Pr_mus

Appreciate the answers, makes things a whole lot clear. To see if I've got this straight, I'll try to run it down using the info and slides in the thread.

If Freedom launches prior to mid-October, I'll start with 32 Reward Points. 33 if after. According to the slide of the exact tier buys, it'll cost me 25 Reward Points for all the Vet Rewards I have right now. I'll fill Tiers 1-5, have one slot (Blazing Path Aura) missing in Tier 6, and one slot missing in Tier 7 (Seismic Path Aura). Buying those two slots will bring me into Tier 8 with either 5 or 6 Reward Points left depending on when Freedom launches. That's 1-2 months, or 1200PP ($15) or 2400PP ($30) from Tier 9 VIP status at launch.

So long as I've got it all right, anyone with at least 84 months of Vet status banked when Freedom launches will be able to crack Tier 9.

Some follow-up questions after going through the whole thread.

1) Rounding. Are we? Three out of four levels of Vet Rewards end up with a fraction in the initial Paragon Reward formula, and I'd like to know how that's being handled.

2) The discrepancy in the listed max of 29 Reward Points in the PowerPoint slide, versus what long-term Vets could actually have. I'd end up with either 32 or 33 Reward Points to start with (see #1 above), and while there's been some speculation that the slide didn't take everything into account properly, I'd like to know if some of my Points are vanishing off the top.

3) Positron confirmed that Vet Rewards you've already earned with the current system will stay with you in the Paragon Rewards system. I think the exact quote earlier in the thread was that they'd already be filled in on the grid or something like that. So my question here is that will those already-earned rewards be simply given to you, or pre-bought using the initial allotment of Reward Points? It's the difference between me starting with 32-33 Points or 7-8.

4) Lastly, I see that the Going Rogue special enhancements are now listed as a Tier 7 Reward. Seeing as how I bought Going Rogue, I would certainly hope that if a large portion of my initial Reward Point allocation will have to go to auto-rebuying my Vet Rewards (see #3 above), that the GR Enhancements would be given out for free, rather than forcing the spending of a Reward Point on something that previously did not require it.

The enhancements are only given to characters upon initial creation and entrance into the game. If the toon was created prior to GR's launch or prior to your use of the code, they won't get the enhancements retroactively.

At least, that's how it's working for me so far.

1680x1050, Core i7-920 @ 2.66GHz, GTX 260, 196.21

Shadow Maps and some parts of Ambient Occlusion (the top level of Strength, "Strong with color bleeding", and the top level of Blur, "Trilateral") floor my FPS. Also, weirdly enough, FSAA above 2x floors my FPS.

Haven't upgraded to 197.45 yet as it makes Sacred 2 go all crazy on me.

Gonna help out as much as I can here, just getting back into the game today after about 12 months out.

My current system is:

Intel i7-920 w/12GB RAM
MSI Twin Frozr GeForce GTX 260 w/896MB RAM (196.21 Forceware)
Win 7 Pro x64

So you know where I'm coming from. Starting off, I'm continuing to use jg0001's settings in the NVidia CP without changes. For the in-game settings, I'll go through them one at a time with the settings that work best for me. (There are places where settings are repeated, I've simply skipped over those.)

GRAPHICS
Resolution: 1680x1050 (obviously, set this to whatever res you're running at.)
FSAA: 2x (any setting above this immediately drops my FPS from 60 down to 30, and even 2x has my FPS fluctuating between 55 and 60fps.)
Advanced Graphics Settings: Enabled
Graphics Quality: Customized

ULTRA MODE OPTIONS
Shadow Mode: Stencil Shadows (Shadow Maps of any quality immediately drop my FPS from 60 down to 30.)
Shadow Map Shader: N/A
Environment Reflections: Ultra Quality
Water Effects: Ultra Quality
Advanced Occlusion Settings: Enabled
Ambient Occlusion: Customized

ADVANCED AMBIENT OCCLUSION SETTINGS
Occlusion Strength: Strong (The highest setting, "Strong with color bleeding", immediately drops my FPS from 60 down to 30.)
Ambient Resolution: Quality
Blur: Bilateral Depth (this is a weird one. On my rig, Fast has about a 2 FPS hit, Gaussian and Gaussian Depth have a 1 FPS hit, Bilateral and Bilateral Depth have about a 2 FPS hit, and Trilateral drops my FPS down to 30.)

ADVANCED GRAPHICS SETTINGS
Suppress FX When Close: Disabled
AGEIA(TM) PhysX(TM) support: N/A (this is a personal thing, I need PhysX support disabled to play Sacred 2 with the Ice & Blood Expansion without crashing.)
Particle Physics Quality: High (same reason as AGEIA support above)
World Texture Quality: Very High
Character Texture Quality: Very High
World Detail: 100%
Character Detail: 100%
Max Particle Count: 50000
Vertical Sync: Enabled
Mouse Cursors: Color

Use Geometry Buffers: Enabled
Anisotropic Filtering: 16x (yeah, I can jack AF up to max, but not FSAA.)
Texture Crispness: Smooth
Shader Quality: High

Depth of Field Effects: Enabled
Bloom Effects: Regular
Bloom Amount: 100%
Desaturation Effects: Enabled


So the big three performance hits seem to be FSAA above 2x (and I wonder if that's a bug of some sort, as I didn't previously have this issue), Shadows set to Shadow Maps, and top-end Advanced Ambient Occlusion.

