Two layers of textures in certain buildings? (incl. screenshots)

WhimsyDragon · March 2015

Same exact thing happened to me in the Mage's Guide of Wayrest... it initially looked just like your before pics, with the pillar that no longer exists once it fully loads in. Very odd. I've also experienced situations where stuff appears white before loading, which is probably a separate issue, but neither of these oddities occurred when I used to play regularly last summer.

Rune_Relic · March 2015

Raygee wrote: »

kimboh wrote: »

I've seen exactly the same thing before, in the same location, before update 6.

Daggerfall is also one of the places where I suffered from FPS drops and random loading screens.
I suspect this unseen multi layered building structure is probably contributing to poor texture loading, as building textures in Daggerfall often take much longer to load than in other locations.

Maybe some leftover world builder ideas that were not properly removed in clean up before launch and have been forgotten about.

Finally someone who can confirm this, thank you for posting this! :-)
Yeah, it's the same for me, too, that Daggerfall is one of the places where the fps drops a lot (you can see that in the screenshots in the upper left corner in that info bar, 15-16 fps which is "normal" there) and the random loading screens show up.
Apparently, these textures and different architecture are not rendered anymore as soon as the "normal" ones appear, or we would still see that pillar, for example. But they are there while loading, otherwise we wouldn't have seen them.

Any post of a mod would still be appreciated.

That's the thing that troubles me...applying different textures is one thing....that pillar is part of a different model. So its not just textures. I really don't understand why you would have different models occupying the same space. Why would you double on graphics memory on that way ?

Veldoril95b16_ESO · March 2015

*Removed*

Veldoril95b16_ESO · March 2015

Raygee wrote: »

I'm sorry, but I gotta bump this again.

For all players who are experiencing a huge performance impact and fps drops in certain places, this is a thing you might be interested in.
I still think it's funny how mods or devs are still ignoring it, though.

The developers will surely heed your enlightenment.

Gidorick · March 2015

I've been experiencing NO layer in some buildings.

Cyrene · March 2015

Literally get this double texture EVERY time I enter a building now. Thats directly after the NO LAYER experience as seen above ^^ At this point I'm just speechless so thanks for bringing this to the forums.

Gidorick · March 2015

Cyrene wrote: »

Literally get this double texture EVERY time I enter a building now. Thats directly after the NO LAYER experience as seen above ^^ At this point I'm just speechless so thanks for bringing this to the forums.

So I have something to look forward to?

RSram · March 2015

What I'm seeing from your two photos is two different locations or cells; the objects and textures just come with the cells and are irrelevant to your problem. Why are two cells trying to load in the same location. That's a major bug IMO. Yes it would be a memory hog if the game system kept both in memory.

Moonshadow66 · March 2015

@Gidorick Yeah, that's what I see, too, when it's not the double layer

(I'll post some more screenshots in a minute, as you wished^^)

@Cyrene You're welcome

@RSram I don't think these are actually different locations; to me it looks like they tried at least two different models and textures for the exact same location, decided to use the one we all know but forgot to remove the other before releasing the game.
Also, these "cells" are not like cells as we knew from the previous ES games; all doors we can enter without a loading screen are about 25-30 meter below ground level, I often see this when none of the textures are loading and all the NPCs and players are moving around in town far above^^ Also f.e. when I go to the Mages Guild in Rawl'kha (interior) and it doesn't load anything, I can see all NPCs from the inn at the same height, and the townsfolk far above. It's an interesting sight, but.. it sucks, nevertheless.
The advantage of these "instant doors" is that we can get in right away without waiting for the loading screen to end - the disadvantage is the memory since everything is more or less pre-loaded... And now after seeing even more than just one set of textures and models, it's no wonder how the game runs in certain places for many players.

Moonshadow66 · March 2015

More screenshots (even more coming later, if you're interested I'll try to get some more from other locations).
Btw, on some pictures you can see that it's not fully rendered, neither the textures nor the models, but.. it's there although it shouldn't.

