Zloth

Pthththhh, like I'm going to watch the YouTube version. Headed to Samuraiko Productions to see the real thing.

SWEEEEEEETTT!!!

Ashcraft, there's another Ash moving in on your turf! (Warning, vocals not safe for work!)

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Letting anyone else play your account for any reason is a bad idea.

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Like I said, in front of MY PC. I'm going to be sitting right there - and probably nosing in when people send tells.

Errr, I haven't heard of the event. I watched the first one and a whole lot of nothing happened. What's supposed to be going on?

Roadrunner is shoving us all onto a new server with a new URL. New link is: http://home.roadrunner.com/~dasloth/...20Updates.html

Ugh, I haven't updated since late June! And there are some freaked out image links at the top, too.

I should point out that ImageShack has a new format. You are supposed to get an advertisement on the left and the image on the right. This works for me under Chrome but breaks under IE8 beta. Hopefully it's just a beta bug and not a problem for everyone with IE.

CoH Helper is moving! Roadrunner is pushing everyone on to the same server so the URL is changing. The new URL is http://home.roadrunner.com/~dasloth/CoH/CoHHelper.html

The old URL should work for a few more weeks but then it will vanish - no forwarding.

I'll update my signature as soon as I make an index page. (Dang new servers don't let us get directory listings.)

I think I would probably just point them at WeGame and/or YouTube and let them poke around for themselves. Or better yet, set them in front of my PC and let them play.

Great video Kranny! (I think I said that last time. ) Maybe you could post that on WeGame.com as well?

Dark Respite and Vertical Studios? Oh my.

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So when the event was on and Halloween salvage prices were down I bought some to save up for my alts, friends alts, and sg mates....about 10 of each - so that's 40. Base salvage racks - now IO salvage racks - only hold 30. So I need two racks just to hold the Halloween salvage I had purchased - which could have all been stored in one base salvage rack...

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But then, bigger bases mean you can have more salvage racks. What's more, you don't need to stockpile lots of base salvage to prepare for making more stuff now, you only really need to stock up on a few rares for whatever you are about to build. That should free up tons of space. You can use that for your special salvage, for a common stockpile for IO crafting, for passing between your own characters, or for empowerment supplies. The first and last option you can do now but the other two options are impossible in the current system.

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...along with candy canes, all the components we had stock piled - some times as many as 100 of each type (yeah, well, sometimes more even of some) and base salvage that we were accumulating to make more components - that salvage and gear is share-and-share-alike for most of the sg/vg's that I'm in.

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Uhhh, 100 of each type? That's not share and share alike, that's just hoarding. Sharing involves people actually using the stuff.

Think about how this is working. Say you got enough Halloween masks over the event to satisfy everyone over the next year. When the next year rolls around, some of the nicer folks go out and farm more special salvage. Whoever wants it gets it when they need it thanks to some selfless folks who trudge through the boredom of farming every year.

Now say you don't have enough and run out. The folks who still really just have to have that one extra costume slot can get it on the market. The folks who would like an extra slot but don't want to pay through the nose for it can wait for the event to roll around again. Then they go out and get the special salvage themselves. Instead of just getting a hand-out from the SG powers-that-be, the people that actually want the salvage are gathering it, which should be a lot more rewarding.

That said, I would definitely like to see special salvage and invention salvage put in different bins. Making invention salvage storage and special salvage storage the same thing is going to be hell to balance. In the long run, I think it's worth the effort, even if it is non-trivial.

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Thanks for all your hard work contributers; I know I rather have "The Scoop" than not. Great Issue, now c'mon peeps they need you!

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Exactly. Both sides dedicate vast amounts of quality time to the community. If either side actually succeeds in driving the other off the boards/game, it's going to be tragic for the community.

Well, easiest way is to just flip the switch on my demo launcher.

You might also look at Paragon Wiki. There you'll find the command is either -demodump or -demodumptga.

Wow, there's some good timing between the music and the video. The night fight actually looks the coolest to me.