Got a lot of playing to catch up on, so I'll be seeing how my current settings fare in a lot of situations.

No one is bullying you. No one is trying to sweep things under the rug. You need to calm down and step back a bit.

You came in here yelling WINDOWS 7 IS NOT READY. Several people tried to help you isolate the problem. A couple jumped on you. They got yelled at. You insisted (and keep insisting) that everything should work out of the box. Other folks, including me, say it does. You say this doesn't matter, since it didn't work for you. We've tried to show how this is an invalid viewpoint, and now you're playing victim.

So let's lay this out, shall we?

Just because everything didn't work out of the box for you doesn't mean that Windows 7 isn't ready for average users.

1) First off, we're using the Release Candidate version of 7. Unfinished code. There have been a number of fixes between RC1 and RTM, and from what I've heard from Technet folks I'm acquainted with, the final version of 7 is even better than the RCs. (Hell of an accomplishment, MS, gotta hand it to you.) There is every possibility that the crash problems you're having are a result of something in the RC that's been fixed for release. Do we know for sure? No. But that doubt needs to be factored in to any equation regarding usability.

2) "It doesn't work for me, ergo it's not ready" is a logical fallacy. And one that's been quickly disproven several times over this thread, and in the number of other Win7 support threads here on the forums. Now, you're finally coming around on this one. You said in your last post that "My point is, based on my experience I wouldn't recommend it." That's great, but that wasn't your point in your earlier posts. You said "It looks like Windows 7 is not yet ready for CoH", "The point, though, is that if I managed to have problems with a by-the-book install (thankfully I was able to *play* CoH at least) on a computer designed to run Vista, there will be a hundred times as many at the Windows 7 launch", "I didn't say "don't use Windows 7", just that it's not ready yet.", etc.

It's fine that you're now going to be basing recommendations off of your experience. You do need to remember, though, that other people's experiences do not mirror yours.

3) People have been trying to help you out here, and you've been rebuffing them on all fronts. "It should just work out of the box" just isn't a reality on Windows, and you know this. And certainly getting upset because a game doesn't work properly while running on release candidate code, and you're not willing to chase down a problem, isn't exactly a working viewpoint either. I think I have a solution for your patching problems, it's something I ran into with other online patchers in Win7. But so far you seem uninterested in solving your problems, so I haven't wanted to waste my time. I'd be more than happy to try to help you, as are others in this thread.

4) If you want to feel like you're being dumped on, go right ahead. But when you espouse a viewpoint, then put your fingers in your ears when other people try to convince you otherwise, you don't get to claim bullying. Sorry.

Look, there are people in this thread who would still like to help you out with your problems. Certainly the hard locks are something major, I'm leaning towards a chipset driver issue on that one. But you have to want help for folks to be able to give it to you. And if that's not the case, well, this whole discussion was a colossal waste of time.

And yet many people with systems and hardware much like yours are having no problems with 7 and CoX. I'm certainly not, CoX has been rock solid for me on both the beta and RC1, and the only drivers I've downloaded outside of Windows Update are for my printer and the NVidia drivers.

Anecdotal evidence is still anecdotal.

When I14 goes live, will I be able to just copy my Missions folder over to my live copy of CoX and thus have access to all my work-in-progress from Test?

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That sounds about right. Currently, there's no way to chain objectives to directly lead into another mission without first talking to the contact.

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Yeah, I'd figured that was wasn't yet possible, as I was pretty sure I went over everything with a fine-toothed comb and didn't see it. Means I'll just have to rejigger things around the limitations. I'm already redoing the second mish in the chain, changing the outline sketch which had a "deliver clue to NPC" component into a "you need to rescue the NPC who you were going to deliver the clue to, and along the way he/she will do the analysis".

Workarounds, workarounds.

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Also, no cutscenes in this version. AFAWK, it's a tricky system to program as a dev, and they haven't developed an easy-to-use interface for it yet. Wish list item.

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Again, I'd figured that was the case but just wanted to make sure. Means I'll have to revamp a lot of the planned dialogue and I'm not exactly sure how I'll do that yet...maybe end up having NPCs in the missions.

Anyways, thanks again for the help from folks in the thread. And Lightfoot, I'm gonna start playing around with your suggestions shortly. I think that might just work.

Some quick questions on things I couldn't find:

Are cutscenes possible in the current iteration of the MA?

I can't find a "Kill X of Y" mission objective. I assume this is because the MA arcs are instanced out, and you're not actually doing them in the game itself, thus making street hunting impractical. I was thinking of getting around it by using a large outdoor map, populating it with many different types of enemies, and doing the Kill X there, but I can't seem to do that either.

Is it possible to make multi-part missions? The first mish for the arc I've got outlined would want to work like this:

1) Talk to contact
2) Kill X of Y. Final kill gives clue leading to
3) Door mish, need to kill boss and recover glowy.

Appreciate the closed beta folks here helping us out.

It looks like the badge requirements changed overnight, at least on Test. It's now only 5 Werewolves, Vampires or Spirits, 20 Witches, or 35 Zombies to get their respective badges.