits of destructable environments in a high resolution graphics environment.
And the most amazing thing of all, is after WoW took over the MMO marketplace with very low-res cartoony graphics we still have MMOs focused so much on graphics. How many Minecrafts have to be made before they realize that gamers want games utilizing advances in technology, not HD TV shows.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
Well the failure to integrate with social networks is just outright bad of MMORPGs, especially in server-based games. It's really dumb that I can't just Facebook Connect, see where my real friends are playing, and join their server. It's not a particularly complicated interface to create, and a game like TOR easily should've been able to implement that (if not being super awesome and letting players transfer to their FB friends' servers, or at least group together.)
Not sure the types of inputs you mention are relevant to MMORPGs yet. I'm really not sure I want to use rythm game inputs or motion-game inputs when I play my MMORPGs. Hundreds of games or not, every computer has a mouse and keyboard and they're functional devices which will make sense to keep using for years to come.
BF3 having destructable environments represents a long-running series which innovated in one strong direction.
Also it's not fair to praise BF3's single innovation in a discussion about controls without bringing up the fact that BF3 has terrible controls. I can't remember a FPS where I've had so many dropped inputs. I constantly must press keys a second time in order to keep my character crouching, or moving forward.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Yea get SSD, then it will go fast.
Skyrim loads a zone in like 10 seconds with a 10krpm HD, it loads before you can read a fraction of a tip with SSD.
SKYeXile
TRF - GM - GW2, PS2, WAR, AION, Rift, WoW, WOT....etc...
Future Crew - High Council. Planetside 1 & 2.
Just realize that you are going to be replacing your SSD's at a faster pace than a standard hard drive. The memory used in SSDs curently has a limited lifetime, measured by the number of writes it can handle before the cells start degrading. Its similar to a CD or DVD-RW, you can only write over the same space so many times before the media itself degrades to the point where it can no longer reliably hold data.
Don't panic, it isn't like its going to fail in a couple of weeks or anything, but instead of a new HD every 5 to 7 years, expect to have to replace it every 2-3 years, possibly sooner if you do a lot of writing to the drive. Btw, never assign your SSD to hold the swap file (if you haven't disabled that feature entirely).
"If MMORPG players were around when God said, "Let their be light" they'd have called the light gay, and plunged the universe back into darkness by squatting their nutsacks over it."
-Luke McKinney, The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming
"In the end, SWG may have been more potential and promise than fulfilled expectation. But I'd rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
-Raph Koster
It's not as big a problem as you think
Yes they write fail after a while but you can still read them
If you reformat them - they work again!
so you can take the data off your SSD(s) onto a tradition harddisk or external drive or whatever, reformat the SSD then copy it back.
It's not a good idea to make a system with just SSD
But a systems with Mid size SSDs raided together (120GB seems to be the sweet spot) and then a hard disk for storing pictures / music / video / email AND for swapping data back and forth from if SSD write fails will probably be the norm in the future
As a side note, avoid them hybrid drives, the ones that are like 1tb but has a SSD within for caching, its cheaper and better to get separate SSD and HD
biggest thing that bugs me with current mmos
we used to have crappy 56K modem connections and slower computers
but... When I played DAOC there were 100s of people on screen
now we have fast broadband and better computers
theres hardly anyone on screen, games grind to a halt with too many people around
Now obviously graphics have improved putting more strain on the computer, so you would expect the better computers and better graphics to kind of cancel each other out.
But network wise, MMOs still do the same thing as before, and we have much much faster connections, shouldn't we be bumping into more players on screen not less
@ Quizz
Have you heard anything about the new hybrid SSD/HDD drives. I'm kinda courious about the product.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Sometimes some techniques fool our eyes and mind, mipmaping, UV mapping, ... but cost less time to get it on the screen. This our machines are handling more and more in an acceptable way during single player action.
MMOs though need also a fast way to communicate. Latency is key here. Thé problem is the throughput of real time events on the screen and in a playable synchronised way. This is still a hell of a job for the small computer power we use or can afford.
The more players there are on the same server, on the same spot, the more data our computers have to work with. And for this reason quality of graphics is diminished explicitly to get the job done. So it is not our PC, XBox or Playstation that is the culprit but our way of communicating ( our network system ) which is still too slow for the things we want it to do.
Rated M for Mature - May contain content inappropriate for children
I remember like 7 years ago when the horde raided Stormwind. Hundreds of players on the screen, many people had an AMD with 1800mhz, 256mb RAM and a slide show.
Once once upgraded to 512mb, it worked almost ok.
Today's machines contain 4-8gb, CPU and GPU power is way beyond, graphics in many games are still 2007...but no developer dares to let 100 players at the same time on screen anymore. Instances left and right, 8vs8 pvp instead.
Somethings not going into the right direction.
I think they are taking the same approach to a big problem as a sys admin would. If you need X number of servers for something, you don't buy X servers, you buy Y servers and virtualize the crap out of them to make X servers. And for the most part this works great. Saves time, resources and is generally easier to manage.
And now to the point of my kinda crappy analogy! They are trying to do the same thing with MMO instancing and getting different results. While the solve the problem of 100 people on the screen lagging, they create a new problem of 25 people in 4 instances thinking their server is empty. Are there still 100 people in one zone? Well, technically yes. Problem solved? No. People are not computers. They know when they have been divided and it actually matters to some of them lol.
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
Agreed, I had my 4 80GBs Intel X-25 SSDs for years now without any problems.
I have them raided with raid 10 and while it have happened that the raid array kick out one of the drives I just rebuild it again and it is as good as new with no lost data or no need for constant backups.
OP could easily get 2 more of those 60 GB SSDs and Raid them with Raid 5 to get more security and speed, it is possible that he needs to get a Raid PCI or PCI-E card as well depending if his MB support raid though (software raid suck) but they are really cheap.
That is my advice anyways, 2 more of those will still be relatively cheap, add more speed than a 120GB drive and more security as well. You could just add one of course and just install the games on it, but you might as well speed up your OS while you are at it.
Not as good as 2 separate drives, hybrids really never are. Besides, if you have a small SSD and a large SATA drive you can always exchange one or the other, you could get one or more simlar SSDs and raid them and a critical failure means you only need to pay to replace the part that broke.
The only reason to get the hybrid would be if you have a very limited space to put it in.