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!
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 made:
Future Steps
When we are in a good position to release the Technical Alpha version of the game on DirectX 12, players should expect the first iteration of testing will not have all the advanced rendering features available. For example, features like shadows and bloom (glare effects around bright lights) may not be implemented yet.
There are a huge number of different processors and graphics cards in the marketplace, and we won’t be able to test all of them internally. So, our first focus will be asking for players to tell us about compatibility issues, glitches, etc... This testing is still in the future, but we are well on our way!
What we expect from DirectX 12
The goal of moving to DirectX 12 is to ensure that the technology used to maintain the game is supported, as well as provide us with opportunities to further modernize the game. As technology continues to evolve, so must the foundations that SWTOR is built upon. This goal and mindset is similar to when we migrated to 64-bit. However, moving to DirectX 12 also opens the door to all kinds of graphical improvements we’d like to make in the future that wouldn’t be possible with DirectX 9.
We will share more details about other benefits players can expect from DirectX 12 in a future article. At this time, we wanted to share the progress that has been made so far and give you a glimpse into what’s to come. We appreciate your support, and we look forward to sharing more progress with you soon!
-The SWTOR Technical Team