Kal_Choedan_NA

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(Kheldian's only)

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OMGoodness, the apostrophes... on a plural... it BURNS!

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It's not a plural, it's a possessive. :-) And we all know possession is nine tenths of the law.

Ask any exorcist.

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If it's a possessive, Kheldian's only what?

Small error: you've listed both TT: Assault and TT: Maneuvers to be taken at level 18.

Most of the time, negative LOD bias can just be left on clamp.

It can be used to sharpen images in some games, but as you mention it can add aliasing artifacts (jaggies.) Anisotropic filtering basically acheives the same thing without introducing artifacts, so if the game supports aniso (which of course CoH does) you should just set this to clamp.

EDIT: Tweakguides has a really good guide to all the settings in the Nvidia driver. Well worth a look if you just want to know what any particular setting does.

Well Natsuki, I'm sorry if I caught you on a bad day, but my post certainly wasn't intended to be rude, it was only intended to be helpful - and honestly, I've read and re-read my post, and I cannot fathom for the life of me what you took offense at.

My post was quite definitely constructive and I'd appreciate it if you'd stop saying otherwise. The difference between constructive and unconstructive criticism is that constructive criticism contains suggestions to address the item being criticised; unconstructive criticism would simply be of the form "you got X wrong" or "X is rubbish" which I obviously did not do.

While "programmed random occurence" may be "easier" in some sense it is still factually incorrect, particularly given the misleading highlights you have used on the term, and spreading incorrect information in a FAQ is not something I personally approve of. Believing in a flat earth may be "easier" than explaining the realities of geography, astronomy and physics, but I'd still be motivated to speak up if schools started teaching my kids we lived on a flat earth.

You are of course under no obligation to update your FAQ, but your posting it here gives your tacit consent for anyone reading to levy criticism or offer suggestions for improvement - if you don't want that, post it on your own web page instead of on a discussion forum. My only motivation in posting was to help improve your FAQ in however minor a way, and quite honestly your rude and ungrateful reaction makes me wonder why I bothered.

I think we are veering into "noise > signal" territory so I'm not going to continue this discussion here, but if you think there's more to say feel free to PM me.

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I digress; and perhaps I am arguing semantics anyway.

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Yes, you are. Woulda been nice if you had something constructive to at least add instead.

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How rude! I wouldn't have posted if I didn't think it was constructive. I might not be contributing data on proc percentages, but I'm still offering my knowledge and time in an effort to improve your FAQ; you could show a bit of gratitude - or at least courtesy.

Just a bit of a nitpick:

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What does proc mean?

In this case, it means "Programmed Random Occurrence"

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Unless the CoH developers have decided to change the standard genre terminology themselves, this is not true - although it is a very common mistake.

"Proc" is short for "procedure", and it dates from the days of text MUDs (possibly even earlier). It refers to the segment of code that is called whenever one of these types of effects goes off; originally the term wasn't limited to only activated effects on attacks although this has become the only common usage.

"Procedure" isn't terribly intuitive however, particularly if as with most people, you were never exposed to a MUDs code and thus never saw the term used in context, so a number of alternative explanations have cropped up over the years; "programmed random occurence" "potential rate of cast" and "process" are all examples, but all are equally incorrect.

Text MUDs are also where we get the term "Mob" which was short for "Mobile Object" or just "Mobile", which typically referred to NPCs (although not always), and which sometimes causes confusion because while the term "mob" is singular, the word "mob" in regular English refers to a group, and people will use each version interchangeably - "I pulled a single mob from the mob" would be an example.

I digress; and perhaps I am arguing semantics anyway. "Programmed random occurence" is a perfectly reasonable definition of the term (at least in today's usage), but it is certainly not the original derivation - it was never an abbreviation for the phrase as implied by your highlights.

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Stereo - Display mode: Use vertical interlace monitor
(note: the above setting does not appear on the earlier driver; I'm not sure what exactly it does, so I leave it alone)

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PMFJI, thought I'd fill in the blank here This setting is used to configure stereo 3d glasses and other stereo imaging devices. If you don't have such a device, then it won't do anything at all and can be ignored.

