Star Wars Galaxies tech questions

I put this here so people thinking of getting the game can ask the community of theur system can handle it and so people owning the game can ask basic questions in a more "Star Wars friendly" enviornment that the official SWG forums.

 

It seems that lag seems to be the number one issuew with Galaxies from launch.
I'm not a tech guy, by any means, but I'll do what I can to find the answers for commonly asked SWG. The first will deal with Lag
What can I do about Lag?
Well, there are 2 different kinds of lag-server, which is on SOEs side, and Client, which is on our end. Server lag we can do nothing about.
First, you'll need to determine which type of lag it is.
Under options (Control+0) you'll see a misc tab. Under that, you'll see an option to enable system status window (if the name is similar, I apologize-I can't remember exactly). Enable this window.
It will tell you your ping and packet loss among other things. If your ping is super high and you have ANY packet loss, it's your internet connection more than likely.
If your ping is below 120-125 your good, if not, make sure you aren't running other programs and if not, you may have spyware or other issues (I'm not familair with a lot of ping issues. Any help would be appreciated here.)
If both those are fine, look at your system. To run really well, you need at least above 1 ghz processor speed, 1 gig ram and 128 video card-now this differers from the min that SOE says but this is what I found it the true minimums.
To run really well, 2.5 Ghz, 1 gig ram and 256 meg video card.
If getting the above minimum doesn't decrease lag (it may not totally eleminate it), then I don't recommend spending more money on stuff if increasing it didn't at least help a little) under game options set your vertex/pixel shader to 1.4 or 1.1 - and that might help
If none of this worked, try disabling "bump mapping" under the same game options (which can be found BEFORE yuo load into the game.)
If you are still suffering massive lag (you are always going to get some in high population cities) everywhere you go, there is a thread on the official SWG forums that suggests this is a known tech issue. They also seem to be aware of the issue which means a fix will happen.
keep in mind, since the CU and Total Experience package, the servers have exploded with population-higher than launch.

 

Thanks for startin an offical tech support thread, Vader. I much appreciate it, man. Take it easy.

 

I'll try to keep it as updated as possible.
If anyone has a knowledge of computer tech and SWG, please feel free to ijack

 

Sweet man thanks for the help!


Also another question about lag... what if I joined a server that has less people on it, would that lower it any significant amount? And is there a way to switch an existing character from one server to another?

 

Switching servers can help a little-but not worth the $60 to swith characters!. The problem with if you switch is there are sectors/zones that make up all the planets, no matter which server you switch to, the most popular will more than likely lag until the upgrade again-it's already been done a few times.