Bill Z Bubba

Groovy. I'm going to have to check this out.

Here's what I'm hoping happened:
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Some other dev: "Yo, Castle, folks are exploiting tport foe and porting turrets around. Fix it."

Castle: "Well, yea, I can do that, but I'd have to break /dev and /traps for the folks that use recall to port their toys around."

Some other Dev: "I don't care. It's an exploit. Plug it with I-8. No excuses."

Castle: <sigh> "Fine." -But now I'm gonna have to figure out a way to fix /dev and /traps so that they aren't hellish for solo players. And I probably won't get it in until Issue 9. Great, 6 months of folks like Bill Z Bubba screaming at me that he deleted his tries at /dev and /traps because he found it so idiotic that he can't port his toys around.

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That's what I HOPE happened.

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Yes, it applies to Auto Turret.

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Yet another pointless nerf for a sub par power.

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People keep talking about this as a nerf to AT specifically. Nevermind all the other powers it effects. I imagine the case was that there was no way to exempt specific 'droppables' from this change and not that the horrible, evil devs just wanted to kick AT while it was down...

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You're probably right, but it doesn't matter. The end outcome is that two sub-standard sets are now even MORE sub-standard.

Wanna fix it, Castle?

Make the following powers have the same AI and mobility as the Force Field Generator from Traps:

Triage Beacon, Acid Mortar, Auto Turret, Tree of Life

Make the following powers all behave as if they were seeker drones, but fix the seeker AI so it actually seeks enemies and stays close to the caster instead of moving like drunk snails:

Poison Trap, Time Bomb (And please fix the Photon Seekers AI while at it.)

There. Now the sets can at least be used by someone that prefers to actually move through a mission at a faster than a dead sloth pace.

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Puppies are cute... but kittens are better. *runs*
:P

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Actually, in my experience, they taste about the same.

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Tastes of baby?

And did everyone look at Quake's 4some shot and think:

"That kitty is thinking: "Lunch.""

Do you have Bloom, Depth of Field or High Water enabled? Turn them all off. Problem persisting?

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I remember writing a post asking Cryptic and NCSoft to have some sort of memorial for Coyote -- the first ever fan to post on the old forums, and writer of the "Welcome to City Of Heroes FAQ." (I'd "known" him online for quite some time over on the Safehouse.)

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Well played, Castle.

Several items:

I assume Visigoth is following company policy on the recommendation of the 6.6s. Folks are supposed to be able to use the regular graphics slider in game without getting issues. (As in, NOT turning on advanced options.) The 6.7s introduced painful framerate hits when used in conjunction with Crytpic's (post-process, pixel buffer, front buffer: pick one, nobody has set me straight on what the correct term should be) effects. Those being Bloom, Depth of Field and High Water. Low water, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, does not utilize the pixel buffer, and thus does not break FSAA or cause huge FPS issues.

Of course, not all of those effects have the text that they won't work with FSAA, and the description in game for FSAA doesn't tell you that it won't work with those effects. It also doesn't tell you that using in game FSAA is problematic at high resolutions.

Or was it the 6.7s introduced the strange ghosting with Cryptic's HDR effects and the 6.8s introduced the FPS hit of doom? That sounds right. Either way, 6.6s if you use those effects. 6.8s if you don't.

Ok, the SmartGART message, the ONLY time you should EVER see that is after a clean install of the drivers. Once it's done once, you should NOT being seeing it again.

If you are, your driver install is out of whack.

The only reason that there is a differnet package for mobility and go cards is due to the OEM agreements that ATI and Nvidia have with Dell, HP and their ilk.

It's so OEMs can try to keep the average user from being able to get better performance through driver upgrades, and instead, forces them to buy another laptop. It's sick, it's immoral, it's american business at its finest.

See my reply to your reply in the 6.8 thread.

Your systems aren't telling you the truth:

Visigoth's Post By default, hyperthreading/multithreading is now disabled. There was a period where it was the opposite, but then Cryptic nuked it. You must use -renderthread 1 to enable that functionality. I have no idea if even with the flag, quad-core is supported at all.

Once you get into ATI's and click on the Drivers and Software section, on the left nav, find the section for Drivers and Software/WindowsXP/Radeon/Previous Drivers and Software

Kind of a pain, but on the 3rd page of that section you'll find the 6.8s. As for the mobility versions, you might try omegadrivers.net or that other site that folks have mentioned that I can't remember...laptops2go or notebooks2go or something like that.

