LovesBigDogs

Thanks Aries, by the way, for posting this guide. I have CoH on two computers. One computer runs Windows XP 32-bit (it's older) and another runs Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (and it's newer). Your backup method works great on Windows XP 32-bit, and I've used a similar method in the past on that system. In fact, this method is how I migrated City of Heroes to my 64-bit system back in 2010 with my newer computer!

Something has happened recently though. After the server publish of March 27, 2012, I began getting messages that City of Heroes files were corrupt. So I ran a repair. CoH would play fine, but then the next time I'd run the game there were messages once again that CoH files were corrupt. This is when I started looking into back-up scenarios for my CoH folders on my 64-bit system. I played with copying my CoH folders (live, test, beta) to a different location and made difference comparisons between the files in the original and copied CoH folders. I was agast to find many files (almost all *.pigg files) were not copying exactly. Upon inspection only a few bits had been flipped between *.pigg files that did not copy exactly. Further, when using WinZip to compress the coppied folders, doing a test of the WinZip archive showed corrupt CRCs. I found that this problem does not affect WinRar, in creating Rar archives, but WinRar won't create a Zip archive saying Zip archives can't handle the file size. So... I tried making backups of other folders on my computer that had similar sized files and generated similar sized archives. Those checked out okay.

The problem mentioned above only happens on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. Windows XP 32-bit copies everything correctly and effortlessly (though slower since it's on an older computer, yet I'd take accuracy over speed any day). So, the question is... has anyone had a similar issue and if so, have they found a workaround solution?

I can't imagine this is happening, but is it possible, CoH (when on Windows 7 64-bit) is using some kind of copy protection -- possibly using newer features of the operating system -- making any CoH folder management dependent on the NCSoft Launcher patching process? CoH is already sort of copy protected b/c you need an account and log-in information. This issue has me stumped. Any help would be appreciated in figuring out what's going here.

Best Regards!

I've searched several times for threads for official statements from the devs about issues I'm seeing with endurance recovery after re-choosing powers in i19 (and it seems like the “issues” may have started in i18). I just can't find descriptions of it; maybe I’m a bad forum searcher. Perhaps people can help me. I just want to understand the logic, vent a little, and put in my two cents about the game play aspect.

So, now I know that if I "respec" on a toon under i19 that my base endurance recovery is lowered, and as well as my base regeneration rate. I've been finding people that haven't respec'd during i19 have higher numbers.

As one example, I have an (Invulnerable)/(Super Strength) tank that I love to play. A fellow player has the same AT. Here are the numbers:

No i19 respec toon:
Regeneration Base: 0.79%/sec (14.81 hp/sec)
Recovery Base: 0.52%/sec (2.64 end/sec)

My i19 respec toon:
Regeneration Base: 0.42% (10.34 hp/s)
Recovery Base: 1.67%/sec (1.83 end/sec)

What was done with recovery seems tricky b/c the older toon has a lower percentage base, but a much higher "end/sec" number.

Once the Fitness Pool became inherent I initially thought it was a good idea because I used the Fitness Pool on all my toons anyway to manage endurance recovery. And I used health as well, especially to slot the +recovery "proc"ess enhancements: i.e. Numina and Miracle. So I "maxed-out" stamina (with 3 regular end. mod. IO's) and with health I would slot (Numina +Recovery/+Regen)(Numina Health)(Health IO). If needed more endurance recovery, I’d slot (Miracle +Recovery)(Miracle)(Numina +Recovery)(Numina Health). I’d open up the slots early so they’d be available for exemplaring situations. I also made sure each power had an endurance reduction amount appropriate to that used by the power. (i.e. Foot Stomp would get more end. red. than Laser Beam Eyes, etc.). I even gave preference to IO sets that supplied a endurance recovery bonus.

In the case of my tank, she has a slow attack rate but under a heavy fighting load I have noticed the endurance levels moving around quite a bit where before they were solid. On other toons, under a heavy fighting load endurance will bounce around terribly and toggles will drop completely at times, where pre-i19 (under the same end. red. and stamina slotting scheme) everything was fine!

Some people have said, well just use Incarnate powers and those issues will go away. That may be true but I think that is (way) beside the point. Why would the developers pretend to "give us" something (the Incarnate System), but in a stealth way actually take it away (in the case of endurance recovery). Why should I have to rely on something I may not want to level up in right away (the Incarnate System) to get back part of what I had? Is this a way to make toons weaker so that the Incarnate System seems like a better idea and therefore promote more buy-in? Also, a gripe I have is that I've had to go through two “respecs” on many characters to "tune them" to the new endurance/recovery reality to make quality of life good again. I paid a lot of attention to it before; my work was thrown up in the air, now I'm picking up the pieces. My thinking is that it’s beneficial to build the strongest toon w/o Incarnate abilities in mind and then chose an Incarnate path that best suits play style and/or goals.

