This week's tale of Senate impotence

Comments

• Rekrul Member Posts: 2,961

  October 2006

  (CONTINUED) Possible Lifting on RAM Restrictions? by Psychopyro80: 
  The discussion continues now that changes along these lines have been
  put onto Test Center.  Senators are reporting a noticable difference
  with the increase.  Tereb shared
  that the cap on Test Center is now set at 1500MB rather than at 750MB. 
  Users with more than 1GB of RAM may see more of it get used.  This came
  to live with Chapter 3.6 and the limit will be upped to 2 GB with 3.7.
  

  ---

  
  
  
  1500? 1.5 gigs? For what?
  
  And 2 gigs? For what?
  
  And no, visuals simply don't count, because games out there manage thousands (several 1000) different particle effects and animations, not dozens that SWG offers.
  
  

  
  
  
  
• Wildcat84 Member Posts: 2,304

  October 2006

  It's so they can code even more inefficiently and waste more system resources.
  
  
  
  
  
• kissodeath Member Posts: 102

  October 2006

  I guess all those supercool particle effects .....I dont play NGE .....dont have many numbers to calculate anymore thou

  
• Bissrok Member Posts: 1,002

  October 2006

  ---

  Originally posted by Wildcat84
  It's so they can code even more inefficiently and waste more system resources.
  
  

  ---

  The excuse I read was "But everyone's got at least 2 gig! We didn't want it to go to waste!"
  
  
  

  
  A** Still Raw From Your Last SWG Subscription? Come join us at RLMMO.com
• Xcathdra Member CommonPosts: 1,027

  October 2006

  Ahh.. so in true fashion they are fixing something that was never broke... gotcha..

   

  Xcathdra

  Having access to a billion $ IP - Billions of dollars..
  Having access to a massive fan base of said IP - Even more Billons...
  Singly handedly alienating them due to stupidity - Priceless.
• Obraik Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 7,261

  October 2006

  I'm truly speechless...

  

  
• jrscott Member Posts: 1,252

  October 2006

  ---

  
  

  (CONTINUED) Condemned Structures Need to Go, by Khristen: Since the community desire for a pack-up of inactive housing seems to be having technical difficulties, Khristen requests
  that the bug be fixed that keeps condemned structures around
  indefinitely.  When the auto-deduct/condemned structure maintenance
  system was first put in, structures were supposed to be destroyed after
  6 months in a condemned state.  Khristen brings
  up the issue again as reports surface that Customer Service has told
  players that a "new" game mechanism has been installed to remove
  condemned structures after 6 months.  Thunderheart previously
  stated that part of the challenge facing pack-up is that the player has
  to be in the world for a structure to be packed up.  No further
  response.
  

  ---

  
  Uhhhh...seems like a pretty simple issue to get around dudes.  Put them in the world during the packup procedure (as part of that procedure), then take them back out.  Little chance of them already being logged on, since you are dealing with people who have not logged on for at least 6 months.
  
  Of course, they would likely forget to take them back out of the world at the end of the proc, leaving 100s of thousands of ghosts in game, but they would eventually, in two years or so get around to removing them. 
  
  I'm sorry, this challenge seems like child's play to an experienced developer.
  

  I realize I said I quit. I never said it was forever
• Apache_ Member Posts: 168

  October 2006

  
  

  ---

  
  Originally posted by Rekrul
  
  (CONTINUED) Possible Lifting on RAM Restrictions? by Psychopyro80:  The discussion continues now that changes along these lines have been put onto Test Center.  Senators are reporting a noticable difference with the increase.  Tereb shared that the cap on Test Center is now set at 1500MB rather than at 750MB.  Users with more than 1GB of RAM may see more of it get used.  This came to live with Chapter 3.6 and the limit will be upped to 2 GB with 3.7.
  
  
  
  
  
  1500? 1.5 gigs? For what?
  
  And 2 gigs? For what?
  