SmartGART takes about 15 to 30 seconds to bring up the ATI tray icon and bounce my pointer to the center of my screen on a cold boot after my desktop pops up. Pretty sure you can disable that in the CCC.

First and foremost, the 6.9s are crap. Period. End of discussion. The 6.8s have given me the best performance out of the 6 series but ONLY if Bloom, Depth of Field, FSAA, and AF are all disabled in game, Water is on Low or Off, and FSAA and AF are enabled in the CCC.

You say that your best ATI system has:

2.16ghz core duo
1.5gb RAM
Radeon x1600, 256mb

Your proc should be surpassing my 3.0GHz-HT-P4 OCed to 3.2. Do you have the -renderthread 1 flag within your coh shortcut? If you don't, then you're only using half of your proc.

You have 1.5GB RAM where I have 2GB. Do you still have VM enabled on any drive or partition? I do not. But that shouldn't be affect FPS with you standing still in Atlas.

The X1600GT is the midgrade of the current generation. My X800XT is the higher end of the last generation.

Take a look at this Tom's Hardware VGA chart and you will see that the X1600Pro PCI-E card gets slaughtered by the X800XT AGP card with the X800XT doubling and sometimes tripling the performance of the X1600Pro. This is the main answer to your inquiry. Never buy a mid or low grade video card from EITHER manufacturer and expect great performance.

I do not use temporal AA or Adaptive AA

My current settings in the CCC:
FSAA: 4X
AF: 8X
Catalyst A.I.: Disabled
Mipmap: High Quality
Wait for Vert Refresh: Always On
Adaptive AA: Disabled
Geometry Instancing: Enabled
Support DXT Texture Formats: Enabled
Alternate Pixel Center: Disabled
Triple Buffering: Enabled

SmartGART: Everything Enabled

VPU Recover: Disabled

ATI Overdrive: Enabled

Settings in Game:
Suppress Player FX: Enabled
Ageia PhysX: N/A
Particle Physics: High
World Texture: Very High
Character Texture: Very High
World Detail: 75%
Character Detail: 200%
Max Particle Count: 50000
Vertical Sync: Disabled
FSAA: Off
Shadows: Enabled
Use Geometry Buffers: Enabled
Anisotropic Filtering: Off
Texture Crispness: Smooth
Shader Quality: High
Water Effects: Low
Depth of Field: Disabled
Bloom: Disabled

Sound Playback Mode: Performance
3D Sound: Enabled

At your location, on the train in Atlas, facing south looking over the horizon, I am sitting at 31FPS. If I do a 180 and face the wall, I jump to 60FPS. If I hop into the nearby tunnel to the NW and begin blasting, I float around 45-50FPS.

Although I can promise some improvement by rolling back to the 6.8s, you're still going to be forced to get past the bottleneck of the X1600.

I hope this helped some, Ebon.

One last edit:

It should be noted that, as I feared prior to I-7, the texture upgrades they added to the hero side hurt my performance badly while travelling through zones.

I wasn't then, and still am not pleased with this. The added quality of the textures does NOT equate to the performance loss and should have been rolled back. And then they should have used the same texturing in villains.

I have no doubt that the next system I build will be able to get me back to 50-60 FPS running around all zones, but not everyone can drop 1500 bucks on hardware because of a single game.

Glad ya found it, man.

Are you talking about the guide to guides sticky at the top of the guides forum?

huh... I just realized I've never posted my guides in the guide to guides guide.

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Besides, by the time MUO comes out, I'll be more than ready for the switch, as I'm sure most of us will be.

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There's one. How many to follow?

Oooo look, the marvel MMO lets me do X, CoH/V doesn't. Oooo, the marvel one has better performance cuz it's written under the heavy guidance of MS and thus will be coded in D3D... heading out. Oooo, the marvel one let's me be a wolvie clone without getting the smackdown by the mods. 50K players exodus.

Sorry folks, not seeing an upside here.

Unless Cryptic intentionally makes the combat system completely different and uses the extra advertisement to gain more players.

Whatever. We'll see. For now, I'll maintain my pessimism.

