Bill Z Bubba

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What about our Patron respecs still being borked?

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Top of my list.

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Ability to drop missions. Coming soon!(TM) I know this will make a lot of players happy that they don't need to contact Customer Service just to continue thier story arcs.

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Cool. Thanks for this.

Now...

How about getting NCSoft to push ATI for a fix for the FSAA/Bloom-DoF-HighWater issue? Or pushing a fix with a recode from Cryptic? Since overall game performance has suffered over the last few issues, perhaps it's time to step back and look for different ways to code the graphics so that neither breaking FSAA nor reducing everyone in CoV to below 30FPS occurs?

Well... bummer. Good luck with TR, CuppaJo. Hope to see you again at the next NCSoft Austin gig.

Your servant,
Bill Z Bubba

Phenriz,

Although I haven't had the opportunity to see the issue myself, there have been reports of the 6.7s causing the aura errors that you speak of.

The fix? Roll back to the 6.6s. Be sure to completely uninstall the 6.7s and run Driver Cleaner to make sure first.

I'm with Omega_Medic. I ALWAYS level slower when I team. Why? AFKs. Waiting on folks to sell, bio, get to the mission. Waiting on folks waiting on tactics. Waiting on leaders to make decisions. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

Solo there is no waiting. There is only killing. Only leveling. Teaming raises mob con. Higher level mobs take longer to kill. Thus slower. Teaming reduces XP per kill.

Want to level fast? Roll a scrapper or a brute, go to highest difficulty at 22 with maxed out SOs. Be on the middle diff at 12 with maxed out DOs. Only do what is necessary to finish the mission. Always have 3 missions ready in your mission list so that your travel is optimized.

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What is the point of buying a MMORPG if you are just going to solo!?

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He's talking about leveling fast. If you want to enjoy the game and other players, expect to level slower. (Barring being a leech and powerleveling from 1-50.)

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Have a Virtue only captions contest! Duh!

And Bill, we can't draw you if we don't know what you look like!!

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Bill (Ignore that it says Beel)

One from Brandon McKinney (Bill's on the left)

Go to the 3rd pic on this page for Celtic Bolt's rendition from before Bill got his hooves.

I NEED MORE!!! MORE violence! MORE Blood!

Hmmm, considering I seem to be the only Pinnacle representative, and I've only had two pieces done...

Everyone draw Bill Z Bubba!

It's only fair, after all.

Stabbing in the dark, but have you disabled any and all firewalls (be it norton, mcafee, zonealarm, hardware, windows) you have running and tried like that?

Great "welcome to corrupting guide" guide. I had the same epiphany with my corrupter as I did with my dominator. Play them like their CoH ATs that they were made from, and you'll likely fail. Play them as Cors and Doms, and watch as the weak and strong alike fall before you!

Since my main is claws/sr, I'll reply on that.

Starting with SR you have:

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Focused Fighting: 1 endred, 3 def
Focused Senses: 1 endred, 3 def
Agile: 3 def
Practiced Brawler: 2 rchg
Dodge: 3 def
Quickness: 1 run
Lucky: 3 def
Evasion: 1 endred, 3 def
Elude: 3 rchg, (3 def optional)

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I'm in 100% agreement with this slotting.

For claws you have:

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Claws:
Swipe: 1 acc, 3 dmg
Strike: 1 acc, 3 dmg
Slash: 1 acc, 3 dmg
Spin: 1 acc, 1 endred, 3 dmg
Follow Up: 2 acc, 2 rchg, 2 tohit (2 dmg in place of tohit optional)
Confront: 1 range, (1 taunt optional)
Focus: 1 acc, 3 dmg
Eviscerate: 1 acc, 3 dmg
Shockwave: 1 acc, 3 dmg

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You will be sucking wind so fast your head will spin. Yes claws uses 20% less end and has a 20% recharge reduction on the attacks, BUT the end cost isn't so low that you can live without end-reds.

After an unknown number of respecs, I've settled on the following:
Claws:
Swipe: 1 acc, 3 dmg, 1 end
Strike: 1 acc, 3 dmg, 1 end
Slash: 1 acc, 3 dmg, 1 rec, 1 end
Spin: 1 acc, 3 dmg, 1 rec, 1 end
Follow Up: 2 acc, 2 rchg, 1 (dam or tohit), 1 end
Confront: Never take, that's what focus is for
Focus: 1 acc, 3 dmg, 1 rec, 1end
Eviscerate: 1 acc, 3 dmg, 1 rec, 1 end
Shockwave: 1 acc, 3 dmg, 1 rec, 1 end

You'll still need stamina, unless you're regen. I left so many rec-reds in because sometimes the situation demands more AoE, or more ST than living without rec-reds will allow for. Followup's tohit buff stacked onto Slash's defense debuff makes it REALLY easy to live happily with 1 acc in all the attacks other than FU.

