Update log
Full STAR WARS™: The Old Republic™ update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Hello to all of our SWTOR players! This is the Technical Team behind the initiative to bring SWTOR to DirectX 12. We’ve seen your questions and requests for updates on the progress we are making and now that we are nearing the end of the first quarter of the year, we thought this would be a good time for a quick check-in!
Extracted changes
- Compatibility
- Performance
- Events
- UI and audio
Whether you’re a brand new player or one that’s been with us since the very beginning, it’s likely you’ve heard us talk about Modernization. This has taken many forms in recent years, from visual focused efforts like the refreshing Environments and Characters, to more technical ones like the 64-bit Client. Modernization continues to be a priority for the team as we look to the future of SWTOR, and at the nexus of both technical and visual upgrades is DirectX.
The Beginning of the Journey
When we committed to upgrading our version of DirectX, the first task was to create a baseline that would allow us to experiment with different approaches to modernizing the game. In short, we made a version of the game where the rendering was reduced to a basic set of features. For example, at this stage objects were drawn with no textures. This allowed us to remove aspects of our engine that were specific to DirectX 9 and ensure that we could move to DirectX 12 without introducing fundamental performance problems.
(Examples of Korriban in the earliest stages of migrating to DirectX 12)
Next Steps
Next, we began to recreate the minimal rendering features in DirectX 12. SWTOR was originally created in HeroEngine, but as the game has been upgraded and modified heavily over the years, little of the original code remains. It’s basically now the SWTOR Engine and is specific to our game. Therefore, we couldn’t simply get an upgraded version of the engine–we had to rebuild it!
Through collaboration with partner teams at Electronic Arts, we were able to integrate rendering components from Frostbite with the SWTOR engine. (We are using some components, but we are not converting the game to the Frostbite engine. Our game content depends on the SWTOR engine and isn’t compatible with Frostbite.) With the basics working, we set out to convert or replace all the major rendering features that weren't part of the minimal set. Some features, such as shaders (short programs that assign colors to pixels), had to be redone from scratch because the differences were stark while other features could be kept with a few modifications.
(Earliest stages of rendering)
(Earliest stages of rendering)
(Example of the additional textures and working shaders)
(Additional textures and shaders)
Where are we now?
This work has come a very long way! We have all the major features working, except for the User Interface (UI). We can all agree that the UI is a must have for any future testing, and we’ve found that converting this component has been our greatest challenge to date. Similar to the rendering engine upgrade, there was not a direct upgrade path for the UI, and we worked with teams at EA who had carried out similar work before to complete the conversion ourselves.
Currently, we are working to get the UI in a functional state so that we can move on to public testing. Along with a few other loose ends to tie up, once we are in a position to communicate further about a Technical Alpha test, we’ll make an official announcement. For now, here are examples of the latest progress we’ve
Source