Arev wrote:And the number of different items each character can have as well, particle effects and poor, nearly 10-year old coding (from UO2), leads to the massive lag. I mean, given all these variables, you have to give the SWG Devs some slack.
And then they capped it at 30 FPS...
But yeah, there's a reason why you're always laggy as hell when you load into a starport or shuttleport. Your video card is taking so damn long to draw every distinct item out there. There's a fine balance between cool & customizable and shitty & slow... The SWG devs went to such great lengths with customization, they also made the game unplayable under certain conditions... I mean, ever wonder why events of like 30+ people turn into extreme stutterfests???
To be fair, given its age, I still think SWG is a very beautiful game when you are able to run it at its full settings at 30 FPS. I think that it's only recently that it's really started to show its age.