More of the Fighter's Guild in Daggerfall:

Here the Inn in Daggerfall, the Mages Guild in Davon's Watch and the Inn in Rawl'kha, textures not loading:

Yay^^

Bastijer · March 2015

Stormhaven - Wayrest city.
The first issue with double textures happens in the bank always I enter it.
The second issue - lack of textures- happens to me in every single house I enter in that city.

Just my 2 cents

farrier_ESO · March 2015

My guess is that the buildings are not multi-layered, and this isn't LoDding. Though we do see LoD elements elsewhere, stairways becoming ramps, and so forth; the LoD models also have simplified collision, which I believe can sometimes cause you to be launched far into the air when the new collision volume loads; and can also result in you walking knee-deep in floor.

Instead, from your screenshot, I suspect that there are style kits, so they can use the same building resource in different areas, and it'll automatically convert to the local architectural style by swapping out kit pieces in the original style with pieces in the local style. Which, if true, is pretty freaking awesome, from a design point of view.

So you're seeing a "double-wide archway" kit piece there, but the local style kit is not yet loaded, so what you see is the same piece from the previously-loaded kit.

At least, that's my guess, and my hope!

Thing is - the load screen *should* prevent this. What's not loading? My suspicion is that although it's loaded into memory, the kit piece models and textures haven't yet been updated on the videocard... but this is a really wild guess, and probably wrong.

Moonshadow66 · March 2015

I just remembered a few threads which (now) I think they are related to my OP, here's the one with the most pictures:

forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/151346/so-i-was-wondering-in-the-middle-of-the-alikir-desert-one-day/p1

I can't find all of these threads anymore, but I think this one is enough to see what I wanted to point out to.
I think these new areas shouldn't be in the same ones we are currently present (they should be in different "cells"), so there's even MUCH more stuff rendering in the background than what's only right infront of us. Of course, these new areas are much further away, so they might not even have any impact on the performance, but, like the other unseen things, they are there.

farrier_ESO · March 2015

That thread looks more like scratch/dev areas that were not deleted from the world map in the move from dev servers to live, and is likely unrelated to the changing archway graphics.

Sounds like they are stripped of all interactibles (which would make a performance difference) and are just basic meshes in the current zone's style kit, which won't make any significant difference because of LoD and occlusion preventing them from getting loaded in.

Moonshadow66 · March 2015

farrier_ESO wrote: »

That thread looks more like scratch/dev areas that were not deleted from the world map in the move from dev servers to live, and is likely unrelated to the changing archway graphics.

Sounds like they are stripped of all interactibles (which would make a performance difference) and are just basic meshes in the current zone's style kit, which won't make any significant difference because of LoD and occlusion preventing them from getting loaded in.

Of course they have nothing to do with the archway graphics... I was merely refering to the general performance. There's just too much unused stuff which I thought is, eventually, decreasing the performance and could easily be deleted. So maybe it's not, who knows.

After update 6, the forums are full with reports about how often the game freezes, crashes all the time or the loading screens never end or take too long, so after seeing these "double layers", I thought this could be related somehow (besides of many other things). Maybe it is, maybe it's not.
Or maybe I just put too many thoughts in this game's future, so I'll just leave it at this. None of the "officials" has shown up yet to explain what these "double layers" are, so if it's not important enough for them to at least tell us "no, this doesn't have any impact on the performance", it's not important enough for me to re-subscribe (my subscription expired just a few days ago). It's that easy.

