Necrotron

Asymmetry? Sure. They'd need to completely redo the costume creator, though.

I remember reading that there are only so many costume nodes available. A new category would use up one of these nodes. I think they have... two of them left, and to use more would need extensive work.

Seeing as no new categories have been employed, save for Weapons, I think they've been doing just that sort of work, probably for GR.

That would open up much more than just separate shoulder options. Collar items, arm items (pouches, armour), thigh items (holsters!), you name it.

When lag starts to hit you, try using /reloadgfx. I, too, experience lag at the AE screen after a period of time.

A valid point. The bulk of the Heroside content was made a million years ago. Really, what you need to do is avoid the standard contact chain completely. It's sad that we need to do this, but Going Rogue has been said (officially) to include another content track that starts at a low level.

If this is the first time your friends have played CoH, get them up to level 5 and start doing the Hollows stuff. That stuff was revamped recently (missions relocated to near contacts, enemies put into alleys rather than on the streets, enemy mob size reduced, more varied mob 'types' put in), so it's actually a pleasure to play through. When you all get your first police radios, start doing those 'til you can do a Safeguard for temp travel powers.

When you hit level 10, run the first Midnighter arc for all of you; it's well-written, fun to play, and unlocks the Midnighter Club. Continue with these and Hollows missions. At level 15, head straight for Faultline; everything there is as polished as the very latest in Midnight Club / Cimerora missions. At level 20, you have another story arc available in the Midnighter Club. By the time you're done with Faultline, you should be level 25 or thereabouts. At that point, your friends should easily be familiar enough with the game. The next track of arcs can be found in Striga Isle; also, don't forget Ouroborous at 25.

With the Hollows, Faultline, and Striga giving you a solid backbone for 5-29, any gaps left can be filled in by radio missions, Safeguards, midnighter stuff, or even task forces and trials.

When you hit 35, you get hit in the face with a twenty foot saucepan, serving up delicious content. RWZ and Cimerora are the beefiest of the lot. They will take you to 50 without complaint.


All that said... I do wish it wasn't necessary to ignore huge bits of the game. I'd love it if the old 1-40 content in CoH was given a do-over to match CoV.


EDIT: I completely forgot about Croatoa. Completely, utterly forgot. ...Make of that what you will. >_>

Yipe.

I know exactly what your problem is. If you choose C:\ as your install directory, it will go to C:\City of Heroes. If you choose C:\Program Files as your install directory, it will go to C:\Program Files\City of Heroes. If you choose C:\City of Heroes as your install directory, it will install to... C:\City of Heroes\City of Heroes.

You can see where this is going.

CoH uses a very old PhysX library, which is incompatible with today's GPU-accelerated libraries. Even if you try to replace the CoH PhysX library with a newer one, the updater will throw a fit and 'fix' the file back to the old one.

Short answer, until Paragon Studios updates stuff on their end, you shan't get GPU-accelerated PhysX.

But in truth... there is no point.

You can still set Physics detail to Very High without a PPU or GPU-acceleration, and on modern PCs there isn't much penalty for doing so. You can still use the High setting if Very High impacts your framerate, as both settings are almost indistinguishable.

What you need is laptopvideo2go. These guys take official drivers and modify a special file that tells it what GPUs are compatible, then release them as ready-made laptop drivers.

This file is literally all that stands in your way. All nVidia GPUs use the same driver, and that file tells the driver what it can and cannot install on. Changing it is easy; but thanks to laptopvideo2go, you don't even have to do that.

You guys, if you want to stop vanishing, don't do this.

If you do, then you'll

It sounds like everything is running smoothly. I have a few suggestions to get everything hunky dory.

First, enable vsync. It may cap your FPS at 60, but your monitor can't display anything more than that anyway. Vsync keeps the picture smooth. Also, go into your nVidia control panel and enable triple buffering; this will help keep FPS high and latency low when vsync is on. While you're there, change antialiasing to "enhance the application setting" and 16x.

You can also experiment with the SLI settings. I don't know if CoH benefits from the second graphics chip.

Forgive my brevity and poor grammar, I typed this on my phone.

No. The Test Server is not a solution. It is no way to try out a power. The Test Server runs builds that may not be stable; it is not guaranteed to be up (like right now); it may be tied up in a closed beta; it is not easy or intuitive to test something out with it. Of all the retorts to the original suggestion, which can range from "it's too much effort" to "it isn't needed", the test server is NOT one of them.

Wait a month. Core i5 will be out. That's an i7, but cheaper.

I can't recommend CrossFire. It simply doesn't work with City of Heroes. Instead, find the GeForce which costs as much as you're willing to spend. I can recommend the GTX 275 or GTX 285.

I can only suggest that you put your shortcuts onto the taskbar or start menu.

You'll soon get the hang of the search. Just press the Win key and start typing. This will also search your desktop.