  And no, visuals simply don't count, because games out there manage thousands (several 1000) different particle effects and animations, not dozens that SWG offers.
  
  
  

  ---

  
  

  Are they saying that haveing 2 gigs of RAM is going to be a system requirement?  What could possibly take up that much RAM from SWG?  I remember playing Pre-CU with 512.  Sure it got choppy from time to time so I upped it to 1 gig.   But 2 Gigs??  
  
• Starnick Member Posts: 140

  October 2006

  (Repost) Clarification on the gigs of ram...
  
  

  ---

  
  
  
  Since there has been some confusion on what this means, I will explain.
  
  Before
  publish 3.6 the game would allocate 75% of your current availible
  memory (RAM) to the game up to 1GB. Meaning that if you had 1GB or more
  of TOTAL RAM, the system would allocate 750MB to the game.
  
  256MB = 192MB of RAM to the game
  512MB = 384MB of RAM to the game
  756MB = 567MB of RAM to the game
  1024MB(1GB)or More = 750MB of RAM to the game (not quiet 75%
  
  After
  publish 3.6 the game allocates 75% of your current availible memory
  (RAM) to the game up to 2GB. Meaning that if you have 2GB or more of
  TOTAL RAM, the system will allocate 1.5GB to the game.
  
  256MB = 192MB of RAM to the game
  512MB = 384MB of RAM to the game
  756MB = 567MB of RAM to the game
  1024MB(1GB) = 750MB of RAM to the game (not quiet 75%
  1280MB = 960MB of RAM to the game
  1536MB = 1152MB of RAM to the game
  1792MB = 1344MB of RAM to the game
  2048MB(2GB) or More = 1500MB of RAM to the game (not quiet 75%
  
  As
  you can see, this only affects people who have MORE then 1GB of RAM. If
  you do not have more then 1GB of RAM, it will not affect YOU! you will
  notice no difference at all. You do not need to buy more memory to play
  the game. You can still play it as you have been since this change went
  in with the publish of 3.6. The change is already in the Live game you
  have been playing.
  
  

  ---

  
  So for all of us with 1 GB of ram, our performance should be better because we won't be capped at 750 mb of ram...
  
  
  
  
• Wildcat84 Member Posts: 2,304

  October 2006

  
  My machine can perform:
  
  Athlon 64x2 5000+, 4GB DDR2 RAM, GeForce 7900GT
  
  The NGE cannot.
  
  I logged in for 30 minutes and got tired quickly of 10 on 10 gankfest.
  
  Ugh.
  
  They could dope up the NGE with Levitra, Viagra, and a shot of heroin and it would still be impotent.
  
  
  
  
• ArcAngel3 Member Posts: 2,931

  October 2006

  One thing I'll say is that it'll be a small mercy to the tortured souls in SWG if they FINALLY bring back camps.  My gosh, people have been trying to explain to SOE the simple concept that "CAMPS ARE FUN" since they were yanked with the rest of the fun things we all did. 

  Having said that, I still think it's crappy to give people back one thing at a time over the course of months, all the while taking their money, when they could restore everything via classic servers.  To me it seems like they promise little tidbits of things that they wrongfully took away, to keep people playing and paying.  I could be wrong, I'm not a mind reader, but when I was playing SWG last month, I really felt strung along. (e.g. keep playing and you'll get bases back soon, and TK back soon, and now camps back soon...etc.)  BAH, keep it SOE.  I'm not paying any more money while I wait months to get things back that I enjoyed.  Besides after you give it back, how do I know that you won't just up and delete stuff again?

  Sick of the mind games SOE, no thanks.

  ARC3
• Xcathdra Member CommonPosts: 1,027

  October 2006

  So we dump just about everything out the window when they brought us the NGE. We all beg for them to give us stuff back... They say no, it will never happen...

  Then they start giving us stuff back slowly and ask dumb questions (and it was fun?). It just proves they have no concpet of what the players enjoyed, what the players liked, or what the players wanted. Their own arrogance got the better of them with the we know what you want attitude.

