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TOR and instancing
Gaudrath
Member Posts: 33
Now why do I get the feeling that, despite of developer assurances (curiously unrepeated since) that instancing is only a temporary measures, instancing is in fact here to stay?
Because the engine is so horribly unoptimized that it can't handle more than a few players on screen at a time? OR because their net code is so bad that having more than a hundred players per instance lags the game to hell and back?
Honestly, what would be the reason to have servers with such a low, LOW population cap... how many servers are there? 100+!?
Every time I read about people complaining over instancing, the whole thing just reeks of badly optimized engine...
Comments
lets hope the engine improves and they open up the servers a bit more later down the road but for now it works and it keeps us from fighting over mobs
Even instanced, these zones have more people than most zones in any other mmo.
The larger planets are rarely if ever instanced. Never seen on on tatooine or alderaan.
Get farther in the game.
Shadow's Hand Guild
Open recruitment for
The Secret World - Dragons
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http://www.shadowshand.com
The engine and source they bought is commercial grade. Its the first 3rd party engine they have used i believe so it could just be a matter of not using something new to its full potential.
Then again, there seems to be a "trend" now of people liking their own "bubbles" and not having to associate themselves with other players while questing and such. And by implementing this system its the easiest way to fix that problem.
They already said they were gona do a "slow roll out" so i imagine some kind of virtual cap is in place.TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
I know people have complained a lot about instancing and low population caps, but I haven't seen anyone wondering why exactly are those in place, because it can't be to prevent overcrowding (even initial developer statements said only starter worlds will be instanced to combat overcrowding, with later areas non-instanced since the player population would spread out after the initial rush).
Personally I am inclined to blame EA for forcing Bioware to release an unpolished and unoptimized product. At least I hope so, because if the fault is actually with their basic code architecture and not with the lack of optimization, then instancing is here to stay, probably as one of those "will be fixed eventually" items which end up never going away. And that will definitely kill the potential TOR has, more than anything else.
A few thing to discuss though:
1. Even with an unoptimized engine, a game with such medium-intensity graphics shouldn't have the kind of performance problems people are reporting.
2. Why such low server population cap? That says bad net code to me. Because with instancing they should be able to comfortably host at least WoW-level number of players per server without total server population having any impact on gameplay experience. But TOR now has a comparable number of servers to WoW, with only a fraction of total gamer population WoW has, so do the math.
3. And a bit of conspiracy for flavor - could this be the real reason they decided to shut off half the world from being able to easily access the game? Because they knew their game simply can't handle that number of players since it requires ten times more servers than a "normal" MMO would?
('cause if they knew in advance, then it's not a case of TOR being a poorly optimized MMO, but a case of TOR being a poorly built one, and that's a much bigger problem)
There is a "first time pvp"-topic on this forum in which the OP states that he didn't met any players to PvP with in his instance on Tatooine and he had to switch to another instance.
to the op!the big reason why not many can be on the screen is because this game make heavy use of transparency(wich is not a condition it is a requirement for sw with all the laser stuff going on,and as we know enabling ss and mlaa to have good transpaerency is very ressource intensive,they even had to lower graphic quality to get all the transparency to make sure it worked!and yes with ss and mlaa on and does look fantastic!
Well then that's just a case of poor engine, which I doubt (I heard good things about the Hero engine). Transparency is heavily used in every game (can't do particle effects without it, also many complex-looking objects fake some parts with 2D sprites or textured planes which are semi transparent, for example tree branches and wire mesh fences) and these days it should not and usually is not a factor when it comes to engine performance.