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Great idea. Comdemn a game before you've seen anything about it other than Marvel and Cryptic are working together to make it. Brilliant strategy. And while you're at it, insult anyone who might be excited about the prospect of playing a new Super Hero MMO, because we all know there should only be one choice no matter how old it is (or will be). That's right, folks, new = BAD! Excellent.

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I'm condemning it for the potential negative fallout it will have to the only game I play anymore. 'nuff said.

Great link, Roxstar.

A sequel to CoH/V would be something I'm all for. I'd jump ship for that in a heartbeat. Why play the outdated?

Marvel's MMO isn't a sequel to CoH/V. It's competition. If it IS part of Cryptic's evolutionary plan, if CoH/V was simply the foot in the door, so to speak, then that bodes poorly for those of us that don't want to play Marvel or DC's takes on the MMO.

How big a playerbase does EQ-1 have compare to EQ-2? I honestly have no clue. I would assume EQ-1 is gasping its last breath.

I'm hoping I'm not around to see City of's last breath. And I'm hoping the only other superhero game at that time isn't Marvel or DC associated.

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And to think about all the problems ATI users will have just doesn't help.

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It's Microsoft publishing. It'll be coded in D3D. No ATI problems of major note. And I doubt I'll be touching it with someone else's cattleprod.

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50K wolvie clones leaving the game, and you dont see an upside?!?

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Point to you, sir.

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Besides, by the time MUO comes out, I'll be more than ready for the switch, as I'm sure most of us will be.

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There's one. How many to follow?

Oooo look, the marvel MMO lets me do X, CoH/V doesn't. Oooo, the marvel one has better performance cuz it's written under the heavy guidance of MS and thus will be coded in D3D... heading out. Oooo, the marvel one let's me be a wolvie clone without getting the smackdown by the mods. 50K players exodus.

Sorry folks, not seeing an upside here.

Unless Cryptic intentionally makes the combat system completely different and uses the extra advertisement to gain more players.

Whatever. We'll see. For now, I'll maintain my pessimism.

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I'm in the dark, what was Posi referring to when he mentioned a project between Cryptic and Microsoft?

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Go here.

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If it were xbox only, I'd understand this move. As it's ported to PC as well, I have no idead what the hell Cryptic is thinking.

"Gee, let's have 2 superhero MMOs! We'll compete with ourselves!"

Thus diluting both player bases.

I don't get it.

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I'm in the dark, what was Posi referring to when he mentioned a project between Cryptic and Microsoft?

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Marvel based MMO for xbox

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Cryptic Studios and Microsoft’s

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And lo, the heavens did shake, the earth did crumble, as the great hero makers of Cryptic meandered, nay, vaulted into bed with the greatest evil known to man.

On the other hand, does this mean a directx version of CoH/V is forthcoming?

My main villain, Louis Cypher, after much laziness, finally tagged 50 tonight. Bringing the total to a whopping.... 3 50s.

Do we get a free month if we buy only the ingame items?




Well.. everyone said SOMEONE was going to ask...

Smitty,

I could see bumping up to 3acc in FU and 2acc in all attacks for PvP. In PvE though, 2acc is all I've ever needed to consistantly hit anything.

I was also confused by Statesman's confusion.

He expected SG/VGs to run in sgmode all the time and that higher level characters would fund lower level, but knew all along what a pain in the tush it is to transfer in blocks of 99999 inf. Yet did nothing to resolve that?

Here's what I'd like to see:

The ability to invite your own alts into the SG/VG.

The ability to store influence/infamy in an ATM, either locked down per game account, so my highbies can fund my lowbies without outside help, or if that won't work, open to everyone as a "community chest." But then you'd need to actually be able to trust everyone in your SG/VG like I can.

Were we able to do this, THEN, and ONLY then, would the vision of everyone in sgmode all the time work.

So give us banks in our bases, and offline sginvites, and your vision will come to pass.

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As soon as they add that feature I will skip every single hunt mission.

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I know one type of mission I'll definitly drop: "Go see representative for PVP Zone X"...

Don't you just hate when you have to go from deepest Brickstown or Founder's Fall to Kings Row and back, just so that you can be given a lecture about a feature in the game you know about since forever, while your team is badgering you all the way with "Lets get on with a real mission! Aren't you done yet?" etc...

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Fixed since having base teleporters go to all zones.

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However for all sub level 40 zones I think you'll find that to be the case. And since the Hollows is a hazard zone .....

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The Rikti Crash Site now has a hospital.