ROFL for the Slow Loader cartoon!

I sure hope the problems can be fixed. It would be nice for ATI/AMD but it would be really great for this game. I shudder to think how many customers have been lost because they were crashing and getting weird graphic errors with a high end ATI/AMD card.

Now we need to wait and see. "No timeline" doesn't exactly fill me with excitement, but it's not a message of doom, either.

Yep, SS.... my laziness.... excuse me, my efficiency has been quite high of late.

W00tStudios used to take demo uploads, but it looks like they've stopped doing that. Ah well. If you PM me your email, I can just zip it up and mail it to you.

Sunstorm - He That Made Chain Induction Work! That was amazing. Of course, that means you'll be held to a somewhat higher standard.

/bug No Lost Pounds
I had my character jump up and down for a full hour but, in real life, I didn't lose any weight at all! Why not? Can't you put Sunstorm on this issue? I really think it would help sales if you could get it to work. By issue 13 plz.

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Ask Agent Ruby:

One of the things that many players will want to ask you about is the difficulties with in the past is using some of the higher-end effects, such as High water effects, FSAA Depth of Field, and other settings with ATI graphics cards in general. Do these settings still cause problems with City of Heroes/ Villains? If so, are they being addressed?

Thanks for stopping by our forums!

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Great question - there are some things still being tackled, but being a CoH player myself, I can tell you that there have been a lot of improvements over time. A few things to point out:

First, AMD releases a new CATALYST driver every month with performance and feature improvements, so it's always a good idea to keep your drivers up to date

Second, we have a great support program through our "Catalyst Crew" program - the Crew is a group of dedicated (some would say fanatical ) Catalyst testers who put our drivers through the ringer regularly, and test against as much as they can. They also try to reproduce as many issues that are submitted as possible, and you can submit any issues you encounter HERE.

Finally, our Catalyst Control Center (CCC) has a number of options you can optimize to change things like AA, AF and a number of other features, which sometimes helps in improving performance and image quality. There are also some good resources on our website on how to optimize CCC for a better gaming experience.

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Oh, new drivers have been tried. MANY new drivers. Same with CCC settings. Please understand, these problems have been going on for at least three YEARS now.

The Catalyst Crew sounds good, maybe they can get the ball rolling and a fix can be found. But right here, right now, and for the past three years, your cards have not been able to do Full Screen Anti-Aliasing and use the high end graphic options like high detail water effects at the same time.

So my question is - why would we buy one of these cards when <ahem> the other company makes cards that can use the high end options?

(Sorry for such a pointed question but this has been going on for years and instead of sending an engineer they sent a saleswoman. I myself suffered through this problem for a year and half. Coming in here to try and sell us a product with that still going on is galling to say the least.)

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You should add some detail in the crashing thing about the "driver stopped responding" crash, since it seems fairly common (is there even an actual fix anyway?).

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There's the Vista Hotfix that helps a lot of folks, but not everybody. I keep hoping it will show up in Windows Update any day now but it's starting to look like it will be Service Pack 2.

Here's the story:

Windows Vista has some sort of timing bug that will cause your video drivers to stop responding and, after a minute or two, reset. The faster your machine and your graphics card, the more often you can run into this bug. It can happen as soon as you start playing or hours later. On my 8800GFX, I was crashing about once every 20 hours of play.

Hotfixes should not be installed lightly. Microsoft only gives them a little testing. Don't install this just in case you might get the problem some day. Only install it if you are already having symptoms along these lines.

Regarding Mid's post - yes, please repost that!

Eh? Nope, it's Ree Spite, I can hear it quite distinctly in my head. I guess it means you are going to spite something a second time. Stick your ear up near my head and have a listen, it's very easy to hear.

Errrr, you don't need a bat to help you listen, why are you swinging that around?

You pronounced your name wrong, "Respite" is pronounced "ree spite."

Wow, she really does talk fast! I'm just a Kansas boy, how'm I s'posed to follow these city slicker speak!