  Then they get upset because all they see on the SOe Forums are nothing but negative comments about whats going on.

  Management needs to go...

  Devs need to go.....

  Community relations need to go...

  The Senators need to go....

  The NGE needs to go....

  Then and only then are they in a position to go forward..

   

  Xcathdra

  Having access to a billion $ IP - Billions of dollars..
  Having access to a massive fan base of said IP - Even more Billons...
  Singly handedly alienating them due to stupidity - Priceless.
• Rekrul Member Posts: 2,961

  October 2006

  ---

  Originally posted by ArcAngel3
  One thing I'll say is that it'll be a small mercy to the tortured souls in SWG if they FINALLY bring back camps.  My gosh, people have been trying to explain to SOE the simple concept that "CAMPS ARE FUN" since they were yanked with the rest of the fun things we all did. 
  

  ---

  What will you do with camps? They serve no purpose anymore, since the mechanics behind them was removed. Nobody also goes out hunting, there is no more downtime.
  
  Once camps do come back, many people will realize how meaningless they are, and how the world has changed. If you venture outside of larger cities, you'll see there's really nobody there. Nobody will run across your camp, nobody will randomly wander in.
  
  Roleplayers? Sure, all 18 of them still left in the game.
  
  
  
• Agricola1 Member UncommonPosts: 4,977

  October 2006

  Agreed, camps no longer serve a purpose in the NGE. You could say camps are pointles in the NGE, but I prefer to say that the NGE is just pointless. Camps did serve a purpose once, the NGE never did.

  "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
  
  CS Lewis
• AfroPuff Member Posts: 207

  October 2006

  I will say this in defence of the RAM changes.  A lot of the 'lag' I used to see was really the result of caching delays while my hard drive thrashed (swapped game files from disk to RAM and back). I'd walk into a building, and  have to wait for my drive to fetch the textures. I'm sure others see this performance issue.

  Once upon a time the whole game could live inside of 750MB, so people with 1 gig of RAM could actually load the whole game into memory for improved performance.  With 3 expansions and whatever else now, it hasn't been possible to load the whole game into RAM like you could before, since the game was limiting itself to 750MB max.

  This change should improve performance noticiably. My only question is: why'd it take so long to make this change?

   I'm also flabbergasted by this exchange:

  
  
  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

   

  
  

  (NEW) About the Poll, by Psychopyro80:  Feedback on the GCW and PvP poll is discussed.  Senators ask why an option for "I do not like PvP" was not included as an option because many players just do not care for the play style regardless of any perks or changes that could be made.  The lack of an option for lag issues was also brought up.  Shadowbrak states that "I don't feel like it" is not an option they can fix, and that option would generate useless data for them.  Thunderheart also shares that the poll option function is limited to 10, but it would make an interesting follow-up poll.

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  

   

  
  
  
  

  It's not smart to sabatoge your poll data.  If you feel it's important to get players into PvP, but it happens that a significant amount of players won't PvP no matter what games changes you make, then you need to know that, before you devote scarce developer hours to that issue. It takes special talent to be this bad at requirements gathering - I'm continually surprised at just how good they are at being bad.

   

  
  SWG Team Mtg.
• Rekrul Member Posts: 2,961

  October 2006

  ---

  Originally posted by AfroPuff
  

  I will say this in defence of the RAM changes.  A lot of the 'lag' I used to see was really the result of caching delays while my hard drive thrashed (swapped game files from disk to RAM and back). I'd walk into a building, and  have to wait for my drive to fetch the textures. I'm sure others see this performance issue.

  Once upon a time the whole game could live inside of 750MB, so people with 1 gig of RAM could actually load the whole game into memory for improved performance.  With 3 expansions and whatever else now, it hasn't been possible to load the whole game into RAM like you could before, since the game was limiting itself to 750MB max.