I just want to understand what’s going on. I guess it's just "their game" and they can tweak whatever they want, eh? There's always the power of "unsubscribing" (Bleh!) Okay rant ended.

But seriously, I would like to know the reasoning behind this and why the information isn’t more readily available. I think the supplying reasoning and information would help people experiencing the same issues (I've talked to many people) buy into whatever is going on with less frustration and help them re-tune their characters so they can get back to enjoying the game.

Some people say "I have no endurance problems". Some people may not, but quite a few do when such issues weren't around before. I don't think it's across the board, but I think it's a "stealth" change in that I can't seem to find more concrete information about it. I say a stealth change because, for example, my Dark Zombie Mastermind had atrocious endurance/recovery issues despite my best efforts. And now with a respec to switch a couple powers unrelated to anything endurance or stamina related, she plays a bit more smoothly, but that’s just one AT.

The endurance and recovery changes seem to be all over the place (to me) and as Peter Griffin would say "That grinds my gears"... well a little bit. Help me understand what was done!

Remember that Invincibility also takes to-hit buffs as well so, using SOs or plain IOs, 4-slotting with 2 defense and 2 to-hit buffs would make sense (i.e. stacks with more enemies, up to 10). Of course you'd probably want an endurance reduction in Invincibility too resulting in 5 slots. Although I use IO sets to effectively reduce the number of slots I use, the SO or plain IO equivalent would be: (end red)/(def)/(to-hit)/(def)/(to-hit). I see noticeable improvement slotting to-hit; i.e. w/o accuracy and to-hit tank attacks tend to miss more, which is a big deal. Since they deal only “moderate” damage it’s important that every hit counts. So, in my experience, this is a way to use Invincibility to its "full effect."

On my invuln/ss tank, for example, smashing and lethal resistance get easily capped. I don't see defense getting near a cap. When I added the Fighting Pool (Boxing/Tough/Weave), there are definitely noticeable results from doing an SO or plain IO equivalent of 3-slotting weave (end/def/def). Weave gives defense on the order of Tough Hide. So (Tough Hide) + (Weave) = about 7.6% + 7.6% = 15.2% defense or so. (Weave covers more kinds of defense than Tough Hide, so check “Combat Attributes”.)

Invincibility does stack with the number of surrounding enemies. Say you increase, from slotting, defense from 1.0% to 1.4% (or so) in Invincibility. With 10 enemies surrounding you this could be 10x(1.4%) = 14% extra defense. Invincibility is dynamic though, so it’ll be hard to evaluate even if you have the “Combat Attributes” window open. That thing jumps around a lot during play making it extremely hard to read, in my opinion. So (and these are ROUGH numbers) in a mob of 10 foes you could have 15.2% + 14% = 29.2% defense. That, combined with your resistance, makes survivability quite good for an Invulnerability tank.

Good luck!

Just browsing the forums on any technical issues related to running CoX. About the 1.8 GHz Athlon 64... Aside from newer processors, the newer motherboards and memory that go with them will be optimized to transfer data faster, but still I doubt there are any programs that effectively use more than two processors. If the Athlon processor is single core and doesn't use something similar to hyper-threading then performance may be similar to a Pentium 4 2.0GHz with (maybe) faster memory. It could be the 4850, if it's a budget model, might have a thin memory bus (128bit vs. 256bit) -- I can't say for sure. It seems though the system should play CoH maxed out w/o AA on pre-i17 settings though.

For comparison I have a Pentium 4 3.4GHz HT, 4GB RAM, Sapphire ATI 3850HD 512MB (AGP), and 240GB (2x120GB RAID 0). I've tested all the Ultra Mode settings and some settings don't seem different to me on low versus high (e.g. environmental reflections). But I do manage to get a good blend of Ultra Mode settings that bump up the game's visual quality. I think the ATI HD cards are good, but maybe with an extra (logical) CPU there's a nice bump to performance. I get anywhere from 50fps to 9fps depending on many variables. Lower framerates in very crowded outdoor areas. Rikti raids can be 4 fps. The point is older systems can play CoH just fine, though perhaps clockspeed and an extra (perhaps logical) cpu may be necessary. Just some thoughts...

Thanks for the list of bug fixes/patch notes. Although the list is short, it shows the patch addresses some important issues (e.g. reimbursing toons with custom power colors *YEA*) and the explanations given by Avatea are short but descriptive and comprehensible. This is service!! Thank you devs!!