A quick question - has anyone played with the 8-series "enhance application setting"? My understanding is that it enables Nvidia's shiny new coverage sample AA instead of multi- or super-sampling, but I haven't toyed with it yet to see if it works with CoH. Anyone?

This is one of the better guides I've read. Nice work!

I had a question about slotting as you level up; with some exceptions, it doesn't seem worth slotting IO sets until quite late on in the character's life. How would you slot this as you level up?

This guide is great - but I really, really wish there was a sample build I could load up into Mid's and play around with.

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I find it quite interesting that you say this for many reasons actually. Apparently You don't know how to run a Fire/Kinetics. If you are running CJ with a fire/Kinetics you need all the end reduction you can get with the many toggles that are run. So don't patronize me if you have only had your Fire/Kin for 5.02 seconds as I've had mine since 2005. So I'd think I would know how to slot these characters.

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I would think so too, yet it's obvious that you don't.

Combat Jumping's base endurance cost is 0.06 endurance/second. It is the cheapest toggle in the game.

Adding a single equal level SO endurance cost reducer reduces this to 0.05 endurance/second, saving you 0.01 endurance per second.

Adding a second slot takes this down to to 0.04 endurance/second, for a total saving of 0.02 endurance per second.

To put this in perspective, the base endurance cost of running Hot Feet alone is 1.04 endurance/second - or 52 times greater than the amount you are saving by slotting CJ in this way.

It is never a good idea to slot EndRdx in Combat Jumping. Slot the default slot with defense (for a gain of 0.45% defense on top of the base 2.25%) or just slot it for jump (for a gain of an extra 66% to your jump height.)

If you're only using SOs (or common IOs) it is also not worth putting any additional slots into CJ as diminishing returns will make the increase to defense not worthwhile and unless you are going for a hurdle+CJ unsupressible mini-travel power, extra slots for jumping would be a waste too. Clearly slotting IO sets is a different matter but that is not what we're discussing.

So I'll reiterate to you - if you're going to give advice, at least do some research first, and to everyone else - don't waste your time with this "guide".

I read this with interest at first, but after getting progressively more frustrated with the terrible use of English (misuse of apostrophes etc; yes, I care about the quality of writing in a purely written medium, sue me) and the text which was simply copied from the game descriptions of powers, I finally came across this:

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Combat Jumping: While active, Combat Jumping increases your defense. Also moderately increases your jump height and distance with good air control.
Recommendation: Useful
Slotting: Two Defenses; Two Reduce Endurance Cost

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2 x EndRdx in CJ? Seriously man, if you're going to give advice at least do some research first.

Don't waste your time with this guide.

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Whenever I quit the game the last image on screen "freezes", and I hear an error beep in the background.

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A BEEP?? Through the speakers or coming directly from your PC?

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Oh - you know, Vista's shiny new "error dialog" noise. Red herring I'm afraid

-k

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It's getting kinda hard to remember all the details of your bug. Does this happen if you just start City of Heroes and immediately quit from the login screen?

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Yup, although in that case, rather than reporting the crash as being in PhysXloader.dll, it reports it as being in "".

Specifics:

Whenever I quit the game the last image on screen "freezes", and I hear an error beep in the background. Alt-tab doesn't work, so I do ctrl-alt-del->task manager, which gets me back to my desktop with a task manager window open and it also enables me to view CoH's "you've had a crash" box, which I ok, and then I get the "what were you doing when it crashed" box. If I either wait for that to submit or just cancel it, CoH finally quits (the taskbar button disappears) and Aero switches back on.

It feels like a video driver issue to me, although the error does report a problem with a PhysX .dll. Given that, it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that it was a problem with my soundcard drivers, or the phase of the moon maybe

-k

Willy -

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Well I'm going to be rude and state the obvious -- better that it crashes when you quit then when you're in the middle of the game. All in all this is the last thing I would be worrying about.