RSram · March 2015

Raygee wrote: »

@Gidorick Yeah, that's what I see, too, when it's not the double layer (I'll post some more screenshots in a minute, as you wished^^)

@Cyrene You're welcome

@RSram I don't think these are actually different locations; to me it looks like they tried at least two different models and textures for the exact same location, decided to use the one we all know but forgot to remove the other before releasing the game.
Also, these "cells" are not like cells as we knew from the previous ES games; all doors we can enter without a loading screen are about 25-30 meter below ground level, I often see this when none of the textures are loading and all the NPCs and players are moving around in town far above^^ Also f.e. when I go to the Mages Guild in Rawl'kha (interior) and it doesn't load anything, I can see all NPCs from the inn at the same height, and the townsfolk far above. It's an interesting sight, but.. it sucks, nevertheless.
The advantage of these "instant doors" is that we can get in right away without waiting for the loading screen to end - the disadvantage is the memory since everything is more or less pre-loaded... And now after seeing even more than just one set of textures and models, it's no wonder how the game runs in certain places for many players.

In the OP, the top screen shot shows a stairwell with a column in the middle, and the bottom just shows a room with archery targets, so it looks like to me that two different sets of geometry are being loaded.

Veldoril95b16_ESO · March 2015

Raygee wrote: »

farrier_ESO wrote: »

That thread looks more like scratch/dev areas that were not deleted from the world map in the move from dev servers to live, and is likely unrelated to the changing archway graphics.

Sounds like they are stripped of all interactibles (which would make a performance difference) and are just basic meshes in the current zone's style kit, which won't make any significant difference because of LoD and occlusion preventing them from getting loaded in.

Of course they have nothing to do with the archway graphics... I was merely refering to the general performance. There's just too much unused stuff which I thought is, eventually, decreasing the performance and could easily be deleted. So maybe it's not, who knows.

After update 6, the forums are full with reports about how often the game freezes, crashes all the time or the loading screens never end or take too long, so after seeing these "double layers", I thought this could be related somehow (besides of many other things). Maybe it is, maybe it's not.
Or maybe I just put too many thoughts in this game's future, so I'll just leave it at this. None of the "officials" has shown up yet to explain what these "double layers" are, so if it's not important enough for them to at least tell us "no, this doesn't have any impact on the performance", it's not important enough for me to re-subscribe (my subscription expired just a few days ago). It's that easy.

I can't believe that ZoS is able to publish update 6 with such performance issues.

Perhaps the "double layers" have more layers inside, like Russian Matryoshka dolls!

Gidorick · March 2015

@Raygee that's awesome! Looks like some wacky realm of oblivion. How to you KEEP textures from loading. For me it's like a 1 second delay. Is there a way to stop the HD textures from loading?

Moonshadow66 · March 2015

Veldoril95b16_ESO wrote: »

Raygee wrote: »

farrier_ESO wrote: »

That thread looks more like scratch/dev areas that were not deleted from the world map in the move from dev servers to live, and is likely unrelated to the changing archway graphics.

Sounds like they are stripped of all interactibles (which would make a performance difference) and are just basic meshes in the current zone's style kit, which won't make any significant difference because of LoD and occlusion preventing them from getting loaded in.

Of course they have nothing to do with the archway graphics... I was merely refering to the general performance. There's just too much unused stuff which I thought is, eventually, decreasing the performance and could easily be deleted. So maybe it's not, who knows.

After update 6, the forums are full with reports about how often the game freezes, crashes all the time or the loading screens never end or take too long, so after seeing these "double layers", I thought this could be related somehow (besides of many other things). Maybe it is, maybe it's not.
Or maybe I just put too many thoughts in this game's future, so I'll just leave it at this. None of the "officials" has shown up yet to explain what these "double layers" are, so if it's not important enough for them to at least tell us "no, this doesn't have any impact on the performance", it's not important enough for me to re-subscribe (my subscription expired just a few days ago). It's that easy.

I can't believe that ZoS is able to publish update 6 with such performance issues.

Perhaps the "double layers" have more layers inside, like Russian Matryoshka dolls!

Roomception

Moonshadow66 · March 2015

Gidorick wrote: »

@Raygee that's awesome! Looks like some wacky realm of oblivion. How to you KEEP textures from loading. For me it's like a 1 second delay. Is there a way to stop the HD textures from loading?

