Father Xmas

Like Back to the Future, the first PotC movie wasn't planned to have a sequel. There was a happy ending and all was right with the world. But it made a boat load of money. Soooo they went ahead and made a two part sequel that unlike BttF, it took the happy upbeat ending of the first movie and made it bittersweet.

That's the server load. It may or may not, there are debates about it, analogous to the current population of players. Green light load, yellow medium, red heavy load. I've never noticed load affecting my play other than starting a mission, when it may take longer.

Also you may notice the server list order changes. The server you were on last is always first, but then the rest is ordered by load. Freedom and Virtue tend to be the most active and have the heaviest load.

A great source of information, general as well as minutia, is ParagonWiki.

Yes, it was a cool video. Reminds me of a stop motion video arts project I did in college back in the early 80s. Of course back then all we had were full blown 3/4" editing decks and the whole process was analog. I think I used green army men Vs wind up spiders, but I digress.

Can't really say why, I can only speculate.

Maybe because the later areas have a greater number of different objects and those objects have considerably more polygons than what you find in Mercy.

Maybe certain areas are more player rich. Player characters have to be created as you first encounter them. And since player characters rarely look alike every one takes a chunk of memory to represent each of them. Way back when CoV first came out, I noticed (didn't have a lot of memory back on that system) that when I approached areas that had a lot of players, the game would stutter badly as the system needed memory to represent them. Areas like region around the Arena/Hospital/Quartermaster in Port Oakes was particularly bad, it was like hitting a wall as I approached there when returning from a mission.

The difference between outdoors and in instanced missions is easy to understand. In a mission the game only needs to have the mission map and interiors loaded in memory and usually only one NPC group. If all of that can be kept in memory, the game doesn't need to hit the juggle memory to disk. Outdoors there is so much data, and at higher levels you are likely traveling faster than when you were simply jogging everywhere, so you are encountering more objects faster and with not enough system memory you start beating on the swap file and the game stutters.

As for the HP Mini 210-1100, everything I found on that model says it's stuck at 1GB. Maybe certain models can go to 2GB but I would try to find out if your exact model can be upgraded before ordering memory.

Edit: Further reading of this thread seems to indicate that it's just very picky about the memory it needs. It appears that Crucial sells compatible memory, use their adviser tool with your exact model to find the exact module that will work.

You scared the pants off me there. Thought that Claudia Black died.

Their point was it didn't matter who made the drives, failure rates directly correlated with time spun up. All other factors were statistically insignificant compared with that.

Still if you looked at the article from hardware.fr, it's not failure rates really but returns based on one french online retailer. Take memory for instance. Corsair overall only had a 1.4% return rate while a particular model had 15%.

In the case of memory how many of these returns really come from dissatisfaction when the buyer attempted to use them in an overclocking situation and was unhappy that it didn't perform the same as some review site.

Tom's Hardware just got bit by this attitude on their new $2000 build. They went with very cheap memory that in the past they found they were able to OC well above it's listed speed and timings but now, OMG they actually meant DDR3-1333 Cas 9 when they say DDR3-1333 Cas 9. What is the world coming to? That's OK, they saved a whole $15 over DDR-1600 Cas 8. But that $250 case really helped performance.

Same is true with hard drives, video cards, motherboards, etc. A review shows a lucky result overclocking or fortuitous combination of parts and when they try it themselves their results bares little resemblance to the results from the review they read. So they send it back with a sob story.

Return rates to an e-tailor isn't actually failure rate but skewed with a dissatisfaction rate due to over hype.

Now where did I hear about that before.

Look everybody, it's a netbook! A single core (with HT) Atom with Intel integrated graphics running Windows 7 Starter!

Sorry about that, it's just that rig is very underpowered for gaming. The Intel graphics is poor, you are stuck with 1GB (limited in BIOS, thanks of HP) of shared memory and a single core Atom is pretty low end on the CPU side of things. At least the hard drive is 7200RPM.

Turn on "Advance Graphics Settings" and turn them all down to their lowest settings or off. I still think the basic game shader isn't at it's minimum (not sure how much that would help).

The game also chews up a lot of memory while playing so I would suggest that you kill any "helper" apps you may have loaded. Ad-aware for instance is a pig. 1GB isn't a lot with shared memory for the graphics. Outdoors will be worse than in mission. You still will be paging the game on and off the disk as you roam around outside as the game itself can easily use 1 to 1.5 GB of memory while playing. CoV areas are a lot more complex than most of the CoH side so it tends to be very laggy traveling around outdoors.

You can also try and defrag the game directory with a utility like Piriform's Defraggler or Auslogics Disk Defrag. Both give you an option to defrag just a folder so it won't take all day. The game gets awful fragmented after a patch and every little bit of time saved counts.

Sorry. So exit as many things as you can before starting the game to conserve system memory, go into the Advance Graphics Settings and and make sure everything is turned all the way down and defrag the game folder.

Yep, talked about back when the trailer came out a few weeks back.

There are rumors that a 5 and 6 are already being planned to complete a 2nd trilogy.

I had a gunslinger port on a mission Sunday, but only because I retreated to get away from a slew of incendiary missile happy, purple conning Zeus bots (forgot I set difficulty for Father Xmas to +1/x2 the previous time I played him) long enough to use Heal Self.

The rest of the time gunslingers either got close enough to fall for my ice patch or I would freeze em solid and let my icicles wear him down while play with his friends. Didn't even notice defeating the "prime boss" because of my "epic" (as in time consuming) battles Vs Zeus bots.

Any box version other than Going Rogue gives them access to CoH and CoV. What it won't give them access is to the new Praetoria area, allow their characters to go from good to evil and vice versa or become an Incarnate (well those are the main downsides of not going with the GR edition).

Other than the basic CoH or CoV, each box set comes with special goodies to sweeten the pot. Minor powers, costume pieces, emotes, etc. The ParagonWiki page AquaJAWS linked to will have links to each box set which will list their specific goodies.

Now you know what CG animators do on their lunch breaks to pass the time.

You bought a laptop without a discrete graphics chip. You can't "add" a video card.



You chose ... poorly.

Rereading books set in the Eric Flint's 1632 universe.

Well don't forget the Tron inspired Automan.

I'm just waiting for the "wah!, they gave us a 3rd build, now I'm going to have to farm/buy another entire set of IOs, wah!" thread.

Has a visual flair. However I don't think that alone, or the fact Summer Glau is in it, will make it succeed any better than the majority of original superhero shows of the past such as M.A.N.T.I.S. or Exo-man.

One of the City's last honest cop, framed as the City's big bad, believed killed but taken in by a group of circus performers, taught various skills to craft a superhero persona similar to his son's favorite comic book hero. Summer Glau is the young honest reporter who teams up with him while he tries to bring the real bad guys to justice and clear his name.

Usually I'm inspired from something I've recently read, seen or even heard ("Father Christmas, give us your money"). Heck even the current crop of Radio Shack Christmas commercials with their "holiday heroes" have given me costume ideas.

Sometimes it's a pun or other play on words for a character name.

I would say ancient driver. But being an older laptop you may not find a proper driver at AMD's site and HP likely gave up updating it years ago. Need someone who is more verse in modding desktop ATI drivers for laptops.

Also upgrading to Windows 7 may not have been a smart thing to do on such an old system, doesn't look like HP officially supports (more like doesn't bother) Windows 7 on that laptop.

The suggestion from panthera should help.

Besides going BOOM the science pack also have some neat combat auras. But yes the armor pieces are kind of meh.

Well they did send a Top Secret payload with it.

TNT 9p EST.

Eliot as Santa, Parker as an Elf.