Better visual quality armor!

I am not sure if this has been posted before but, I searched the forum and checked out the "Check this thread and use SEARCH before posting ANY new thread" and found nothing about this.

I have a high end computer and I want Guild Wars to look the best it can. When I look at my armor it looks great, it's very detailed and high quality, but when I view other people's armor they quality is rather poor and this frustrates me alot.

I know why this has been done, to stop the game lagging but what about people like me who have high end PC's? I don't want to look at thousands of people with blurry armor!. Why can't an option be added to the graphics menu allowing a user to set the detail of other players armor? If the game starts to lag, a user can simply lower the option or set it as it is now (default). Giving the player the option would please everyone!

This image has been saved in JPEG format at high quality with Adobe Photoshop. Look at the poor quality!



Here is an example of my paragon in an outpost (left) and explorable area (right). My friend took these pictures with the printscreen button, saved them as high quality JPEG's in Adobe Photoshop and sent them to me. No quality has been lost, they are basically bitmap files but smaller in filesize.



Is anyone with me?

NOTE: Please read all replies before posting, we think it is possible to have this done via your hard drive and not the server itself. Giving the player THE OPTION of high detailed textures in outposts is what I am suggesting, my suggestion is not to force it because the game would lag on slower computers.

guess it wouldn't hurt

/signed

Yeah, hires armor would be awesome. With an option to scale down to medium res for slower computers.

Is that all? Just 2 comments? Why do people buy high end PC's if they don't care about graphics?

Agreed. There should be an option.

A few months ago, my parents were nice enough to buy me a new computer. New Graphics card, New Dual core processor, 2 gigs of ram. I was excited to go into all of my games and see what difference it would make. Spent hours loading GW from the downloadable client, went to LA and....


Nothing changed. It seems a shame to wasted the craftmanship and work that the devs have put into the individule armors in game, I wouldn't mind seeing it in its full glory.

Definately /signed

Perhaps only chars within viewable range... say 20 GW feet... would appear with hi res armor... those further out of view have low res... not a hardware geek, but that might be a solution. This is a subject that has always bugged... I mean, I want ppl to see my awesome armor lol

We're all well aware of this and yes its a bit of a pain. But does it effect the gameplay? Nope! Would it probably demand more power from your PC to be rendering dozens of armors in higher resolutions, with bit mapping and all that jaz? Yes!

You have to appreciate that this is an MMO, so it has to cut corners here and there to prevent lag. Asking the servers to move higher resolution textures around would cause alot more lag.

It would also demand a more powerfull machine. Something myself and other players cant afford, want or need.

Its is also a 2 year old game with a 2 year old engine, and upon its release it probably looked very impressive. I was and still am impressed at how most of the game looks. Its still one of the nicest looking games ive played and I personally think it looks alot better then games like WoW and its cartoonyness.

To add improved armor textures would require re-fitting alot of textures and probably some re-development of the gaming engine. Time which needs to spent elsewhere.

And it wouldnt just be a case of "well turn the settings down to stop the lagging", because those textures would still be holding more information then your seeing.

Dont get me wrong, it would be nice....

...but as I said, it doesnt effect gameplay and the rest of us survive with it. Just wait for GW2 when they have the opportunity to use a new updated engine and flashier graphics.

In the mean time, enjoy the game for its gameplay and re-playability. Something it has buckets of!

Apparently my previous post got pwnt by the uber speed of Guru that occurs now and then, but here's what I have to say:

It only displays armour in low quality in towns and outposts. So outside, you can see everything on its best.

What's to sign about this?

/signed for this comment.

I think you are being a bit selfish. OK you and some others may not or cant afford to upgrade their PC and that's fine but don't say it's a waste of time because of that and don't say people will survive without it, I like good graphics, please appreciate that. People like me have powerful PC's, we want better graphics and it wouldn't require much work. ANET have all the textures already made, not much work would have to be done to get this to work in my opinion.

I don't see how it can lag the server if people are given the choice of whether they want hi detailed texture or not. I have a dozen very powerful multiplayer games with far better graphics than Guild Wars, and those games don't lag. It's a 2 year old engine and maybe back then, the textures needed to be reduced, but technology has moved on, at least use the engine at it's full potential now!

Ok, for one, that pic was taken in a town or Outpost and there is a very good reason why the armour is low res in the towns... because there are sometimes as many as 100 people in an outpost and the information being sent around would be crazy...