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You're right, it's not a show-stopper, but it is damned inconvenient. As Zloth surmised, whenever it crashes, it forces a full file scan on the next start, which means every single time I launch the game I have to sit through the file scan which takes several minutes and is tedious in the extreme!

What's perhaps more worrying to me is that I've not heard of anyone else having the same problem - that makes me nervous. If the fault weren't isolated to CoX I'd suspect a more general problem with my machine.

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That said, do you have the Ageia runtimes installed? Have you tried updating them? Uninstalling them? Installing them if you haven't?

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I did mention this in my earlier post - I currently have them installed, but the crash was happening before I installed them, happens while they are installed, and continues to happen if I uninstall them.

Zloth -

I've disabled desktop composition for CoX which effectively "switches off Aero" while the game is running, but I haven't tried disabling Vista's UI entirely. I can't imagine it would make any difference but then I can't imagine why the heck a PhysX .dll is (reportedly) crashing either - I'll give it a shot and let you know what happens.

-k

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The game uses Ageia physics, emulated in software if you don't have a card. Just a FYI.

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Yes, I know. It's not supposed to crash every time you exit the game however; I mentioned I didn't have a PPU to pre-empt anyone asking the question.

-k

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Interesting. For me the cursor goes to a dithered black and white monstrosity. It's the right shape, but after the nice colored cursors in game (blue hand, gray arrow, etc), monochrome black and white just don't cut it.

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You're not alone; I get exactly the same thing, and I'm running a 7950GT, 158.18, Vista x64.

Even more fun, CoH crashes every single time I exit the game, bringing up it's error reporting dialogue which (usually*) claims the dll at fault is PhysXloader.dll. I don't have an ageia card, but I have nonetheless tried installing the ageia drivers to see if that helped (it didn't).

I have no doubt that some combination of I9/10 and new Nvidia drivers will eventually fix these problems, but until then I've just learned to live with them.

-k

*Usually, sometimes it claims that "" is responsible. Helpful.

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Do you log into your Windows as an Admin?

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Yes. That explains it.

-k

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I've got my desktop shortcut to the updater set to disable desktop composition. Thing is, it ain't working. I've got the same thing set for Oblivion and, when it runs, there's a message popup in the system tray to tell me it's happening and using alt-tab shows me an old-style program list. When I run the updater I get no message and alt-tab'ing still gives the cool glassy look.

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Found out why.

When you right click and change the properties, you only change it for your Windows login. CoH runs under your admin account so the setting doesn't take. You have to click the "Show settings for all users" button and THEN set it to disable desktop composition.

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I'm not sure that's correct; I haven't done that, and disabling desktop composition works perfectly for me just by using the normal dialog box.

-k

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.... As previously mentioned, it actually has a 160 GB hard drive with 512 in addition to that; the total size is not 512 RAM.



*looks at spec sheet* confusing....

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<QR>

She has 160 GB + 512MB that is more than enough to run Vista and/or any game out there-

It sounds like something is running in the background on top of CoV-

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Unfortunately you've both misunderstood a very important aspect of how computer hardware works. Hard drive "memory" is a very different thing from "RAM memory". The two are effectively unrelated. Slightly more technical things things like paging files aside, the hard drive is used to store long-term data, the RAM is used to temporarily store stuff that's you are trying to use right there and then - like your operating system or any programs you run e.g. CoH.

You could have a 70 bajillion GB hard drive, it still wouldn't help you run a program that needs to expand out to 1GB or more in RAM when it is running.

As others have mentioned, ideally you want at least 2GB of RAM to run Vista & CoH and the size of your hard drive is completely irrelevant to that calculation.

-k

Thanks for the replies.

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I think I read somewhere that if you reinstall the game from the original discs under Vista it eliminates the UAC prompt. I haven't tried it myself, so I can't say if it does indeed work.

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Sadly not - this was a clean install of Vista followed by an install from the original CoV discs followed by patching, and I get the prompt.

