Writer_Tina

Windows XP Pro SP2
AMD Phenom x4 Quad-Core, GP-9600, 2.31ghz
2G RAM
ATI Radeon HD 3870

Drivers... we started with the 7.11s and had the problem then, too. At that poitn my settings were precisely what you have in the first post, except for extra particle count.
Current driver is reporting as 8.430.0.0, that came off the MSI disk that came with our cards. Date on the drivers was October. Those were loaded when the 7.10s failed to install.
Star's trying 7.12 now, he can update you on that.

I have changed my settings so many times, I don't even know where to start, but here's what I have right now:

CCC settings:

AA: 4x, filter: box
Adaptive AA: off
Anisotropic: 4x
Catalyst AI: disabled
MipMap: High Quality
Vertical Refresh: On, unless application specifies. Yes, I had it to Always On for a while, but I turned it down when I went to test Warcraft.
Support DXT texture formats
Triple buffering.

In-game settings:
Suppress Extra Player FX: well, I set it to on, but the game always disables it later
Suppress FX When Close: On
Particle Physics: High. I've tried all the other settings, too.
World Texture: Very High
Character Texture: Very High
World Detail: 100%
Character Detail: 151%
Particle Count: 50000. It's also been 25000, 10000, 100, and other points in between.
VSync: Enabled, but it's also been Disabled
FSAA: Off, but you've seen our notes on this
Shadows: On, and yes, I tried off
Use Geometry Buffers: Enabled, and yes I tried disabled
Anisotropic Filtering: Off, and we've fiddled with this, too
Texture Crispness: Smooth, and if you're wondering, yes, I tried fiddling with this, too
Shader Quality: High, and I've had it on other settings, too
Water Effects: None, and it's also been Low
DoF, Bloom, and Desat: all greyed out, can't change anyhow

And, if I sound cranky, it's not at you; I appreciate you're trying to help us figure this out. I'm cranky because this really is the only game I've ever had this kind of problem with and we tried for 4 or 5 hours with various combinations of settings to fix it and nothing has worked reliably except the stupid FSAA switch, which then proceeds to break FSAA.

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We have never had this kind of problem with ATI plus any other game ever.

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And, in fact, I just loaded World of Warcraft, which is full of glow and Bloom and more people than I tend to see at once in CoX, and not only does it work with ALL settings maxxed, but my framerate is 1.5-2x what it is in CoX.

That's where we started, Bill. Water FX off, actually, not even on Low; FSAA and AF off in the game and handled in CCC. All the way back before changing from 7.11 to 7.10, in fact, and then when we first had 7.10 loaded. I've had water FX off for ages because of the funky things it does on ATI cards even on Low.

The FSAA thing seeming to toggle things was discovered by sheer coincidence of "Well, no one's tried pressing this button yet" and discovering that it toggled off the odd colours. After trying playing with all the other settings in some way, basically.

With the settings as you recommend, IOW (except for water being OFF), is where we first noticed the problem. We've probably tried nearly every possible combination of FSAA, AF, Water, Shader, Particle amount, etc. that there is. And, seriously, changing FSAA in the game has been consistently what turns the funky coloured trails off.

Edit: But, in the spirit of figuring I might as well try everything, I turned Water from Off to Low. It just changed the colour of my funky trails.

Incidentally, turning Catalyst AI on (as the only other thing I hadn't tried) limits me to Low w/bumpmaps shader. Turning it off brings the rest of the options back.

I'm really about || from cancelling my subscription. Again. I'm going to go read now.

Actually, more testing reveals this isn't always true. I set stuff up in the game to match, relogged, and came back to glowy red sprint. BUT, turning off FSAA fixed it. So somehow FSAA is acting as a toggle for this in-game.

Interestingly, whether or not I show the benefits of AA seems to also vary, but I haven't narrowed down the pattern yet other than it SEEMS to work more often when I've got Catalyst handling it and FSAA off in the game... but not necessarily working that way all the time.

I also should note that regardless of settings in Catalyst, I no longer have even the option of turning on DoF or Bloom. I don't care, but it's interesting that I had them on the old card but not this one.

No other game I play has issues with ATI cards.

Okay, here's weirdness for you: since nothing else worked, my SO tried hitting the FSAA option. It cleared up the problem (which was extending to other glows, like the base portal, CoT ritual circles, and Ancestor Spirits -- I shoulda taken a screenie of the Pink Ancestor Spirit), so I tried it, and lo, cleared mine as well.

I'm gonna try turning AA and anisotropic back over to 'let application manage' for now, and turn them on in game, and see how that works for us.

(ETA: This is after switching drivers, and yes, they appear to be manufacturer-provided 7.10s.)