They have stated before why they have the armours in low res, its unlikely to change because it would cripple low end PC's, which the game is optimized to work on...

yes, it would be nice, but hell, my armour is high res in explorable areas, so I'm happy

Why doesn't anyone understand me when I say "Give people the option of increasing the detail of their armor"

By default the armor is left blurred in outposts and towns, but manually someone like me with a good PC can increase the detail if they wish. Why should that affect anyone with low end PCs?... It doesn't.

Im not an game designer expert, but im going to make a speculation (I could be wrong).

Regardless of what graphics level you have your game set to, whether it be high or low, the models and textures still all contain the same amount of information.

The only thing which changes is whether that texture shows all that information, or hides parts of it (i.e it looks focuses or blured, or it shows the bump maps or not etc etc).

If you hide bits, then it makes it easier for your PC to render it. But all that information still exists within the texture and the model. Information which needs to be sent and recieve by the server.

At the minute lag issues are small for most players. The textures and models have been optomised to cut back on such issues, which is why their not perfect.

This being the reason why you see lesser detailed armors inside towns and outposts. To cut down on lag when surrouned by dozens of players.

If we increased the information for the textures and models of each player, its is adding alot more information to be sent and recieved for each player ingame, at that time.

Yes you can turn down your graphics level and your PC would be able to handle it from a stand-alone point of view. But from a server point of view, your adding alot more information to send and recieve.

It isnt a simple task, because it has knock on effects throughout the entire game. Consider how many people play GWs every hour. Imagine increasing the information stored for each of those characters 5x-10x-50x.

It would probably be the equilivant of what you see when a new campaign is released. Major lagging and rubber banding and erro7s for the first few weeks until it calms down. But it wouldnt calm down because its would be a perminant change.

Yes it would be nice, but its not a priority. If you play an MMO online game, you have to expect the graphics to be worse then a stand alone offline game, due to optomisation for the servers.

And it is a 2 year old game. Its like buying a first generation model mini and expecting BMW to upgrade it to a 2000 Mini Cooper. You bought the game knowing it was 2 years old so I would have expectations would have been well-grounded.

Maybe GW:EN will add new graphical touches here and there, but I wouldnt expect any major texture improvements.

I'd personally rather the graphics were a bit low-spec then have to endure lagging and rubber banding.

But dont get me wrong, I appreciate that the hardcore gamers with their expensive rigs want big, flashy graphics. But I think you'l have to wait until GW2.

NOTE: I could be completely wrong, and maybe better graphics wouldnt affect the entire game. Is so then woop! But if it was possible, im sure Anet would do it.

I don't know if what you are saying is true and neither do you but it makes sense. ANET know what they can and can't do so lets hope they have read this and taken note if it is possible. I just wish ANET would reply to a few threads from time to time.

Gaile replies to the odd thread every now and again, but their busy people and there are 100s of threads posted every day.

Check the forum section which follows the mods, to what threads they have replied to.

I have looked at the memberlist for a Gaile and found nothing. Can you give me a link to these forums?

I strongly suspect that the server isn't describing textures and models. The server probably just tells you:

Warrior with Tyrian face #7 and maximum height, wearing all 15K Kurzick armor dyed blue, is dancing at coordinates XY, facing NE.

and then your client figures out how to draw that. That sort of system would use much less bandwidth than if the server knew how to to draw the 15K Kurzick armor, and described every coordinate of every polygon for every frame.

I would think the poorer armor in towns is just because most processors couldn't handle rendering 100 armors in high detail, and it has nothing to do with the servers. Not that I actually know.

1) Adding an 'Ultra High' texture setting to enable armor on other players to be rendered in full detail should be added.

2) If you have a crap PC, dont complain about it and carry on using the 'low' setting. If a higher setting causes lag, rubberbanding, 0 FPS, you can turn it down!

3) If you have a PC fast enough to handle Ultra High textures like I and many others have, you can use it.

Thats all there is to it really. I dont see how anyone can argue against adding better quality armor textures.

And btw, texture info is all stored and ran from your HD. Enabling higher res textures would not affect the games bandwidth as they are loaded off your hard drive and not via the net connection. One simple way of understanding this is by going into options and changing the settings. If different settings required your internet connection, they would have to download everytime you moved the sliders, which is obviously not the case.

