Zloth

"The next step is to load your demo into Zloth's demo editor, which is nice enough but it sure would be tons better if we had a full featured one. <looks at Positron>"

"Now that you've made your changes, save them to a new demo file and load it. You'll have to load the whole game up again because you can't switch from one demo to another from the in-game command prompt, can you Pohsyb?"

Beware

I won't be surprised if they are only doing one workshop at a time.

Oh come ON! That's not even fair!!

Well, normally Dark Astoria is like that. It did clear up for a few days but that was years ago.

The only one that jumps to mind are the monuments you can get in the missions from the second Shadow Shard contact. I'm having trouble remembering what they look like, though. (I mostly just remember Kora fruit. Mmmmmm Kora..... )

I13 beta? Pah. We've already read it all. What are they supposed to show? Are you really interested in seeing where the button is that switches between one build and another? Do you just HAVE to see the dialog box they used for linked xp right NOW, even though you aren't going to see it in game for a month at least??

Or would you rather go see DR show you all new stuff that you can use IMMEDIATELY?

Come on, the choice is obvious. Particularly if DR serves cake instead of just cookies.

<G R I N>

Yep, there's a billboard just west of the Utopia place! Kinda trashed but at least it's standing.

Now I want to go really really bad!!!! Still can't, but I wanna!

Will somebody make a video of her making a video?

Can't skip that, that's your best one! (Though the I12 trailer would have been best if, instead of "Oh my god!" you had said "Hmmm, I think I should have turned left at Albuquerque!") <just kidding! just kidding!>

[ QUOTE ]
We had it figured out, guys!

[/ QUOTE ]
"We" being the people who have used it a lot. The people who haven't probably aren't going to think to look in the "A's" to remove a program. I don't think anyone ever used that feature to add a program. If it were up to people like you, we would still be stuck with those old QWERTY keyboards! Oh wait...

Search is friggin' hugely cool. I never use Run anymore, even though I added it to my Start menu.

But anyway, I think we were talking about how this topic should be unstickied and replaced, or something like that.

All right, I can't resist....

Learning to Fly - Pink Floyd

Red Spider by Frongpond, which I don't see anywhere on the nets. (Ooo, it's all mine!)

Time Warp from Rocky Horror Picture Show hasn't been done to death yet. It will be some day but hasn't yet. Act now while you still can!

Spider Man by the Ramones - or anything else from that album.

Peek-a-boo - Souxie and the Banshees (no, not the Devo version!)

Flowers by Talking Heads always reminds me of the Eden zone. If there's a billboard in that zone, Leandro could have a ball with this one.

Monsters and Angels from Voice of the Beehive might work

Feed the Tree by Belly for the villain respec trial.

The Box by Orbital

Our skills probably aren't up to this level yet.

Errr, didn't that come out in the 90's? I take it somebody did the song again?

Nope. The "in game videos" thread back in the pre-beta boards lived on forever. Until the boards went away. (And that's not dying, that's divine ascension. )

[ QUOTE ]
Will the old post counts be carried over? Or will we all start from 0?

[/ QUOTE ]
Or will we not count at all?

That's perfect Mid! Well, practically perfect... most Vista users probably don't have the Run option on their Start menu. There's a Search instead that finds it just as well. (Or you can type windowkey-R to bring up the run menu.)

Oh frak, I just remembered today that there are still Vista-only steps in my guide! Well, I hope they were real close to what's in XP. (I just did that 'zero virtual mem, defrag, fix virtual ram' trick today under XP and it was pretty close. The 'advanced settings' is just 'advanced' and it's in a tab along the top instead of a link on the left side, but all the rest was the same.)

Thanks!

No comments?? Wow, don't get that often. Well, the new topic has been created. I'll see if I can get it stickied.

Bah, he's trying too hard. The worst ever song would be "Puberty Love" in the movie "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes." Thankfully, it doesn't appear to be on YouTube.

Phew. OK, I'll let you folks pick that over for a few hours then I'll start a new topic with those posts. (I want to get them inside the edit window so I can get all the UBB codes.)

The first post will have a list of each of the posts in the table of contents and a link to each one. Hopefully that will reduce the "ZOMG itz huge! I'll just ask" factor. A little.

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.