Bill Z Bubba

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La Calavera

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Holy freaking scary!

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But so sexy scary

Venture,

Often times, I find myself at odds with your posts, but these three lines:

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You don't get through this world with honor, you do what you have to to survive.

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This viewpoint is what's wrong with society.

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Instead it was squandered on fanservice for the emotionally immature.

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I'm sure your posts are doing exactly that: presenting the entirely accurate image of PvPers as people who care nothing about fair play or sportsmanship and care only about winning by any means necessary. Who wants to game with people like that?

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Pure logic. Pure gold. Bravo.

That's not to say that I haven't PvPed with honorable folk. I have. I enjoyed it thoroughly. But they are the exception, and not the norm.

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Also, I want a Rularuu Watcher, that I can ride around like a big 'ole flying beachball.

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Visions of Dr. Strangelove. That would ROCK!

A damn fine guide, Inspector6.

I disagree with your take on bonesmasher and barrage, as I'm in the opposite camp, but my opinions are irrelevant in light of my praise of your guide.

Good show.

Items missing from this revision that will be in Rev 3:

In your BIOS: set Plug and Play OS to NO. This way, the BIOS won't let the OS override other settings you set in the BIOS.

If you have OVER 1GB of system RAM, AND you are using an AGP video card, set your AGP Aperture for 256MB. If you are at 1GB of RAM, set it for 128MB. Below 1GB, go for 64MB.

And an entire section I left out of this rev:


If you really want to feel your gamer cahones, flash your motherboard's bios to the latest version. (Not for the weak of heart. DO YOUR RESEARCH FIRST!)

Extra Tweakage:

XP is bloatware on a huge level. Lots of useless bells and whistles that anyone trying to tweak out a little more performance should nuke. So here we go:

Right click the My Computer icon and choose properties. Go to the Advanced tab and and click on the Settings button under Performance. Set this for Adjust for Best Performance. Hit Apply and then Ok twice.
Right click your desktop where it is touching no icons, choose Properties, go to the Appearance tab and click on Effects. Uncheck everything. Hit Ok, Apply and then Ok.

Things look somewhat different? Good. Move on.

"SOOO much work, Bill! Why do I have to do all of this?" Because Microsoft builds their OSs for people that don't want to do any work. You're a gamer that wants the best for yourself, right? Then get busy! If your hands aren't bleeding yet, you aren't working hard enough!

Lastly, a quick mention on overclocking. Don't do it. Ever.

Unless of course you need to because your performance is too low, AND you know for a fact that the bottlenecks occurring to CAUSE your low performance are DIRECTLY related to the speeds at which your processor, RAM and GPU are running.

If that is the case, OVERCLOCK THIS PUPPY!!! The apps are out there, there are ways to monitor your temperatures, ways to tell when you've gone to far without frying your system, ways to make a once slow system a screaming banshee again. But I'm not here to teach you that. If you want it badly enough, you'll figure it out.

Now game. GAME, YOU FOOLS!

Rev 3 should be out by I-7.

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I didn't see anything about an influence bank.

Did I miss it? Will I still need to have another player character to transfer funds to my lowbies?

EDIT: Beyond that.... VERY NICE STUFF, Devs

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You won't. The devs don't want you twinking your lowbies out with influence like that.

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Then they should remove INF trading from the game. Either get rid of it or quit wasting my time about it.

I didn't see anything about an influence bank.

Did I miss it? Will I still need to have another player character to transfer funds to my lowbies?

EDIT: Beyond that.... VERY NICE STUFF, Devs

Although I agree with you, you're wrong.

In game lingo, MOB stands for Mobile OBject

Remember back in the day when the enemies were stick figures, or even bouncing squares? Those were MOBs.

That said, I never call a single enemy a mob. I call them enemies, or baddies. For me, a spawn is the term used to describe the normal amount of enemies in a single group that are generated for your character, if solo, or your team.

So, for me, stating:
"I had three spawns of baddies in that room"
would be correct.

Because it tells me the following:

The pause is a global issue. Happens with ATI users just as it happens with Nvidia users, regardless of the architecture of the video card, as it occurs with both AGP and PCI-X cards.

It appears that fast writes being off for AGP cards exacerbates this issue, by causing the pause to be longer, and on occasion, causing the coh/v client to crash.

Yet disabling fast writes on AGP cards increases overall performance, so we must all make a nasty decision.

Personally, I'll choose the performance bump with the risk of the occassional lockup.

That, and getting this info gives me more ammo to go after the devs about it.

I'm also wondering if the whole thing is related to the multiple face issues that Squeeze posted about here.

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Ah ok yea I have a PCI-E X850XT so that makes sense now, phew atleast I know I wasnt going crazy and just missing the option somewhere thanks Bill

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Cool, Shortman, so tell me:

Do you have a pause, currently, the first time you open contacts after logging in a character?

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turning off fast writes has definitley increaded the time it takes to open the contacts, i'll get about a 4 second lockup before the screen actually opened. thats a 4 second average, with the longest actually being around 10 seconds. craziness.

