Bill Z Bubba
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Posts
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Joined
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If you do go straight to a desktop with a sata cable, don't forget to also hook up the power cable. Windows has a hard time accessing non-powered sata drives... as my brother found out recently.
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Hard drives are almost universally considered customer removable units. I bought a $25 device that allows me to hook up standard desktop and laptop IDE and SATA drives through a USB interface. Looks kind of like this one.
Your laptop manufacturer's website probably has detailed instructions on hard drive removal for your system. -
Quote:When I started playing, my main died more than the blasters I teamed with. Someone told me that the debt cap on a scrapper was a badge of honor, so I was fine with it.Originally Posted by Shrikefire
I don't have a SR toon and I've never really leveled one too high, but I feel like people really liked SR even before IOs. Mostly because of all the defense and defense debuff resistance and +speed and such.
Again, I'll defer to you since you've had a SR for so long, but did your main really suck when you were just running on SOs and HOs? Maybe I'm missing something.
Then one day I found myself with hasten and elude 6 slotted with recharge. The days of permalude were nice... most of the time. Other times, due to how broken tohit and defense were back then, permalude meant absolutely nothing and the faceplants continued.
The loss of permalude, ED, the GDN all caused a time when SR was... bad. REALLY bad. It was the outcry of just how bad it really was that caused the devs to add the passive scaling dam-res and then later allowed the DDR to be enhanceable and prompted the change to how enemies rolled their tohit checks.
So, yea, when I was coming up through the ranks, SR sucked entire fleets worth of chrome off of battleships.
SR still sucks until level 36 and you've stacked weave and CJ on it. IOs gave us back permalude.
Ignoring IOs in balancing the powersets is a bad idea. This doesn't mean that the powersets in question must be tweaked in order to account for IOs. It could mean that IOs must be tweaked to account for the powersets using them. -
It cracks me up so much to see so many people truck out the old "the game is balanced around SOs!!!"
Do yall really want to go back to comparing our mitigation sets with SOs again? Without pool powers?
Rehash all the old arguments? I'm game.
I know of a set that has no +damage. Has no +regen. No +endurance. Lives almost without AoE defense for the first 35 levels. No real dam-res until you're so far in the red that it's more of a tease than real mitigation. No self-heal. One can barely notice you have mitigation until level 12.
Yea, let's ignore IOs completely when balancing sets. That makes perfect sense. Let's ignore the fact that arguably The Worst Mitigation Set in the game (when only considering SOs) allows me to run at max diff with IOs.
Buff the snot out of Super Reflexes. It obviously under performs all the other secondaries. -
Quote:Could we at least get all the "under the zone" maps and everything within them as well as the building shells that are under building facades marked as obscured?Originally Posted by Tex
Have you ever noticed that when you are standing in the shadow of a tree and can't see the tree, you can still see it's shadow?
Or, you can see the shadows of objects that are around the corner of a building, but you can't see the object casting the shadow?
Would you rather these shadows pop in/out as these objects become visible/become obscured or out of view?
Also, determining if an object is obscured is not cheap/easy.
In practice, it does sound easy. In reality when you try to implement it, it is not nearly that straightforward and not that easy to get working at a decent frame-rate.
If the performance if shadow maps is unacceptable, you can always fall back to the stencil shadows (this is the legacy shadow mode from pre-I17).
If not that, could you explain in great detail why zone performance is just the way it is and no fixes shall be forthcoming on that front? -
I tried. Living on 4 hours sleep, I can't even remember which dev gave it to us.
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No.
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Quote:Agreed. And all three whip attacks is THE reason for me to play demon summoning.Originally Posted by Lobster
Suppress Pain is THE reason to play /pain for me. It is an awesome power and should not be underrated.
This reminds me... I need to dual box some /pains for truly sick regen #s.
Put the two together and I'm in the thick of battle with my demons at my side and a full attack chain of whip attacks slaughtering all that stands before me.
And then, of course, there's the whole buff the Demon Prince with Hell on Earth and Painbringer and watch the doom fly. -
Quote:Correct. Coming up last is no longer an issue. We now have a handle on our drinking binges and are able to function while still drunk from the night before.
Historically, Pinnacle was often perceived to be the last server to come back up after updates, which lead its players to jokingly refer to it as "the drunk server". However, this no longer seems to be an issue.
Pinnacle. It's got Bill Z Bubba. And booze. -
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What they said. 2GB is my minimum recommendation for XP and CHV. 3GB min for Win7 and CHV. I run 6GB on my Win7-64bit rig. (But I doubt anyone would notice the difference in load times between 2GB and anything higher without a stopwatch unless they run a bunch of garbage in the background while they play.)
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Quote:ZM, as much as I agree with most of this post, the fact that the absolutely ridiculous FPS drops in redside zones have existed since CoV go live does NOT fill this particular devil with any hope that they'll ever get fixed.Originally Posted by Zombie Man
Even before I17, there were lag spots. The problem with the infamous statue of Recluse is not the statue, but the animated screens all around the area. There are drawn and animated even when behind other geometry.
And that's one of the biggest problems for fps hits in the game, and was made even more problematic with dynamic shadows. If the computer is still drawing complex polygons that are out of sight and hidden by some other geometry, then it gets worse if it's drawing dynamic shadows that are out of sight.