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The problem with UAC is that it just blindly asks for confirmation to continue, and once the retardedness of the system sets in it's all too easy for ignorant and/or untrained users to simply click OK or blindly enter an administrator password without thinking twice about what they're doing. And once that's happened, it's over.

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Of course, user education > all. But regardless of the level of education you give your users, you still wouldn't let them run riot across a system completely unprotected by anti-virus software, would you? Personally I don't use a resident scanner, but I have AV software installed so if I need to download something from a source I'm not 100% confident of I can scan it - and of course I run a scheduled file scan too, because I know damn well that while I do have nearly 20 years experience as an IT professional and most of it is specifically with PCs in Microsoft environments, I'm still fallible and I want to be sure my system is secure.

Having the prompt and more importantly that the prompt appears in the secure desktop layer is surely far better behaviour for a system than simply not having any prompt or warning at all when some untoward action is being attempted. Yes, if people get into the habit of just clicking ok, then it becomes less useful - but the same is true of anti-virus alerts, windows update messages, and so on, and that doesn't make those components any less important. We're back to user education again - education > system security, but education + system security > education alone. UAC is a step in the right direction and you do yourself a disservice by dismissing it out-of-hand.

Forget about the crashing - although if you like we can have a conversation about egg-sucking methods later too. I was hoping that by posting here I might find someone else who was having the same problem (maybe even someone who had had the problem and fixed it) because comparing my system with someone else's who *is* having the problem is going to be a much more efficient way of tracking the problem down than comparing it with someone who isn't.

As regards your comments about x64, I think you are confusing the business market with the enthusiast/gamer market, which, in context, is the market I care about here. In my experience, most gamer/enthusiast machines have 64-bit processors these days, not 32. I can't even recall the last time I saw someone posting on the forums for a recent game about the problems with their system which included a 32 bit processor. Hell, sometimes I feel a bit behind the times because my processor is only single-core! Regardless, I don't think your assertion that "most machines these days have 32-bit processors" is true for the demographic relevant to this conversation. I should add however that I haven't actually seen a survey that gives solid data either way, so I will concede the possibility that you might be correct, but my gut feel is that if we're talking about gamers specifically and not "all PCs in use in the world", you are not.

Yes, it is a chicken and egg situation. Until fully 64-bit environments have a greater penetration, we won't see those "killer apps" appear, and until the "killer apps" appear, some people won't be persuaded to move to 64-bit environments.

However I would rather be on the side of those encouraging the progress of these technologies, not on the side of those holding it back, hence I have adopted early and I would encourage anyone else running a 64-bit processor who is considering Vista to do the same. The more of us who adopt 64-bit early, the faster application developers will be to get to work on that "killer app". Again, do not confuse the business demographic with the enthusiast/gamer demographic, they are very different markets.

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running 32-bit software in a 64-bit environment actually hinders performance as well as negate nearly all potential benefits.

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That statement is pure FUD. Unless one or the other is coded extraordinarily badly, you should notice no performance decrease whatsoever when running a 32-bit app in a 64-bit environment. The only thing you might notice is the 32-bit app takes up slightly more memory than it did on your 32-bit system, and yes, this could feasibly affect performance if that extra memory constitutes the "last straw" for your system, but it is a bit of a stretch.

Using a 64-bit environment can in fact confer a number of performance benefits even to 32-bit apps running in it - these include a more efficient/scalable method for process mapping especially relevant for DLLs, and vastly, vastly improved memory mapping for large files. 32-bit memory mapping struggles with big files and ends up having to write them in and out of the address space several times (slow). 64-bit memory mapping does not have this problem and can comfortably address in one "chunk" the 4GB+ files which have become more and more common as DVDs have become a preferred media for distribution. This means that a 32-bit app that makes use of such large files will actually get a performance *increase* from running in a 64-bit environment.