Referenced Time to Start video on YouTube. (The original Blue Man version is out there, too, but I'm too lazy to hunt it down now.)

Nice thing is, while you can only record demos with quicky little file names, you can rename them to just about anything you want.

Like, say "Winter Farming" dated 1/13/2005. Vista tells me it contains the string "Abominable_Snowman_Giant". So what should I do with it, SS?

How To Post
So you read the relevant section(s) for your problem and you still haven’t figured it out? Well, that’s what the forums are for!

You’ll want to state your problem clearly and given plenty of details. If you just say “I’ve been crashing, why?” then we’re going to have to grill you with several questions before we can help. Tell us things like when the crashing started, describe the crash (do you crash to desktop? Suddenly reboot? Lock up?), and say if the crashes happen soon after you start the game or if they only happen after 30 minutes of play. If you really don’t know what details are relevant, give it your best shot. You’ll probably have to go through a round of questions but as long as you are trying, we’re happy.

After that, give us some data. My CoH Helper program can gather a lot of information about your computer and game settings and format it nicely for our forums. Paste that info into your post. You should also gather a HijackThis log so we can see what programs are running on your PC. If you have some programs up that you normally close before playing, go ahead and close them before getting your HiJack log, too.

Don’t worry too much about grammar and spelling. However, you are asking us to spend some time helping you. If you can’t be bothered to use any capitalization or punctuation, it doesn’t exactly inspire people to spend half an hour researching your problem.

And no bumping! It’s against forum rules.

Close
I hope this guide was helpful to you! Proximus' original guide listed off several of the people that helped gather the information in his guide but, after all these years, that list would go on for pages! So I'll just give thanks to the whole City of Heroes community for all their efforts in keeping this game great.

Missing Screenshot, Demo, Keybind files (Vista only)

Some folks using Vista find that, when they take a screenshot, the screenshot is not located inside the game directory in a screenshot folder. When they record a demo, the demo can’t be found. When they save a keybind file, it doesn’t show up. However, if they try to load the saved keybind file, it does load! What the Hades is going on here??

What’s going on is Virtualization. Windows Vista is much more particular about saving user data in the program files directory. If a program tries to do it anyway and the user isn’t an administrator, Vista pulls a fast one to keep the program from crashing with an “access denied” error while keeping the program data clean. It does this by saving and loading the files from a special folder.

So, instead of looking in the game directory, look in the game directory’s virtualization folder located in your user directory. For me, that would be C:\Users\Zloth\AppData\Local\VirtualStore. Note that the “AppData” directory is hidden so you may need to change your folder options to see it. Or, better yet, just replace “Zloth” with your own Windows user name and search on it in your Start menu.

Game Doesn’t Start
Occasionally people will start the game, see the small “loading” message, and then… nothing. This is most often caused by “skinning” programs that change the look of Windows, such as Window Blinds. Check the options for your skinning program and you should be able to have it exclude City of Heroes.

People also often have trouble with their computer locking up right when they try to log in, particularly right after an update to the game. This is often caused when a firewall program recognizes that the program has changed and prompts you to see if you want to let it connect to the internet. Unfortunately, if you have the game up in full screen, that prompt might be behind the game. But you can’t get out of the game because it’s too busy trying to connect! Normally, if you just wait a minute or two, the game will give up and give you an error message. Then you can alt-tab out and answer the firewall prompt.

Another common crash point is right after selecting a server, which takes you to the character selection screen. This is the first point in the game where 3D graphics are displayed. If your graphics drivers are in bad shape or if your DirectX installation has gotten messed up, you can error out here. You might want to update both of them. (Microsoft updates DirectX every few months. Just go to www.microsoft.com and do a search.)

Of course, virus and malware programs can cause all three of these problems, too. Even the second one if you are skipping the updater. But I only want to drive the point about virus/malware into your heads, not drive it all the way through your heads by repeating it in every section. So I won’t bother to tell you to keep abreast of all the latest Windows updates and service packs, or bug you about keeping your anti-virus program updated this time.