Well, it's a good idea in THEORY, but in practice it's not working. I just tried to install the 7.10 drivers after uninstalling everything, rebooting, etc. but it's giving me an error saying that it cannot find a driver compatible with my current hardware or OS.

Our cards apparently came with a disk with recent drivers on it, however, so we're going to try those. October date on them, so I presume it's at least a similar set.

Ironically, I tried the 7.11 set because I'd seen the post from someone saying they were having troubles with 7.12 and figured that I'd just go with the next most recent. Apparently I should've just stuck with what came with the card, though, since the card itself is so new. (And have I mentioned that I heart my future father-in-law? I do. He bought us new computers for Christmas. The card itself would've been out of my price range, let alone the multicore processor and the widescreen monitor. )

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I'm also seen Sprint trails colored red and blue for no apparent reason.

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Oh, good, I thought I might have been going crazy. As of yesterday, when I first installed CoX on my new machine (ATI 3870 card and 7.11 drivers) sprint trails are sometimes randomly BRIGHT red. It's really disconcerting, honestly, but the more so because I can't figure out what's causing it AND it doesn't always happen, though once it starts happening it won't go away until I log out. Settings-wise, I've played with all the in-game ones to no avail, but I'm using BillZ's guide so some of my stuff is handled via Catalyst instead.

I haven't played the game sufficiently to notice other odd colourings, but that one was immediately obvious.

[Incidentally, the oddity with where the hand is on the enhancements screen is still present with the 3870. Irritating, though easier to deal with with my new, much higher resolution.]

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Well, I swat everything I open,

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Then you aren't the type of person I'm talking about.

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That being said.. all the beasties were appropriate for their area, not for my level.

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Unfortunately that still leaves a lot of reds behind when people don't take care of it, and yes, in the lower-level areas, purples. For instance, in GC I was spawning level 7-10 beasties, which was very unfortunate for my poor little under-5. (Though, interestingly, I just spawned level 2s in King's Row a little while ago with her, which was really odd.)

Well I think they're all pretty darn good, and I'm impressed with anyone who even tried. I have the costuming skills of an epileptic yak, personally. Congratulations to the winners!

Actually I was using my temp flight power to present hunt and found it works better with the temp JUMP power, so, um, I'd have to disagree flight or TP has a "massive" advantage. (And if your problem is with people who aren't nice enough to check the area before claiming a present, that has nothing to do with the travel power and everything to do with people being selfish greedy little twits. You know, like the people who think it's cool to present-hunt in an area that poses no risk to them because they outleveled it 30 levels ago, and then they leave behind the 3 red-to-purple-for-normal-people snowbeasts when they could swat them down in about 10 seconds, because they're IMPATIENT selfish greedy little twits. But I digress.)

Anyhow, about the naughty:nice ratios people were mentioning back there a bit, I agree they seem pretty low, since it seems like we open at best about 4 naughties for 1 nice. Personally as a hero I'm offended by the implication that I'm that naughty! (No, not really.) If it's not supposed to be 1 in 5 or less than maybe it needs tweaking. (Also, spawning 3 level 7s on a level 1 character in GC is just cruel. I've never had a character die at level 1 before.) (I wasn't present-hunting, it was on my way to the mission and I just clicked it cuz it was THERE.) (Seriously. Fastest death ever.)

You didn't miss a patch note; they got it wrong.

There's a copyright statement right at the bottom of the story in the link provided.

a) There are already a post on this story right here

b) The CoH news links to it, too.

c) Reproducing an entire news story verbatim is a violation of copyright.

Feh. FEH, I say!

But, on the bright side, I guess I'll see you over at TR.

(And I guess that means that's finally getting somewhere!)

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The prestige was added to the supergroup. It won't show up under each character's row in the SG window.

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That makes much more sense.

Also, I should sleep before I read things, or something.

Yeah, it'd be great...

....if I'd gotten it. Which on the character I'm on now I'm quite sure I didn't, as she has decidedly less than 20k prestige currently.

Of course, my global channels also mysteriously disappeared again today for me, so it's just shaping up to be a lovely day.

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Second of all, where the heck are the villain heavies? I see hero heavy stations everywhere, but I've seen one villain station.

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Straight forward from the villain base in the little park area is one, and there's another about a block east of Bravo in a little empty lot between two buildings. I got that one a lot. Not sure where the third one is off the top of my head.

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Oh, also, lots of pillboxes were bugged.

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There was definitely something weird going on with Golf, maybe a couple of the others too, about it not releasing the current affiliation and switching over properly. Forgot about that.

I think that while RV is an interesting idea and undoubtedly many people will have a ton of fun with it, I'm unlikely to spend much time there now that I've seen how it works.

Much of this is my thing only, not a commentary on the zone. I don't really like large, hectic teams as a rule (in small doses, yes, but regularly, no), and large hectic battles, ditto. So right there is a good reason to mostly not participate, since that's really the only way that RV is going to work, and I'm increasingly convinced that PvP in general should only be done by squishies in teams of 5 or more.

