What prevents....my immersion...and worries me.

It isn't the number of maps, but the size and the assets contained in them. I barely played WoW, but I played SWTOR a lot.

A city like Ardoris has TONS of houses, decorations and assets in it. I wager that the Ardoris map right now has CONSIDERABLY more assets that you ever see in a WoW or SWTOR individual zone. And in those games, they have 2 minute load times.

 

with maps i obviously mean this.

Though im sorry but if Ardoris is heavy weighted...how should i call Orgrimmar?

 

As someone who has barely played WoW, can you go inside 100+ houses inside Orgimmar? Does that map include individual/modular decorations on 100+ houses as well as decorations inside every house? Does it have 100+ NPCs?

All of that is true of Ardoris. And there is no loading to go inside any of the individual houses. It isn't like when I play SWTOR and I click on door and it gives me a load screen.

 

Im missing the point? Im just saying that so far loading times, to me, interfere with my idea of virtual borderless world. I repeat, comparing with WOW (i play wow since day 1 of US beta, and that game annoyed me years ago...but still i keep my account and i just login by time to time...) or other games will not improve current situation of SOTA. Sota world map, so far, is so much similar to Final Fantasy where every step, theoretically i could be stopped by a random encounter (load 20-30 secs), then i decide to escape the encounter (load another 3o secs), i manage to reach the city (load 30 secs), and so on. To me this is something worrying, and considering i did pledge quite alot, im here asking IF and i repeat IF this situation is going to be fixed and when, i did read as well Chris comments after R12, but uhmm i have some doubt optimization will reduce loading times more then an optimistic 35%-40% which make them still quite heavy FOR MY TASTE. I'm not here to compare what other titles are doing (and titles which is just no sense to put on the same table with SOTA). Im here to decide my options for the future.


*your assumptions on WOW are not exactly correct...Orgrimmar has much more the NPC's of Ardoris...much more items going on if we consider auctions etc...i mean there are LOTS of information going on in there as well

 

What do you consider fixed?

What are you expectations and are they reasonable? If other games with budgets of HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS can't avoid load times, do you truly think it is fair for a small indie game on a much smaller budget to somehow work magic?

 

I think the load times have to be 20s or less.

They should never be over a minute....now, can this be achieved? Not sure.

 

That is why I bring up other games with vastly more developers and budget. If they can't pull it off, what makes you think SotA can? SotA not only has a harder time because of the smaller team and smaller budget, but because there are more assets and housing is so dynamic.

 

You have to be careful in comparing though, and here is why:

Shrouds areas are a lot smaller then WoW and starwars and require loading much more often....so the loading screens become a much bigger issue.

 

Saying that wow didnt mAke it... Its a little comic... Did u log in orgrimar recently or in any other city? Did u notice the new graphics and assets? 12 milions paying users ( used to be at peak)... And no never had to cry about loading there or immersion...but again pls lets stop comparing sota... ThAt is not my goal and its honestly not fair toward sota...

Housing in maps like desert, mines, etc... Really... Many assets?!? U serious???

 

Have you played SWTOR?

I want to go on a raid/operation with my guild. If my "Fleet Pass" ability isn't on cooldown, I press that. Either that, or I quick travel to a hub on a planet and wait for a load screen. Then I click on a shuttle to take me to my ship (though sometimes you have to go to an orbital station first with another load screen) and wait for a load screen. Then on the fleet I have to go to another ship on the fleet where the raids/ops are. Then I wait for an elevator to go to another floor. And then I have a REALLY long load screen to load the Operation map.

Operation maps are huge compared to SotA maps, but have fewer overall assets.

The fleet not only has fewer assets/decorations than a SotA city, the map is smaller than a SotA map.

The outdoor/planetary maps are considerably larger in SWTOR than SotA, but they also have really long load times even though the next planetary zone on the same planet will use pretty much all the same assets.

 

Will you please then answer my questions?

As someone who has barely played WoW, can you go inside 100+ houses inside Orgimmar? Does that map include individual/modular decorations on 100+ houses as well as decorations inside every house? Does it have 100+ NPCs?

All of that is true of Ardoris. And there is no loading to go inside any of the individual houses. It isn't like when I play SWTOR and I click on door and it gives me a load screen.