The only argument I will concede on 32bit vs 64 is that 64bit currently lacks driver maturity, and if that is an issue for you with your specific configuration then you should stay away from 64 bit for the time being, however this being the case you should probably stay away from Vista entirely and stick with XP instead. Many of the manufacturers who are having problems with their 64-bit Vista drivers are having similar problems with their Vista drivers as a whole - I personally use both a Nvidia graphics card and a Creative sound card so I have experienced many of these problems first hand.

Apart from few specific problems though I have otherwise found this setup to be completely acceptable. I just get a single UAC prompt when I don't expect/want one, and CoX (and only CoX) crashes on exit for no immediately obvious reason. I was hoping by posting here I might find others who had either problem and could offer advice, but the lack of any replies of that ilk also tells me something - my problem is not a common one, and so I should delve deeper into issues that might arise from my specific configuration.

If you'd like to continue the advocacy discussion, I don't mind taking it to PMs, but I don't think we should continue it here. Honestly though, I don't think either of us will persuade the other, so I'm equally happy to just drop it.

-k

New drivers haven't helped - it still crashes on exit. Dammit.

Giving applications administrative rights which they do not require is not really an acceptable solution to me I'm afraid. I guess my question really should have been - is this request for admin privileges and the ensuing UAC prompt a result of an incorrect request for rights by CoX (in which case I will have to live with it until Cryptic patch it out) or do I have some kind of misconfiguration on my system? I would guess the former but I was hoping for the latter.

I had UAC turned off for a while too because it was so damned annoying; however as I have learned more about it, I have come to believe that in it is adds a massive layer of additional security to a system - far more than my anti-virus software, for example, and I wouldn't be without that - so I have switched it back on and am just training myself to get used to it's foibles. IT security is actually what I do for a living, fwiw, so believe me I've had the "opportunity" to do more than my fair share of research on the subject

Crashing: I don't believe it's x64 - one of the guys I play with is also an x64 user, has a 7900GT (I have a 7950) and is running the 101.41's, and he doesn't get the crash on exit. That one really puzzles me.

I do have good reasons for running x64, believe it or not I also hold out hope that within a few years, the reasons for running x64 will become much more compelling and we'll have a new standard for these things - in the mean time, consider me an "early adopter"

Thanks for your answer,

Kal

I get a UAC prompt whenever I launch CoX. Any ideas how I can prevent that (other than switching UAC off, of course?)

Also, CoX crashes whenever I quit the game - I'm guessing it's a problem with the Nvidia drivers I'm using (101.41, x64) although I'm surprised that I haven't seen anyone else mention it, if that's the case.

Cheers for any help guys,

Kal

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[u]Swift:[u] I chose Swift over Hurdle as any and all passive ground based movement speed buffs available to you is going to play into your favor. The EM line is a pure bread melee monster, the ability to catch your targets quickly [especially in PVP] is going to make or break you. You cannot ram your pom poms down the throat of a target you cannot catch.

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Entirely alone and with only it's base slot, Hurdle provides faster movement over the ground than Swift (albeit you have to bunny hop.) It stacks with SJ, enhancing your primary travel power, and for PvP it can be slotted along with CJ for a very effective, completely unsupressible movement speed buff.

Hurdle is the superior choice for any build except pure flyers.

-k

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Hurdle and CJ do NOT stack for vertical leap height. Tested myself on test server. And hurdles doesn't help your speed much in door and cave mish where the ceiling is too low for bunny rabbit hop moving. I take Hurdle when I have SS, swift otherwise.

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Hurdle gives a +19.54 + LVL*0.094 f/s increase to your horizontal speed (unslotted.) It also gives a +6 ft jump height increase.

Combat Jumping gives a +0.25 f/s horizontal speed increase, and a +8ft jump height increase.

They do stack (tested via parsing of demos files.)

By comparison Swift gives +5.20 + LVL * 0.043 increase in horizontal speed.

I don't have any trouble bunny hopping through cave and office missions but I guess that's a personal thing.

There is an excellent post here which breaks down and gives detail for every movement speed increasing power in the game, if you want more info.

-k