I think its designed to accommodate graphics cards with low on-board memory, or on-board graphics chips using shared RAM. Upping the quality within a radius seems like a good idea, they already do it for props. I guess it really depends on whether the textures could all be loaded into memory at highest quality, or the feasibility of streaming them from the HDD, I'm not really sure. Not really a big deal for me, to be honest.

It's not a negative network effect issue as the textures are stored locally, and the decision to switch to the detailed texture would be delegated to the client. You have to understand that when you look at another person, their avatar hasn't been sent to you, just the information needed to reconstruct them with the assets stored in your dat file.

And who exactly has onboard graphics with shared ram nowadays? I doubt that would even run GW.

Most gamers have a card around the Nvidia 6600 or 7600 range at least, both of which are fully capable of running this game maxed out. Im sure a 512meg X1900/7900+ would be able to handle max texture details with ease for those of us that have one.

Again, if you dont have a powerful machine, You dont have to use the higher settings.

Another thing I would really like to see is support for higher modes of AA. 4x is just fugly compared to 6x adaptive AA.

I agree. I don't know why you've jumped down my throat about it. If you think I was trying to argue with you, you should look at the post times.

Sorry, only the first line of my last post was intended to you. The rest is just my usual moronic 'I want this now waaaah waaaah' type of post.

Where did you get your figures about graphics cards from? from the recent study by Steam, or the recent study by Xfire? or sales figures?

look, unless you can show me some actually graphic cards figures of usage, then please don't assume peoples usage... I on the other hand will find and post both Steams recent figures and XFires aswell

What graphics card people use is irrelevant, the fact is I and many others pay a lot of money for our good PC's, we want the best graphics possible and we know GW can have high quality textures and I am pretty sure this is all done on your own hard drive. If this is the case, then this should be implemented into GW.

Oh sorry, I base my figures on the many computer tech forums I trolll on

I guess those are only used by leet gamers and everyone else runs onboard intel graphics then?

Seriously andyone of working age with a job and that is a gamer will by now have a 6600 at least. I dont take figures from school children into account. Also, I dont use steam, xfire or any of these other programs, so imo they arent relible either.

Even so, you can get a 7600gt for £65 now, thats the same cost as two games. If you need to upgrade, its hardly expensive at all, unless you need a new mobo/cpu/ram to, but in that case you havnt upgraded since 2002 when PCI-E was first released, which is also a little silly.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...=56&subcat=356

My card (I think) is lower then the 6600 or 7600, and I have no intention of buying a new one or a new PC. The reason is that I play most games on my xbox360. GWs is the only PC game I play. Plus I dont have £1000 to spend on a new machine.

I can completely appreciate your view on that, and I accept i cant be fun having a sooped up PC but not being able to have a game look amazing.

But as I said before, this is a 2 year old game!

You would have bought the game, or started playing on an older machine knowing fine well its an old game now. What expectations did you have visually?

If you want an up-to-date, state of the art, lush looking game, then buy a more recent one that has more modern technology running it. Something with the Unreal 3 or HL2 engine.

Yes Anet is capable of and does update the game. But visuals are a low priority in terms of updating or fixing. The priority is on errors, bugs, balancing skills, new campaigns, new expansions.

Especially when we have GW2 coming out in 2 or 3 years, we can expect better and improved graphics.

As I've said myself, I understand the want for better visuals. I would love them myself, but they do the job and they are nice. Their not horrible graphics that you cant stand looking at them.

You cant really ask or expect a company to completely refit the graphics of a 2 year old game, when there are more important issues. If everything else was fixed and perfect, and they werent busy doing other stuff, then I would be all for a graphics uphall.

But with GW:EN and GW2 coming out, they cant really take time and effort out to over-hall the entire games graphics engine.

Bingo and well said...

There is another very good reason that this doesn't need doing, nor will it be done anytime soon:

If they did this, it would yet again, be something else for people to moan to ANet about not spending time on things like Skill updates, etc... Its unnesecary and so doubtful it'll happen

There is no technical reason not to do it. Its already implemented, because we get hires textures outside of outposts and towns. We just need a switch to toggle this setting for towns and outposts.

I guess it takes as much time as preparing a weekend event. I would gladly sacrifice one of this events for this small upgrade.

/signed

This ONLY happens inside towns and outposts. In 'battle' areas, you get the same quality in allies and enemies.

Althouht this very same suggestion has been made some times already.

I seggested to have the 'texture quality' have a 'highest' option that bypass the limit in cities, since the GW.dat already have the textures and would not be any lag trouble or something.