  This change should improve performance noticiably. My only question is: why'd it take so long to make this change?

  ---

  
  Wrong. There's nothing in SWG that would warrant the use of 750Mb in the first place.
  
  Particle effect heavy games (3D textures, 128x128x32 or 256x256x(16-64), upwards of hundreds of such effects) run contently with 128-512 Mb of RAM.
  
  Expansions and all that make no difference. The game has always been several gigs in size, and loading entire game into memory was never an option.
  
  This is just a sign of improper use of graphics pipeline.
  
  The reason why it makes no difference to performance whether you give the client 1 or 2 gigs, is because you're still limited by graphics pipeline. Graphics cards can use a maximum of 256 Mb or so of assets (meshes, textures, buffers, shaders, ...). Loading those assets into graphics card is prohibitively expensive, so engine must avoid such situations.
  
  Performance comes from designing asset manager in such a way that you never have more than what you need, and the needs change very infrequently and incrementally.
  
  Increasing memory cap is a managerial solution. "Oh, application running too slow? Buy better computer". Unfortunately, it doesn't solve anything. But that is a very good solution for customers with more money than brain, who will willingly dish out upwards of $500k for a new data center, not realizing that money will be wasted, since the bottlenecks aren't removed.
  
• iskareot Member Posts: 2,143

  October 2006

  
  

  ---

  
  Originally posted by Wildcat84
  It's so they can code even more inefficiently and waste more system resources.
  
  
  

  ---

  
  

  Correct answer FTW

  ______________________________
  I usually picture the Career builder commercial with the room full of monkeys and upside down sales chart when thinking about the SOE/SWG decision making process.....
  SOE's John Blakely and Todd Fiala issued a warning: "Don't make our mistakes." Ref NGE
  Winner of the worst MMOS goes to.... the NGE and SWG..!!! http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm?loadFeature=1034&bhcp=1
• Obraik Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 7,261

  October 2006

  
  

  ---

  
  Originally posted by Rekrul
  
  
  
  Originally posted by AfroPuff
  
  I will say this in defence of the RAM changes.  A lot of the 'lag' I used to see was really the result of caching delays while my hard drive thrashed (swapped game files from disk to RAM and back). I'd walk into a building, and  have to wait for my drive to fetch the textures. I'm sure others see this performance issue.
  Once upon a time the whole game could live inside of 750MB, so people with 1 gig of RAM could actually load the whole game into memory for improved performance.  With 3 expansions and whatever else now, it hasn't been possible to load the whole game into RAM like you could before, since the game was limiting itself to 750MB max.
  This change should improve performance noticiably. My only question is: why'd it take so long to make this change?
  
  

  Wrong. There's nothing in SWG that would warrant the use of 750Mb in the first place.
  
  Particle effect heavy games (3D textures, 128x128x32 or 256x256x(16-64), upwards of hundreds of such effects) run contently with 128-512 Mb of RAM.
  
  Expansions and all that make no difference. The game has always been several gigs in size, and loading entire game into memory was never an option.
  
  This is just a sign of improper use of graphics pipeline.
  
  The reason why it makes no difference to performance whether you give the client 1 or 2 gigs, is because you're still limited by graphics pipeline. Graphics cards can use a maximum of 256 Mb or so of assets (meshes, textures, buffers, shaders, ...). Loading those assets into graphics card is prohibitively expensive, so engine must avoid such situations.
  
  Performance comes from designing asset manager in such a way that you never have more than what you need, and the needs change very infrequently and incrementally.
  
  Increasing memory cap is a managerial solution. "Oh, application running too slow? Buy better computer". Unfortunately, it doesn't solve anything. But that is a very good solution for customers with more money than brain, who will willingly dish out upwards of $500k for a new data center, not realizing that money will be wasted, since the bottlenecks aren't removed.
  
  

  ---

  Tereb made a post about it and said that it's an improvement you would notice after long play sessions.  Rather then dumping out data when you've shuttled to make room for the new info, it can instead take advantage of the larger available memory and keep previous locations ready when you shuttle back there again.