I don't mind dying. I don't even mind debt. I do mind getting routinely killed in 5 seconds because I'm playing a villain squishie, that all my powers seem to be useless against every tank and scrapper out there since they're all resistant to them, and that I spent more time walking to and from the villain base than I did actually fighting. I also really have developed a loathing for TP Foe as a power (though I found that if I wasn't lagging and my framerate wasn't floored, I could SJ away before dying to that... but that's a big if).

Some of the deaths might have not happened if my framerate didn't drop to under 5 in large battles, mind you. But when I'm dead before I even see the person hitting me because I can't move the camera fast enough, well... that's not really fun. So if nothing else, largescale PvP on my machine is also sorta a bad idea.

But the absolute one thing that is a problem I see in the zone itself can be summed up by one sentence:

Manticore hits you for 2000 damage.

Okay, fair enough.

ETA: And I, at least, appreciate the contests. I keep missing the deadlines so I really want to enter this time, especially since I have an idea what I want to do.

... you know, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for clarification of what to do if you're running at a larger size or you have to gamma correct in-game but the screenshots don't take that into account. It's not 'gaming the rules', it's trying to figure out if people are going to have to exclude themselves because the rules don't allow for these things.

Or, I suppose, enter a non-optimal screenshot because of the gamma or change their size in game temporarily. The former affects me (to the point that I find my unaltered screenshots muddy and unpleasant) and the latter does not, but the latter affects a lot of people, so I figured consolidating them would be a good idea.

Sorry I said anything, though, if you find it so annoying.

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DO NOT photoshop the picture (minor cropping is ok).

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How about "cropping, resizing, and gamma correction"? Since the screenshots taken don't respect my gamma settings inside the game, and I think given discussion elsewhere (in this thread and others), that's at least wide-spread, if not universal. And resizing is required to meet max size for people running at larger. None of those substantially alter the picture, and all of them are generally allowed in photo contests, so...

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I think I'd be a lot happier if it were first name, last initial than the other way around. There are a lot of people with my first name in my area, but very, very few with my last name.

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Changed!

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Excellent. Thank you!

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* Winners will be identified on the page with first initial, last name, and city, and State (or country if from outside the US).

* Characters in shots will be identified by character name and server.

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Up until this point I was interested... but I'm not keen on the idea of publically posting a list of winners' last names and locations such that they can be correlated with a list of characters and servers... and unless there are a lot of posted winners, it'd not be hard to correlate them.

I think I'd be a lot happier if it were first name, last initial than the other way around. There are a lot of people with my first name in my area, but very, very few with my last name.

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I agree with the fairly general consensus that having both Conserve Power and Power Sink is redundant. I also agree that of the two, Conserve Power makes sense to be the one to drop were a power to be dropped. As far as Quick Recovery, however, I seem to remember _Castle_ saying something some time back about how Brutes would never get Regen as a secondary, specifically because of Quick Recovery enabling them to never having to stop. It'd be brokenly powerful.

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I don't think that it would be brokenly powerful, any more than having CP running 90 seconds in any given 3.5 minutes is brokenly powerful (Hasten + Lightning Reflexes), or having a Scrapper travel with an Emp with RA running 90 seconds in any given 3 minutes (Hasten, and a much bigger boost to Stamina to begin with). I mean, your only downside with those two powers is that you might have to wait a couple minutes to get their benefit again, which for anyone patient isn't a downside at all. (My Fury drops by the time I hit the next group of mobs most of the time anyhow, so that's not an issue for me.)

But... assuming the devs disagree, I'd at least still want to switch Power Sink with CP. Or ask for a QR-lite, with 75% effectiveness.

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Lightning Field: I've never been fond of this style of power in an armor set and I often skip them, but I know other people who love 'em, so... no change to the power.

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It is likely you will be in the very small minority of brute players in skipping this type of power (although I'll be there with you) because your damage toggle is your prime means of getting and keeping aggro in teams.

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Aye, that'd be why I'm all in favor of leaving it as is. I know a lot of people play Brutes as at least Tank Lite, so overall I'm sure it's more attractive with it in, even if I wouldn't personally miss it.

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I would like to see exactly what the tier 9 does before entertaining changes to it.

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Aye, I would too, though getting to 38 isn't likely to happen for me unless they do end up handing out a level bump.

So my comments on it have to go merely by description and comparison to what I know of things with similar description. The impression I've gotten based on that is that it's something like a cross between Unstoppable and, say, the EM Pulse of the Corrupter Rad set (or insert other similar power here), but obviously until I see it in action I can't suggest anything other than tentatively.

So, anyone managed to get an */Elec to 38 yet? Or who thinks they will before too long?