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Damn. What about overall gameplay for you, Grimmstone? Did you notice a performance increase with fast writes off beyond contacts, store and info screens?

Marshal_Victory,

You are absolutely correct. Cleaning out the system monthly SHOULD be in this guide. I'll be sure to add it for Rev 3.

Note to self, also need BIOS tweak section.

There's a link about the contacts/info screen pauses/lockups here.

It may be coincidental only between these lockups and fast writes. It may very well be the cause, as I've had two under the same circumstances.

This is highly disturbing:

Leave fast writes on, take a pretty hefty performance hit, turn fast writes off, get random hardlocks when bringing up contacts and player info.

I am not pleased with this possibility in the least.

For anyone readin this that have also turned off fast writes:

Have YOU noticed a return in lockups when bringing up contacts and/or character info?

Please post yay or nay, as I need to collect this data.

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What if you have only 1 GIG of ram? Still disable the swap file?


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If you have completely streamlined your system so that it is only used for gaming, and you run nothing else in the background while you game, then I'd say go for it. I ran for two weeks on 1GB of RAM with no swap and never noticed any issues.

However, if the computer you game on is used for other applications, especially RAM intensive ones like Photoshop or CAD, then I would leave a swap file in place. Back when I ran one, I set the min/max at 512MB for Virtual Memory.

This really is a case of try it out and see. If you turn it off and problems crop up during long gaming sessions, then turn it back on. If not, fly with it.

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Finally, I figured it out. DCOM Server Process Launcher got disabled. That was what was doing it. Bugger me if I know how/why I disabled that, knowing I needed it.

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Great catch, HolyEvilAoD! And duly noted in case anyone ever asks me that question again.

Marshal_Victory,

About the swap file. There is SOME performance gain by ridding one's self of Virtual Memory. In a nutshell, if Windows CAN swap something off to the swap file, it will. With over 1GB of RAM, there's no point in letting it.

There is a camp on the other side that says this is always a bad idea. But my take on it has always been, reading and writing to a hard drive will never be as fast as reading and writing to RAM, so you might as well leave everything you can in RAM.

I truly hope this helps you, and everyone else that reads it. Computer probs suck for everyone.

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Bill, is it really necessary to tell people to open Regedit (something you really shouldn't tell people to open ever) when they could just open MSConfig and just turn the services off that way?

As for Themes, I would be aware that's going to make your Desktop go back to Classic Windows view.

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MSConfig, ahh if only it worked. Here's what msconfig does:
It creates new -run keys in the registry and moves the items you've disabled using msconfig into the new - directories in the registry. More often than not, the programs that put those executables in the Run folders slaps them right back into the active folder, while msconfig leaves a copy in the -run folder. So even though msconfig now shows those items to be disabled, they aren't. So, no, I will never tell anyone to use msconfig unless it is to prove to them that an item is the cause of an issue. I'll then have then reset msconfig to normal and have them manually edit the problem child from the registry. While msconfig is a great troubleshooting tool, as a configuration tool, it sucks.

That's a new one to me. Everything I'm finding through search-fu is coming up that it was related to disabling services. Not knowing which ones you've hit, I'd be unable to help. If you kept a list of all the services you disabled, you could go back through one at a time and determine which one killed defrag.

Again, if you turn on Bloom, Depth of Field or Water to High while you have Anti-Aliasing enabled in the driver OR in the game, bizarre issues will occur. That's why I show all three of those items as Disabled. If you want to use any of those three settings, you MUST completely disable Anti-Aliasing.

As for the alt-tabbing, as mentioned earlier in the thread, you can either run CoH in windowed mode as Q_Arkhan stated, or you can make absolutely sure your desktop and game resolutions are identical and the same for refresh rates.

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btw on the topic of water textures: It's likely something besides your video card. I have my water textures set to very high (I like my water, and it makes my hubby jealous) and it doesn't effect my FPS feel.

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How do you have anti-aliasing set? You should be suffering all types of hell with Water set to very High and FSAA turned on at all either in the driver or the game. This issue is purely related to ATI's drivers and Cryptic's HDR coding.

On that note, I did get verification that Water set to Low is NOT going through the P-Buffer, so that's why Low Water doesn't break FSAA.

Castle stated that he was only talking about the max value per shield. He didn't take stacking into account. He also didn't tell us WHAT the value of the energy defense in kinetic shield was. I'm beginning to wonder if it exists at all.

Calling Stupid_Fanboy, paging Mr. Stupid_Fanboy. Please come to the thread and share with us whether you determined anything about the energy defense value in kinetic shield.

Here is my performance guide. Following all the steps within will not only fix a GREAT many issues people often have with Windows, but should also greatly increase your overall performance and gaming experience.

Yeeeaaa, I don't do windowed mode. Fullscreen or nothing.

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I knew that, I mean I thought that it was originally a Cryptic staffer in CoV beta who said the problem was because of pixel shader 3.0.

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Others have said that this was the case, but no one has ever found any links of any dev stating so. I think it's just as likely that many of us heard HDR effects and automatically equated it to shader3.0 due to the plethora of articles discussing those two items being used together.