I don't keep them from loading (and I'm not sure if there's a way to stop this on purpose), it just takes ages for the normal textures and models to show up, so I could walk a bit further into this.. strange area. I'm lucky^^

Actually, I forgot to test if I can run through the pillar or if I'd run against it; if it's the second option, then it'd be even more concerning than just the textures.. We'll see^^

farrier_ESO · March 2015

Rune_Relic wrote: »

That's the thing that troubles me...applying different textures is one thing....that pillar is part of a different model. So its not just textures. I really don't understand why you would have different models occupying the same space. Why would you double on graphics memory on that way ?

They aren't occupying the same space. The rest of us don't bump into the pillar that isn't there, after all

They are, like I've been saying, almost certainly kit pieces. The building is basically the same shape, but seems to be being shown in kit pieces of a different style for some reason. You can think of it like a retexture, but it's a little more than just a re-skin, since it also changes the mesh. What @Raygee is seeing is the wrong kit pieces.

Collision is clientside for the most part, so, just like with the LoD items which sometimes have oversimplified collision boxes (or none at all!), these items might well have collision, and the pillar might well be collidable with.

None of this adds anything to the server overhead and lag, though, since the only things the server handles are object interactions and tracking (every lootable or usable item will have a per-player flag to say whether it's been looted; every group-lootable item will have a timestamp for when it was looted and a list of what's inside), character interactions (which will unavoidably scale with N^2, sadly: each client informs the server of the player's movements, and the server then informs all other clients within range, hence the Cyrodiil lag) and AI (pathing, locations, player interactions, respawn timers and locations, pickpocketability state, list of everyone who's hit or pickpocketed it, etc. This scales with N^2 too: each mob's movements get sent to every player in range, which is why there are no deer in Cyrodiil any more).

Kit pieces might have pathing built in, but the server won't be getting confused about which kit piece is used anywhere: that'll be a clientside display issue.

Raygee wrote: »

None of the "officials" has shown up yet to explain what these "double layers" are, so if it's not important enough for them to at least tell us "no, this doesn't have any impact on the performance", it's not important enough for me to re-subscribe (my subscription expired just a few days ago).

You can find your justification wherever you like of course, but why would they respond to something that has a really obvious cosmetic cause with no server impact? It's not like they have any history of responding to threads delving into the interesting parts of the game: that'd take the fun out of player-investigation!

WhimsyDragon · March 2015

The amount of unloaded things and low res textures prior to the good ones is steadily increasingly occuring

It's a bit awkward. Again, never saw this prior to this month.

Romo · March 2015

farrier_ESO wrote: »

Rune_Relic wrote: »

That's the thing that troubles me...applying different textures is one thing....that pillar is part of a different model. So its not just textures. I really don't understand why you would have different models occupying the same space. Why would you double on graphics memory on that way ?

They aren't occupying the same space. The rest of us don't bump into the pillar that isn't there, after all

They are, like I've been saying, almost certainly kit pieces. The building is basically the same shape, but seems to be being shown in kit pieces of a different style for some reason. You can think of it like a retexture, but it's a little more than just a re-skin, since it also changes the mesh. What @Raygee is seeing is the wrong kit pieces.

Collision is clientside for the most part, so, just like with the LoD items which sometimes have oversimplified collision boxes (or none at all!), these items might well have collision, and the pillar might well be collidable with.

None of this adds anything to the server overhead and lag, though, since the only things the server handles are object interactions and tracking (every lootable or usable item will have a per-player flag to say whether it's been looted; every group-lootable item will have a timestamp for when it was looted and a list of what's inside), character interactions (which will unavoidably scale with N^2, sadly: each client informs the server of the player's movements, and the client informs all other clients within range, hence the Cyrodiil lag) and AI (pathing, locations, player interactions, respawn timers and locations, pickpocketability state, list of everyone who's hit or pickpocketed it, etc: scales with N^2 too: each mob's movements get sent to every player, which is why there are no deer in Cyrodiil any more).

Kit pieces might have pathing built in, but the server won't be gettingconfused about which kit piece is used anywhere: that'll be a clientside display issue.