Tossing in my 2 inf, your mileage may vary.

The board's model number will be printed on the circuit board itself, usually near the processor, but I've seen it printed in lots of places so look around.

Ebonweaver,

That's what I thought, too. As it was then explained to me, the redraw rate on an LCD is locked at the factory. There is no way to adjust it. So even if you lower the resolution away from optimal so that you can up the reFRESH rate, the reDRAW rate stays the same. But even if you're right, in order for me to punch up the refresh rate, I'm forced to drop my resolution from 1920X1200 by 60Hz to 1440X900 by 75Hz.

The massive dip in resolution away from optimal causes a fuzziness to the entire image that I continue to find intolerable.

Shouldn't a 12ms reDRAW equate to around 83Hz refresh? If so, why am I locked at 60 and 75 by the manufacturer?

Here's a couple of quotes I came across: (although you can find more quotes on the other end)

"Refresh rate does not apply to LCD (liquid crystal display, now commonly referred to as flat panel) monitors, because they do not render images the same way CRT monitors do. Pixels in LCD monitors remain open or closed as needed until the image changes, and the light that passes through from behind stays constant. Therefore, the pixels don't fade. The rate that affects LCD displays is "response time", the time it takes for a pixel to go from fully open (the brightest intensity) to fully closed (black). Response time is a fixed property, not a configurable setting.

In Windows, Display Properties includes settings for refresh rate, but they are only there for compatibility with the video card, which must be able to handle a CRT that can do multiple rates. An LCD monitor has only one optimal refresh rate setting, so it expects a specific value. Changing this setting for an LCD monitor will affect the image (e.g., it may shift it off center), but will not affect the monitor's actual refresh rate."

"Flicker is a result of phosphor decay; that is, after the energy from the electron gun is transferred to the phosphor material, the energy and the resulting light begin to decay very slowly until the electron beam hits the phosphor again. …

Since LCD monitors do not employ phosphors, refresh rate is not a concern. Basically, the transistors in the LCD remain open or closed as needed until the image changes. This can be a point of confusion for some consumers, however, since most graphics cards still “ask for” a refresh rate setting. This is due to the analog nature of existing graphic cards (see “Inputs” section) and their support for CRT displays. While refresh rates do not apply to LCD monitors, most LCDs are set up to accept any settings from 60Hz and above."


EDIT: It sure would be nice if I could lower my resolution without the blurriness.... the extra horsepower my card has to push at the 1920X1200 really slows me down.

Further edit: To be perfectly honest about it all, I don't know, man. Why would enabling vsync make any difference to tearing on an LCD if the above WAS the case? In one of the other threads, I remember a discussion where someone was stating that it did nothing for them other than lower overall performance, even with triple buffering enabled.

As it stands right now, if I disable Vsync and triple buffering, inside a mission map where I was previously stopped at 60FPS, I'm getting spikes into the low 80FPS. This is on the hero side, of course. But the tearing is definitely present, and noticeable when moving left and right quickly. Vertical lines, such as doorframes, split noticeably.

So telling the video card "you shall not pass 60FPS" by enabling vsync on a monitor set to 60Hz refresh defintely stops tearing on an LCD with a 12ms redraw while it's running at 1920X1200 resolution. That, and LCDs blur at lower than optimal resolutions, are the only facts I can share here. Everything else is based of of readings on the internet, many of which are contradictory on this very subject.

Is Vsync actually tying itself to the 12ms redraw over DVI? Doubtful, since when I have it on I'm capped at 60FPS. If it was, I should be capped around 83FPS.

I don't know. It would involve a lot of testing at various resolutions, maybe even using a tool to force refresh rates not supported by my LCD, to get a handle on what's really going on here. Anyone else want to roll with this?

I've noticed no difference in traffic speed behind or not behind my router. (Unless, of course, my wife is downloading tunes on her laptop while I'm gaming on my game sys and downloading garbage on my workstation all at the same time.)

Also, as I have a router, I will never install any kind of software firewall, and keep windows firewall disabled.

In the prior revision thread, Monorail posted about AntiVir from Avira and spoke highly of it. You might want to give it a try as housecall has been kind of flaky lately.

Here's the link for AntiVir

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While you can plug a dual link DVI cable into your Dell 2405, the extra pins don't actually do anything at all -- the 2405 can only take a single-link input. If you have something that truly says otherwise, I'd like to see it.

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Actually, I received from Dell Product Group, by way of my brother, confirmation that the dual-link functionality was specifically forced off as per a decision by Dell, mandated to the LCD manufacturer, so you're absolutely correct.

If only I had known that before purchasing...

I see the patch that took away the secondary color on the Chaos Leather went through.

I was also curious about the OP ignoring ED in his build. Enjoyed the guide beyond that, though.

Yes. My settings are known to cause issues with alt-tabbing and it appears to be from having the driver manage FSAA.