  You generally want more data in the memory rather then on the much slower HDD when it comes to performance.
  

  

  
• Obee Member Posts: 1,550

  October 2006

  ---

  Originally posted by AfroPuff
  

  I
  will say this in defence of the RAM changes.  A lot of the 'lag' I
  used to see was really the result of caching delays while my hard
  drive thrashed (swapped game files from disk to RAM and back). I'd
  walk into a building, and  have to wait
  for my drive to fetch the textures. I'm sure others see
  this performance issue.

  Once
  upon a time the whole game could live inside of 750MB, so people
  with 1 gig of RAM could actually load the whole game into
  memory for improved performance.  With
  3 expansions and whatever else now, it hasn't been possible to load the
  whole game into RAM like you could before, since the game was limiting
  itself to 750MB max.

  This change should improve performance noticiably. My only question is: why'd it take so long to make this change?

   I'm also flabbergasted by this exchange:

    (NEW) About the Poll, by Psychopyro80: 
  Feedback on the GCW and PvP poll is discussed.  Senators ask why
  an option for "I do not like PvP" was not included as an option because
  many players just do not care for the play style regardless of any
  perks or changes that could be made.  The lack of an option
  for lag issues was also brought up.  Shadowbrak states that "I don't feel like it" is not an option they can fix, and that option would generate useless data for them.  Thunderheart also shares that the poll option function is limited to 10, but it would make an interesting follow-up poll.      

  It's
  not smart to sabatoge your poll data.  If you feel
  it's important to get players into PvP, but it happens
  that a significant amount of players won't PvP no matter what games changes you make,
  then you need to know that, before you devote scarce developer
  hours to that issue. It takes special talent to be this bad at
  requirements gathering - I'm continually surprised at just how good
  they are at being bad.

   

  ---

  Yeah, why waste time trying to solve something that doesn't have a
  solution?  "I don't like it" is an option they don't need to
  fix.  One of the options was something like, 'I'm not good at
  it'.  How the hell is that any more fixable than "I don't like
  it"?  It's amazing how inept the SWG dev team is.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• s0ull Member Posts: 186

  October 2006

  ---

  Originally posted by Obraik
  Originally posted by Rekrul
  Originally posted by AfroPuff
  I will say this in defence of the RAM changes.  A lot of the 'lag' I used to see was really the result of caching delays while my hard drive thrashed (swapped game files from disk to RAM and back). I'd walk into a building, and  have to wait for my drive to fetch the textures. I'm sure others see this performance issue. Once upon a time the whole game could live inside of 750MB, so people with 1 gig of RAM could actually load the whole game into memory for improved performance.  With 3 expansions and whatever else now, it hasn't been possible to load the whole game into RAM like you could before, since the game was limiting itself to 750MB max. This change should improve performance noticiably. My only question is: why'd it take so long to make this change?

  Wrong. There's nothing in SWG that would warrant the use of 750Mb in the first place.
  
  Particle effect heavy games (3D textures, 128x128x32 or 256x256x(16-64), upwards of hundreds of such effects) run contently with 128-512 Mb of RAM.
  
  Expansions and all that make no difference. The game has always been several gigs in size, and loading entire game into memory was never an option.
  
  This is just a sign of improper use of graphics pipeline.
  
  The reason why it makes no difference to performance whether you give the client 1 or 2 gigs, is because you're still limited by graphics pipeline. Graphics cards can use a maximum of 256 Mb or so of assets (meshes, textures, buffers, shaders, ...). Loading those assets into graphics card is prohibitively expensive, so engine must avoid such situations.
  
  Performance comes from designing asset manager in such a way that you never have more than what you need, and the needs change very infrequently and incrementally.
  