Raygee wrote: »

None of the "officials" has shown up yet to explain what these "double layers" are, so if it's not important enough for them to at least tell us "no, this doesn't have any impact on the performance", it's not important enough for me to re-subscribe (my subscription expired just a few days ago).

You can find your justification wherever you like of course, but why would they respond to something that has a really obvious cosmetic cause with no server impact? It's not like they have any history of responding to threads delving into the interesting parts of the game: that'd take the fun out of player-investigation!

But it did(or does?) have impact.

While seeing these types of problem on my screen, I had screen freezes due to RAM use maxing out and the ESO Program stopped report popping up. However for the last 2 days I have not had the graphic glitches and now my RAM use DOES NOT max out. No more freezes/Eso stopped reports.

Preyfar · March 2015

I think this happens on player models, but to a much lesser extent. Everytime I get close to a player model their textures go from high res and instantly unload, going back to ultra low res... and finally BACK to high res. I've seen this all the time since going to 1.6. It's visually jarring.

Also, last night I've had issues where stairs, boxes and other world objects weren't loading altogether. I was doing quests out by Alcaire castle in Stormhaven and every single staircase leading up to the castle was missing. I re-logged, and they popped back in.

So something is definitely going on with the loading system.

Sentinel · March 2015

That was the original design for much of the game's Architecture (Mostly within the DC zones I think). While it's gone now, if you look at the old stormhaven load screen, you will see houses with such architecture in the background. You can also find some of these designs in other areas that haven't been redone. Overall though, I find them very cartoon-y in style, and am very glad they were scrapped.

farrier_ESO · March 2015

Romo wrote: »

But it did(or does?) have impact.

While seeing these types of problem on my screen, I had screen freezes due to RAM use maxing out and the ESO Program stopped report popping up. However for the last 2 days I have not had the graphic glitches and now my RAM use DOES NOT max out. No more freezes/Eso stopped reports.

That sounds to me like it might be confusing cause and effect.

Far as I know, no changes were made to the ESO client, nor to the server, two days ago. But my memory's crap, so I might be wrong: please do laugh at me if so. So, if the problem went away then, that means that something your machine was doing, is no longer being done.

Where I've seen similar (but not identical) effects, it's been where my machine is using the wrong videocard (the lousy onboard one), in which case the frame rate drops to like 15fps and I see LoD items everywhere as the card struggles to keep up with getting the higher res models to my screen, and then I get to play with the LoD items' weird collision boxes. [Which is interesting in itself: it suggests that collision is determined by which model has been sent to the videocard, rather than which models have been loaded into memory; which might be how PhysX works, I dunno. It could be that my onboard offloads a ton of the processing to the CPU, in which case it could be that those are the only models the CPU had been able to load, too. All speculation, I know nothing here].

With a change in behavior of your client on Saturday, though, it seems to me that we can categorically exclude issues with either server or client. So it seems most likely to me that you were seeing these glitches *because* your machine was getting bogged down, rather than the other way round.

Hrm. It could make sense that memory issues would show the wrong kit pieces, if it's designed so that it loads in a base kit, and then only loads in extended, differently-styled kits after that, if there's space. If the styled kits can't be loaded, it'd show the default ones for the zone. This feels like a really cool, elegant system... and yet also somehow unlikely, no matter how cool.

So, what if I'm wrong? I don't know anything about the game internals! (well, full disclosure: I'm an MMO programmer so know a little about industry approaches, but not nearly as much as I should). So, 'course, I could be entirely wrong about the kit pieces being interchangeable. So, let's assume I'm wrong for the time being (because, hey, it's often true!). What else could it be?

LoD feels most likely. A problem with that is that you'd expect to always see those LoD items at a distance, even on a fast machine. Though I guess if it's only one smallish indoor location, it wouldn't necessarily ever get LoDded n the course fo normal play, so players might never see them.