It is neccassary for one reason, that I can admire other peoples high end armors which I cant get on my elementalist or monk. I would love to be able to run up to a warrior in 15k luxon and his/her armor the same way he/she can see it on their computer, because it looks nice.

This isnt really asking for a major update that would take ages to do, as someone pointed out, all it requires is a little tweak to show other peoples armors in outposts the same way that they are in missions/explrable areas.

It isnt asking to change the entire graphics engine, it is pretty much just a minor tweak to enable armors to be drawn at a higher quality which already exists in the game.

All they need to do is add a new option line in the code with a higher pixel limit on rendering armor

Also, with enabling higher modes of AA support in the game, isnt a major update. Games from way before GW were relesed operate with 6x temporal/adaptive AA, but GW is capped at 4x max, even driver settings cant over-ride the ingame option.

If you could actually bother to read and understand how minor these tweaks are, you wouldnt have any need to complain. They are as small as tweaking the number 1024 to 2048 in the ini file yourself for oblivion or gothic 3, and installing a new driver set for your GPU.

/signed

- I just spent 500 bucks upgrading my computer to DDR2 ram with an AGP videocard, new mother board and an Athlon processor, I want to be able to max it out at its best...

You know I play alone alot and for months I thought what I was seeing in towns and outposts was because my PC sucked.

But one day my friend with PigMail ran me to LA and I put two and two together. In town crappy. Outside pretty cool.

I mentioned in the Obsidian Armor thread hwo I like checking out peoples stuff. Wether be high end, a mix of armors, or colorfully dyed.

I understand what the OP is saying, We shoudl at least have "the option" to crank up the res of other peoples armor. But even with my pimped out pc, going to large towns like LA and Droks takes a toll on it as it is.

Just now there isn't any hard evidence that a badass PC could take it since we don't have the option to see for ourselves.

So I'm all with the option to crank it up so individuals can see if their machine can handle it.

On a side note, personally the crappy textures seem to be more noticeable on certain types of armors. Pigmail, warrior FOW, monk tats, ranger druids, necro scars, and since i got the set, Elite Sunspear for the warrior.

Yeah I want to see everyone pimped out in high res, since out in the game you don;t alot of time to check people out.

But i also want to play the game on my notebook from time to time.

/signed for the option to do it.

If it doesn't affect the server then /signed
if it does /notsigned

I don't get lag at the moment unless the server is overloaded where i am or i have webpages in the background and im jumping fromt hem to the game,
I liek the way the game runs on my pc, any change that decreases this will not make me happy, but if a change doesn't affect it then I'm all for it

Wiliam, as i stated before, improving texture quality does not affect server speed as the textures are loaded from your HD. You can see this from swapping between the current texture settings, each higher setting can be instantly loaded in less then a second without requiring any data sent via the server. All it affects is the strain on your graphics card.

If Anet won't give us the option, is there a way we can force it? as in edit the files?

Editing files of an online game such as guild wars might be considered hacking. But I could be wrong, because games such as CS:S and DoD:S let you modify the files. Best thing to do is see if any texture mods could work. Then seeing if they are considered no no's.

I think you are a bit selfish.
I think you really underestimate how many people do not have a high speed connection and a monster pc. I know several players (one of the best monks in the game actually) who don't even have a video card.

Me selfish? You obviously haven't read the entire thread, that in itself is selfish of you... to make a comment without reading my new posts and the posts of others on here.

Giving players THE OPTION, THE CHOICE to allow higher resolution textures is no way selfish, I don't understand how it can be seen as selfish. People have the CHOICE to select a higher texture setting IF THEY PLEASE and people with low end PC's can just run the game as normal.

Most of us think this can be done from your hard drive and not the server itself. If this is possible, it is selfish of anyone to say no to this, because it won't affect you but it can make gamers like me happier.

WTF does it matter if you dont have a decent PC? You still have the ability to use low settings, letting others play with higher settings if they choose to and can doesnt affect your game in the slightest bit.

By definition, you dont even need a damn monster PC to play this game. As I have posted before, you can get a graphics card for £65 that can play this game maxed out on full detail with no struggle at all, and I'm suse it could easilly handle these higher texture settings.

AND You dont need a faster connection for better graphics for the freaking last time.

Read threads before responding nonscence comments.

I could Build a PC from scratch for £300 that can play GW maxed out, full detail AA + AF. That is hardly a monster PC. If you cant afford that then you have more serious things to worry about.