All during Closed and Open Beta, we've been reporting those fps black holes, and many of them got fixed. E.g., the torches in the entrance-cave of Cimerora was a huge fps black hole -- there was something about those animations which killed fps. The odd thing was that you could go to the edge of the map, turn around and face where the cave is, and even though it was hidden by the geometry of the hills, you still took the huge fps hit. The game was drawing and animating that cave and its contents far away and out of sight.
That's been fixed.
Another big fps hit is looking down towards one of the under-zone rooms, such as the hospital or the inside of Paragon Town Hall. It seems the ground wasn't opaque enough, and was still tracking what was happening hundreds of yards under the zone.
There are other hot spots like that, especially looking into the heart of a city zone... all the buildings supposedly obscured are being rendered, and we know that CoV was built with very 'transparent' buildings. Dynamic shadows makes that more complicated.
The Devs are working on making that geometry more opaque, but it will take time.
The best way to keep dynamic shadow but avoid those fps hot spots is to make sure your world detail doesn't go about 100%. Only top end GPUs can handle 200% with dynamic shadows and keep fps over 40. I have a 5870, the top end for ATI, and when I put world detail up to 400% (/visscale 4.0), my fps goes down to 20 fps.
Which brings me to another point that bears repeating: There is no GPU out on the market right now that will allow anyone to turn everything up to max (including 400% world scale) and be at 60 fps. Just ain't happening.
Ultra Mode is enabled for the *next* generation of GPUs to max out. This current batch can't handle it (until SLI or Crossfire is fully enabled). Everyone has to chose which features to dial back for acceptable fps.
Then again, FSAA is working with Ultra Water and Desaturation effects now after 6 years.... so there's some progress.
/yes, I fluctuate between faith and frustration with our devs. **** just takes too gorram long to fix. -
Quote:Have some more neg-rep.Originally Posted by MunkiLord
Haha, I'm now in neg rep cuz of my last post. Lol @ the chicken**** that has to hide to insult somebody. Whoever you are, you're a joke of a person.
Feel better this way?
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Understood and thanks for that explanation.
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Level 54 EB Rikti Heavy Assault suit has a 7.8% chance to hit my claws SR.
5*1.3*1.2 = 7.8
5 for floored tohit
1.3 for level 54
1.2 for boss
Seems to be correct.
Edit: Went ahead and took out a level 54 rikti spawn with 3 bosses. Was actually easier than usual. Defense seems to be working exactly as expected. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Tex
I have a hunch that this is the same issue with ATI drivers as AA + AO, just without AO enabled and with DoF instead, if that makes sense to you.
Aye, in much the way that FSAA being broken pre-I17 by DoF, High Water, Desaturation FX and Bloom made sense to me.
Which, to be honest, I never really understood.
But I thought you stated in another thread that the AO/FSAA issue was occurring with both ATI and Nvidia cards. Wouldn't that imply that it's an engine problem and not a driver issue? -
Should be easy to test. Just watch your combat log and see what chance enemies have to hit you and what compare that to what chance they Should be getting to hit you.
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1920X1200! woot!
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Quote:Preachin to the choir. Since I began playing this game I've spent over $1800 on video cards alone.
I saved up a long time for this card, it's a pain having the game I use if for the most not work right with it :/
/yes, I know I have a sickness. But at least my kid's system rocks anything he can throw at it and my workstation can still be used for testing. -
Quote:Since no one has any way of knowing whether you have some piece of software on your system that will freak out during/after the SP3 install, all we can say is that there is ALWAYS risk.
It's something that I intend to do, but not right at the moment, unless I'm assured there are no risks to doing so.
However, I've been running SP3 on my XP boxes at home and on every workstation (less than 100 XP boxes) at work since it went live. SP3 has caused me no issues. -
Ok... so we are seeing the same halo issue.
Meaning DoF is still a no go with FSAA. At least Ultra Water and Desaturation FX (sepia mode during flashback) is no longer breaking FSAA. -
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Quote:Set to windowed mode, I can NOT recreate FSAA breaking with DoF turned on, HOWEVER, DoF is causing a halo around edges. First screenshot is DoF Off. Second is with DoF On. This is with 4X game managed FSAA.Originally Posted by Tex
Could you post some screenshots what you are seeing?
EDIT: WRONG. That was with CCC managed FSAA. Forgot to turn it off. One minute. <growl> Have to wait for daylight to return. Depth of Field makes the stars disappear. That's reason enough right there to never enable it.
Ok, here's screenshots, Dof Off and then DoF On.
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Do you have the same issue in full screen? Oh... hmm, I already run with DoF and AO off. I don't recall any FSAA issues with I-17 and FSAA when coupled with DoF. If I manage to get back on tonight, I'll turn on DoF and see if it breaks FSAA at all for me. However, I only run full screen.
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Folks, I know I stated that I was going to get up a new thread this weekend, but there's FAR too much video freakiness going on with both Nvidia and ATI cards and Issue 17 for me to be able to do so.
I just don't have the real life bandwidth to spare to give this the attention it needs and probably won't for several months.