So, could be they just didn't rebuild the area's LoD models after redesigning the area (or redesigning the kit); but that seems very unlikely because the alternative models seem to be in the same resolution as the normal ones, which wouldn't be what you'd see with an out of date LoD model. Unless their LoD builder was also broken or not-yet-finished when they built their first LoD models, and wasn't correctly scaling everything down?

One argument in favor of this idea is that I don't remember seeing the archway anywhere else, so a redesign of the kit would explain it. (But my memory's crap, so...)

Alternatively, could it be LoD table corruption? So, instead of the LoD entry for "high-res kit piece A" pointing to "low-res kit piece A", it's pointing to "high-res model kit-piece B"?

I could actually see this being done deliberately during testing, where they want to check that the LoD's working right. You can't reliably do that (on a fast-enough machine) with the default LoD tables, because the idea of LoD items is they look basically the same as the high-res, at the ranges you ever see them. So they could have replaced the LoD items with other items that were obviously different, even at a distance. But doing this manually for each one, and making a "test item" for each one individually would be a pain, and copying the whole item table from another kit would be way faster. To test, they'd turn clipping off, back away from the map, and see when LoDding kicked in.

And then, since they are working on fast machines, they'd not see the LoD stuff being wrong in normal testing, and could forget to switch it back, so it could get forgotten about and accidentally pushed to production, and then it wouldn't get caught by the testers. Two problems with this hypothesis are that I'd still expect to see the LoD items of the other kit, not the high-res items (but if this was at the testing stage, maybe they hadn't built the LoD meshes of the other kit yet); and I would normally have expected them to just replace all the LoD textures with, say, red ones, without changing all the meshes (but perhaps that's not so easy to do on the system they are using; and that wouldn't be the case if they just accidentally copied the wrong LoD data in, rather than deliberately doing it).

If it is a LoDding issue with this area, the memory use would be increased, since you're loading in two high-res models for everything. And you'd gain no improvement from LoD. And it would explain why they eventually get replaced with the correct models, like LoD items do.

ZOS_JessicaFolsom · March 2015

@Raygee - We've got some folks looking into this. Thanks for the screenshots--they really helped! Would you be willing to post your computer system specs?

Cuyler · March 2015

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

@Raygee - We've got some folks looking into this. Thanks for the screenshots--they really helped! Would you be willing to post your computer system specs?

Hi @ZOS_JessicaFolsom I have the exact same rendering issues (not to mention lots of lag) as of late, much more than before the 1.6 patch. Here's my specs, just on a stock Late 2011 15' MacBook Pro.

2.4GHz MacBook Pro (MD322LL/A)

Processor: 2.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7
L3 cache: 6MB shared
Memory: 4GB (two 2GB SO-DIMMs) of 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM; supports up to 8GB
Hard drive: 750GB Serial ATA; 5400 rpm
Slot-loading optical drive: 8x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 3000 and AMD Radeon HD 6770M with automatic graphics switching
Graphics memory: 1GB GDDR5
Display: 15.4-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, 1440-by-900 resolution
Expansion: One Thunderbolt port (up to 10 Gbps), one FireWire 800 port (up to 800 Mbps), two USB 2.0 ports (up to 480 Mbps), SDXC card slot
Networking: 10/100/1000BASE-T (Gigabit) Ethernet

Thanks in advance for any help!

Drazhar14 · March 2015

That wooden construction looks so much better than the plain old boring stone!

Heishi · March 2015

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

@Raygee - We've got some folks looking into this. Thanks for the screenshots--they really helped! Would you be willing to post your computer system specs?

I've ran into this a bit too so I'll add-in specs.

Processor: AMD FX-8350 4.00GHz
Ram: 16GB DDR3 PC3-10700 9-9-9-24
Graphics: GeForce GTX 550 Ti
- 1GB GDDR5
- 192 CUDA Cores
- 900MHz Graphics Clock
- 1800MHz Processor Clock
Systemboard:ASRock 970 Extreme3
OS: 64bit Windows 7 Pro
Net: WiFi, 20Gb/s down, Avg Ping ~100ms