Memory Lag
This one tends to be rather unique to City of Heroes because it uses quite a lot of memory. The game currently requires half a gigabyte of memory. “Requires” as in “if you haven’t got this, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to play at all.” To play the game well, you need at least a gigabyte of memory. If you have Vista, then you will probably need a full gigabyte to play at all and 1.5 gigabytes to play the game very well. (Though I should note here that, at the time of this writing, Windows Vista is not officially supported at all, so I’m just guessing on those memory requirements.)

The biggest symptom of having your memory fill up is that load times start to become long. If memory is getting low, it can take minutes just to get into a mission. (If you have a lot of memory and a fast computer, it can take as little as 15 seconds.)

The best solution to this is, of course, to get more memory. Make sure you know what you are doing, though, especially if you are trying to add memory instead of just replacing what you have.

Beyond just throwing money at the problem, though, you might want to try a couple of things. The first is to simply close other programs. No browsers, no IM programs, no email programs. Task Manager (which can be started by hitting control-shift-esc) can show you what is running and how much memory is being used.

You can also optimize your virtual memory. Virtual memory is hard drive space that Windows uses when it runs out of RAM. Here is an old gamer’s trick for optimizing this virtual memory “swap space” (old but, I think, still relevant):

1. Right click Computer on your desktop and select properties. Select Advanced System Settings.

2. Under Performance, click the Settings button.

3. Click the Advanced tab then click the Change button for Virtual Memor.

4. Turn off the option to automatically manage the page file size.

5. Set the page file size to 0 (no page file). Reboot if asked.

6. Follow the steps up in the “upkeep” section of this guide to defragment your hard drive. It could take a few hours so be patient.

7. Now go back to the virtual memory setting again by following steps 1 through 3.

8. Set your virtual memory to a custom size and be sure to set the minimum and maximum to the same value. That will keep Windows from resizing the swap file and possibly fragmenting it more. I would recommend making the swap file two or three times bigger than your main memory but no more than 2 gigabytes. So, if you have half a gig, you might make the swap file 1300 megabytes. However, if you have six gig, don’t make the swap file 18000 megabytes, just keep it at 2000.

Of course, virus and malware programs can also eat up memory (and CPU and cause file conflicts and….) so be sure to keep your virus scanner up to date and get the latest service packs and security patches installed for Windows.

Graphics Lag

Graphics lag is when your computer is having trouble keeping up with the game. Typically, this results in the frame rate getting slow, sometimes to the point where the game seems to be a slideshow. You can check your exact frame rate by using the /Showfps 1 command. This will put your frames per second number up on your screen. Use /Showfps 0 to turn it off again. The number should stay above 10.

Graphics lag can actually be caused by more than just graphics. If the sound processing is taking too long or if your CPU is getting overloaded, you can get low frame rates.

The best way to fix this is to start the game in “Safe” mode. Start the Updater and click Next just like normal. However, instead of just clicking “I accept,” check the “Safe Mode” box then accept. This will set all your graphics settings to the lowest value and make the game horribly ugly but it should give you a great frame rate, even on low end systems. From this point, you can turn graphics options on via the in-game menu and figure out just what you can and can’t use.

If you aren’t getting a good frame rate even in safe mode, go in to your options and check the sound settings. Set the volume for both effects and music to 0. That will turn your sound off and may help your frame rate a lot. (If it does, you better look in to updating your sound drivers.)

Still bad frame rates? Well, if you have a very low end graphics card (particularly if it’s just a chip on the motherboard instead of a real card), you might need to use the -usetexenvcombine command line parameter.

If you are still having problems, some other program may be eating up your CPU time. Make sure you shut down all other programs. Even a browser can burn quite a bit if it’s displaying a Flash animation. Virus and other malware programs can burn a lot of CPU time, too. Keep that virus scanner up to date and get those security patches and service packs installed! If you get a virus or worm, it can play hell with your computer and cause all sorts of problems.