Let me tell you a few swish things about Win 7 you may not know.

You see the box to the right of the clock on the task bar? Hover your mouse over it. That will peek at the desktop like Win+space. Click it and everything truly minimises. This is designed to let you peek at desktop gadgets, instead of putting them on a sidebar. I have gadgets that show me CPU usage on all of my cores, RAM usage, and the weather forecast.

There is no longer a quicklaunch area of the taskbar. Instead, you pin programs to the taskbar directly. Just right-click it and click "Pin this program to the taskbar". As I understand it, this is similar to how the OS X Dock works, but in my opinion it's much clearer. On OS X, open windows are not tied to the actual process; even if you shut down all windows of a program, it will still be running. I do not like this behaviour. The only clue as to if a program is actually running is a small LED-like dot near the bottom of the icon. As a man who obviously cares about framerates, I don't think you would appreciate programs running in secret.

Win 7 is much clearer. When a pinned program is closed, the program becomes an icon without an outline; click it to run the program in place, where it gains definition and glows when you hover your mouse over it. This is a much more distinctive way of showing you what's a program and what's an icon.

I must caution you against disabling UAC, especially on Windows 7. Whatever you think you know about UAC is irrelevant; it is a very robust security measure, which is quite unobtrusive on Win 7. If you go to change settings in the control panel, UAC will no longer prompt you; it will only prompt when a program tries to get administrator access, when you try to modify files in a protected folder (C:\Windows, for example), or when you try to adjust UAC itself. Many actions that previously required a prompt now simply have a UAC shield on the OK button to let you know what you're doing. Sure, you could argue that you're smart enough not to need UAC, but personally I think I'd let my operating system tell me when something tries to do an admin action.

People do seem to be polarised by the All Programs screen being self-contained, but on Windows XP I inevitably had a massive pullout that obscured the entire screen, or if I enabled scrolling it would take a good ten seconds to get to the bottom. Now, I can just search for what I want, quickly and easily.

Win 7 is also much more sensible with drivers, almost... straightforward, actually. You can install the latest graphics driver by Windows Update, and I do mean the latest, without a restart. Microsoft are leaning hard on ATi and nVidia in particular to comply with this. Practically every Vista-compatible printer out there doesn't even need a driver install, with all scanning and printing duties accessible within the control panel, along with whatever manufacturer-specific options are available. I myself have a HP scanner/printer combination. I plugged it in and wham, done. It worked. I could scan, print, copy. No driver CD, no dialog box. It was incredibly refreshing. I recall using an Epson printer on Win XP, the stupid driver installer wouldn't even recognise that the printer was plugged in.

Win 7 is also much friendlier to running games in windowed mode. You used to have to be a certified schizophrenic to even THINK about trying that, but things are much easier now, without that much of a dent in performance. It makes alt/tabbing a joy.

I'm sure there's more, but my time is running out. I hope you enjoy Windows 7.

I reckon we should give them credit where credit is due. Quality of Life seems to be all we're getting in these issues. The toggle drop problem isn't game-breaking, and it isn't fully understood what causes it, so it's put on the back burner.

As an example of what we're getting QoL wise, I16 will allow you to take your pets (or maybe just henchmen?) with you across zones and missions.

On the subject of dual versus quad, the 2.93GHz dual core would be 40%-50% faster than the 2GHz quad core in City of Heroes. Usually, if you don't know which kind of processor you want, a Quad isn't for you; in my opinion only the most powerful of power users will ever fully take advantage of a quad. Video encoding, Supreme Commander, and Far Cry 2 are the only tasks you would do I can think of that would ever benefit from those two extra cores.

Me, I'm the kind of person who will try to do 3DS Max rendering while playing Team Fortress 2, dedicating two cores to each. I'm the kind of person who watches full HD movies while playing City of Heroes; or maybe even encoding HD video. I demand my computer to be fast, no matter what I throw at it. I have a RAID 0 array that's clocked at 260MB/second, with the first 6GB partitioned off as a page file; that's along with the third hard drive for Windows.

However, even me, with my insane thirst for beefy hardware, would never expect a laptop to accomplish those feats. I believe that hardware should do the job it's meant to do. For a laptop, I want something that I can fit in my bag, use on my lap without sterilising myself, and not have to worry about plugging it in all the time. I can only reccomend you go with the dual core.

I have the MX Revolution myself. If you install the Uperoptions tweak, you can re-bind every button to the keyboard. I use the rocker for targeting (up for next, back for previous, push in for nearest), the forward/back buttons bound to O and L, and left/right scroll to [ and ]; then I bind powers to them per-character as needed.

It's a godsend for Kinetics. Left/right scroll for speed boost and IR; forward and back for transfusion and siphon power; ctrl+forward and ctrl+back for transference and Fulcrum Shift. Six powers, all with easy access, without going near my power tray. That leaves it free for attacks.