And, btw, if I saw a duck as large as "The Coming Storm"'s avatar, then I'd think there'd be a Coming Storm. :\

I saw some player's screenshot once that included his/her/it's UI. They had detached their map from the mission box and resized it to be unobtrusive, but tucked right under the target box. I've started doing this and it has helped for the issue you speak of. While in a zone I can momentarily hover (I like fly powers) and zoom in on the store in question making it easy to reselect it as a waypoint. Yeah, until some feature prevents your selected waypoints from getting zapped, this may help... it helped me anyway.

A pop-up message box kindly asked me to post this on the beta forums. This message box came from running i16 so I'm putting it here. This is the text that the message box allowed me to copy to the clipboard:

-----
Assertion failed

Program: C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe
Time: Mon Apr 19 04:35:08 AM
Process ID: 2744
File: c:\src\utilitieslib\utils\superassert.c
Line: 1857
Expression: 0

Error Message: CRT abort() called

ERROR: swDumpStackToBuffer - timeout (258) waiting for dumpHeap is NOT corrupted
Last windows SYSTEM error: Not enough storage is available to process this command.
-----

Some system specs:
Dell XPS Gen2
Intel i875 motherboard, 3.4GHz HT Prescott CPU
4GB RAM, system managed pagefile (defragmented)
RAID 0 2x120GB (84GB free)
ATI 3850 512MB AGP, Catalyst 9.12 Drivers (not hotfix drivers)

NOTE: I've set my AGP aperture to 64MB. Increasing it results in a pagefile that grows more quickly, as expected. Increasing the aperture does increase performance but by very small margins. Once the pagefile has grown in size (while running CoH) to 2.2GB and up to 2.6GB it'll generally crash at some point, though CoH can then be terminated easily with the task manager. Base editing increases the pagefile size more quickly and results in CoH crashing more frequently. (Are many 3D data structures being written to the pagefile?) With no base editing, CoH general runs nominally for 4 hours w/o crashes but more often 5 to 6 hours or more. (Of course, who plays THAT long?!)

Anyway, Message Box told me to send the text. I hope it's useful to y'all devs! I'm generally happy with CoH performance in general, so I'm not asking for tech support, etc. etc. b/c I know this forum is not for that.

Cool, okay thanks Back_Blast! Thanks very informative!

I have to say I've spent years looking up tweaks to various things and my system is the most stable I've ever had it. As with many people, CoH will sometimes crash/close for unknown reasons or being mapserved, but not often. But there is another thing that seems to bring down CoH. I've wondered if the following is a graphics issue:

After playing for a number of hours (could be two, four, eight...) when my pagefile goes over 2.2GB (could be 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6GB) CoH will at some point crash. Unlike previous versions i16 crashes "gracefully" in that I can hit the window key and use taskmgr to terminate the CoH process tree. I've noticed if I do a lot of base editing or AE mission building, this will hasten the process of a growing pagefile. I'm not sure if this is graphics related, or perhaps CoH storing 3D object information in (pagefile) memory.

Fwiw... I'm running a PIV 3.4GHz Prescott, 4GB RAM, Windows XP (latest patches), ATI 3850HD AGP (normal, not hotfix drivers --- doesn't make a difference for me), and a system managed but defragged pagefile (most stable configuration). Oh and an Ageia PhysX card! Setting the AGP aperture to 64MB helps (allows more virtual memory for system processes so the pagefile grows more slowly). But I can't run any application I have my hands on that makes the pagefile grow as big as CoH makes it grow. So (in my mind) there are two candidates: CoH or ATI drivers... I guess time will tell.

Fortunately CoH is very fluid for me (generally around 25 to 60fps), depending on what I'm doing, at 1280x1024 with high visual settings... but Rikti Raids brings it down a bit From my user experience, there's no need to upgrade... yet.

Hey, I'm using Windows XP and the Catalyst 9.12 drivers and CoH works (more or less!) fine - so I'm slow to adopt new things.

I was wondering if the 10.x drivers and/or the OGL preview drivers (aside from addressing Vista or W7 issues) enable greater in-game stability or graphics options (e.g. AA works from in-game settings vs. forcing through drivers) etc. Essentially is there something to recommend the new drivers over the older ones (except for the ALT-TABbing issue).

I've always wondered if CoH could leverage graphics cards more to improve performance or if newer drivers might help with that. By the way does anyone know what version of OGL CoH uses? Would OGL 3.3/4 help CoH or is that just an Aero UI issue?

Best Regards!