Of course, ATI has known issues with task switching from full screen.

And letting CoH/V manage FSAA at higher resolutions causes the world to go black while leaving the GUI intact.

My advice is not to do it, but I understand this isn't an option for most folks. It appears that you'll get the best task switching performance by running in windowed mode and letting the game manage FSAA and AF.

I can't do this, because of the high res I run even 2X FSAA in game blacks out the world. And Cryptic's FSAA implementation isn't as smooth as ATI's, nor does it perform as well.

Cooke,

I agree with you. It is something I should have had listed as well as comments about tweaking further related to system specs.

My current specs are:
X800XT Xtasy Radeon 256MB Video

P4-HT-3GHz Processor w/ HT enabled and functioning within CoH/V

4X512MB (2GB total) System RAM running in full dual channel

40GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard drive

Creative Audigy 2


Cooke,
You would be amazed at the performance boost if you added just another 512MB of RAM to your system. Load times plummet, overall performance increases.. it's almost scary. I didn't notice as much of a boost from 1GB to 2GB, but that jump has allowed me to disable Virtual Memory on my two partitions so that XP uses RAM instead for its virtual memory usage.

With only 512MB of RAM, you're blocking your video card's use of the AGP aperture, which is controlled by your system's BIOS. This further limits your overall performance.

I currently have my AGP Aperture maxed at 256MB in the BIOS, but with only 512MB of system RAM, I wouldn't set the AGP Aperture higher than 64MB. At 1GB, bump to 128MB aperture, higher than that, max it.

As the video cards RAM gets lower from 256MB, then items to start decreasing are Textures and Shader.

Hope this helps some.

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Would I notice a huge change going to a 2Ghz?

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Probably not. The jump from 1GB RAM to 2GB allowed me to disable Virtual Memory on all drives so that Windows used RAM, instead, for its Virtual Memory usage.

The SmartShader section you should be able to see if you are viewing the CCC in the Advanced view. It will be its own category like Display, 3D and SmartGART. But I"m not seeing it where it should be from your screenshots. Under VPU recover or in a subgroup of the Avivo perhaps? If you can't find it, don't worry about it, as the SmartShader adds funkadelic layers such as: Black and White or Sepia, etc. Not a big deal.

I'm under the belief that your main bottleneck is your processor, but does lowering FSAA and AF to 2X each help at all? If not, then yes, your proc is the big stopping point for you.

Everything you just described points directly to heat issues and failing hardware. You need to unplug everything, crack the case open, yank every single component out, clean everything with condensed air, especially all slots and fans, make it spotless. Then after putting it all back togther, leave the case side off, power up, and verify that ALL fans are running smoothly.

Here's an application that will show you your temperatures, but there may be better/easier to use ones out there. Either PM me the results or start a new thread in the tech forum where other eyes can join in and offer advice. Hop on this quickly, as the more you allow heat problems to occur, the more likely that your hardware will permanently fail.

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If your card supports Geometry Instancing, enable the instancing in the driver, and enable this setting in game.

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Is it called that in the ATI Control panel?

Any comments on alternate drivers?

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In the CCC, it's under the setting: API Specific, and it's only for D3D.
In game, it's called Use Geometry Buffers.
I have it set in both locations as enabled.

As for alternate drivers, both Omega and the DH Zero Point are currently 2 revisions behind. My last run with the Omegas showed no improvement in gameplay. At this point, I see no reason for 3rd party drivers unless:
1: You're running a laptop mobility card and can't get updates from your OEM or ATI.
2: You don't want the CCC or .net framework on your system

Something else that I don't think I've ever stated:
The settings that I have in place within the CCC are left alone for all of my games. I might go in and raise AA and AF for older titles, but beyond that, I'm able to leave as is.

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2. The spawning at 1 hp thing is almost completely negated if you have a self-heal.

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I wonder how long before Defenders start staying behind at the base, patching up the wounded so they can get back to the war ASAP. I know a few people who might really like this idea...

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It would certainly feel a lot more like an actual battle. Huh... I'd be tempted to roll up a proper defender or corrupter for that.

I'm sticking with dark mastery for the tohit debuffs (it's like adding more defense) and because tentacles look cool and annoy the enemy.

As you already see the benefit of skirting the crowd with shockwave, having tentacles holding them together makes shockwave even more effective.

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I remember Cuppa saying we were going to get a free respec after I-7 hits. Did anyone remember or see anything specific as to when they were going to grant this? Same day as I-7 hits, the next week, the next month? Just curious if I need to find a Villian spec team before then.

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Less than a week after I7 goes to live - but not right as it goes to live. I will let you know for sure when I7 actually releases.

I hate to burst everyone's bubble here - but I7 is not going up before the end of May. We have a few more things left to fix/tweak.

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As always, CuppaJo, thank you for coming out and TELLING us. I appreciate it.