  Increasing memory cap is a managerial solution. "Oh, application running too slow? Buy better computer". Unfortunately, it doesn't solve anything. But that is a very good solution for customers with more money than brain, who will willingly dish out upwards of $500k for a new data center, not realizing that money will be wasted, since the bottlenecks aren't removed.
  

  ---

  Tereb made a post about it and said that it's an improvement you would notice after long play sessions.  Rather then dumping out data when you've shuttled to make room for the new info, it can instead take advantage of the larger available memory and keep previous locations ready when you shuttle back there again.

  You generally want more data in the memory rather then on the much slower HDD when it comes to performance.
  

  ---

  But most that still play NGE don't seem to play for long periods of time. The few people I know that are still playing still only log for a few hours at a time at most. I don't understand SOE's way of thinking its like they want to give themselves anything to do other than go over the changes they made after the NGE
  
  
  
• Obraik Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 7,261

  October 2006

  
  

  ---

  
  Originally posted by s0ull
  
  
  
  Originally posted by Obraik
  
  
  
  Originally posted by Rekrul
  
  
  
  Originally posted by AfroPuff
  
  I will say this in defence of the RAM changes.  A lot of the 'lag' I used to see was really the result of caching delays while my hard drive thrashed (swapped game files from disk to RAM and back). I'd walk into a building, and  have to wait for my drive to fetch the textures. I'm sure others see this performance issue.
  Once upon a time the whole game could live inside of 750MB, so people with 1 gig of RAM could actually load the whole game into memory for improved performance.  With 3 expansions and whatever else now, it hasn't been possible to load the whole game into RAM like you could before, since the game was limiting itself to 750MB max.
  This change should improve performance noticiably. My only question is: why'd it take so long to make this change?
  
  

  Wrong. There's nothing in SWG that would warrant the use of 750Mb in the first place.
  
  Particle effect heavy games (3D textures, 128x128x32 or 256x256x(16-64), upwards of hundreds of such effects) run contently with 128-512 Mb of RAM.
  
  Expansions and all that make no difference. The game has always been several gigs in size, and loading entire game into memory was never an option.
  
  This is just a sign of improper use of graphics pipeline.
  
  The reason why it makes no difference to performance whether you give the client 1 or 2 gigs, is because you're still limited by graphics pipeline. Graphics cards can use a maximum of 256 Mb or so of assets (meshes, textures, buffers, shaders, ...). Loading those assets into graphics card is prohibitively expensive, so engine must avoid such situations.
  
  Performance comes from designing asset manager in such a way that you never have more than what you need, and the needs change very infrequently and incrementally.
  
  Increasing memory cap is a managerial solution. "Oh, application running too slow? Buy better computer". Unfortunately, it doesn't solve anything. But that is a very good solution for customers with more money than brain, who will willingly dish out upwards of $500k for a new data center, not realizing that money will be wasted, since the bottlenecks aren't removed.
  
  

  ---

  Tereb made a post about it and said that it's an improvement you would notice after long play sessions.  Rather then dumping out data when you've shuttled to make room for the new info, it can instead take advantage of the larger available memory and keep previous locations ready when you shuttle back there again.

  You generally want more data in the memory rather then on the much slower HDD when it comes to performance.
  

  ---

  
  But most that still play NGE don't seem to play for long periods of time. The few people I know that are still playing still only log for a few hours at a time at most. I don't understand SOE's way of thinking its like they want to give themselves anything to do other than go over the changes they made after the NGE
  
  

  ---

  Tereb is the one that changed it, which is part of his job.  He builds the client.

  A few hours would be considered a long play session IMO.  You don't need to play a long period of time to shuttle alot of places though, which is where this change has been said to have the most benefit.

  I always thought it was kinda silly to have a cap on how much memory the game could use.  I have 2gb of memory, why not put it to full by removing the cap and allowing Windows to do the memory managing instead.
  

  

  
• Trubaduren Member Posts: 575

  October 2006

  rofl

  Starwars Galaxies, An Empier Diveded, That's what it says on my box anyway.