 

Read above and tell me every sota map include what u said? Houses tons if items etc?

I answer: no but loading is still there... Anyway i dont want to be polemic but please do not try to sell me what its
Actually not possible to be sold....

Crap iphone and its
Keyboard

 

Yes, I have.

The difference is...you are not continously seeing the loading....I think on average you loaded perhaps 3 or 4 times in a 4 hour play time(just an estimate here)....play shroud for a bit and count the number of times you load.

 

I just described five load screens to start playing in SWTOR, and that didn't count the initial load screen to log into my character. And for the first few years of the game, on any wipe in an Op, everyone zoned out to fleet with a long load screen, and the zoned back into the Op with a long load screen. They wouldn't let you rez inside the Op itself on a wipe. When you're constantly running Nightmare Ops at release and the hardest content, that means regular wipes and constantly load screens.

I think the introduction of random encounters has made this worse recently in SotA because you are seeing load screens more frequently. But last night I did the Grand Tour quest and I barely saw any. I hit Righ Inis and Winston's Folly real quick. Then I went into Owl's Head and then I played around quite a bit inside the Graff Gems Mine.

I spent quite a bit of time exploring Winston's Folly before leaving the map. I explored the exterior and interior of the Graff Gem Mines before calling it a night. But I was wandering the map constantly and hit a bunch of random encounters, then I probably would have had a very different experience. I try to keep to the roads on the map for that reason.

 

im not saying loading has to disappear...and i won't for sure talk about stuff i dont know...as i never seen the code of SOTA....and im not used to talk about stuff i dont know. I was wondering whether sooner or later it will be possible to cache at least those zones without ever changing contents, or with minor changes....

I repeat I DON T KNOW if that is feasable...but maybe Caching is the way it should be looked into?

 

I have played both WoW and Swtor.
I feel it's not really right to compare Sota with either those games, or those games with each other even.

The way I see it Wow's engine was really old a couple of years ago and still it performs enormously good (yes yes it has gotten a bit of upgrades, but only so much can be changed) - of course the game has loading screens at some places, it's unavoidable, but they are far between.
And the biggest problem with Swtor since it's beginning was the choice of it's engine and the way the devs modified it beyond sense. In Swtor there is a ridiculous amount of loading screens, it's abnormal and most likely a way to work around the engines network limitations.
There were even ways to bypass much of the loading screens and play on the destination map since the maps actually loaded faster than the loading screens finished, I don't remember the details anymore.
Do you remember that point in Swtor's life where you pressed space to jump and the fps would drop to like super low - - when I read it I was so stunned I had to test it and pull up a fps counter.. -sigh-
Swtor certainly didn't spend all of its money on the engine.

The smallish scenes in Sota is a bit sad - regardless of that, the loading times really ought to be no more than 30 seconds to enter any scene, beyond that it's painful.
I am from Sweden, with excellent broadband and a machine with an i7 and ssd, and my loading times has never felt nice so far, I havent timed anything but I doubt I can enter scenes in below 30 seconds.

 

Wouldn't switching to 64-bit binaries in theory enable Sota to use much more memory,
and thus perhaps even cache into memory every scene directly around the one you are in?
That would be worth a 16 GB minimum RAM requirement to me

Why does "everything" in the scene need to be loaded into memory before you enter it, if that really is how it is today?
Can I not enter the Owl's Head scene without knowing where every carpet and candle is?
Load it dynamically - let the distant unimportant things be synced to me last and the nearest things first.

 

Actually, the server is located in Arizona according to this post by Chris.

 

Yes, 64-bit will definitely help but let's not let them use it as a crutch. The 32-bit experience right now is abysmal, especially on the Mac. The devs were also surprised by how many Steam backers can only run 32-bit, seemingly more 32-bit users than the pre-Steam SotA backers.

They actually are dynamically streaming in housing objects as you approach them but there's still a ton more work to optimize that. It just happens to be a worse case scenario when the entry point of some scenes, especially Owl's Head, has houses filled with deco objects right next to those points.

 

In this case,im sorry but id put optimization of what we have so far, top of my to do list,before adding new contents or stuff.