Stargazer

Yeah, that's true. I'm not sure how much GR is going to help though. It's also *possible* that a number of players will migrate away from one faction (Villains probably being the most likely candidate for that), which could make it even harder to find teams in some zones. Time will tell how things work out though.


Honestly I've never been a fan of the concept of side-switching (too many things that can go wrong or just plain be weird). The system as it has been presented so far does seem to have potential though, so hopefully things will work out for the best.

The Villain arcs do tend to be (sometimes far) less complex (in terms of number of missions and travel, not story), but there is great content on both sides. Personally I feel that there is a greater concentration of "good" arcs Villain-side, and that many of the really good arcs show up there, but that's a fairly subjective thing. (One notable exception is the EAT arcs. The HEAT arcs give an interesting story, while the VEAT arcs are, to put it mildly, lackluster)


Regarding adding new faction-limited content, a common objection is that dual-faction content reaches more people, and is thus more "efficient" to add. However, content does not really need to satisfy characters, it's there for the *players*. While there are some players that choose to exclusively play one faction, most players I know do in fact play both Heroes and Villains (this would actually be an interesting statistic to look at - how many players play exclusively one faction?). There is of course the possibility that dual-faction content will be played more times per player for some subset of the players, but at least most players would get to experience the content either way.

(side note: the most "effective" way to give single-faction players more content is to get them to start playing the other faction too. This will of course not be a viable option for some players, but it seems that there are some players that pretty much stick to one faction because of inertia)

Having content limited to one faction gives more freedom to customize the content to said faction, and often this can give "better" (at least in the sense that they're better suited to that faction) arcs. It is of course also possible to make good dual-faction content, but I feel that it's nice to have a mix of the two. Personally, I don't mind in the least if some issues are "Hero-focused" and some are "Villain-focused", because either way, I'm going to play through the new content with multiple characters.

Co-Op *zones* do in fact have a major benefit in that they can host Co-Op TFs. This can make it much easier to start up TFs (particularly villain-side), especially on the smaller servers. Then again, this is less of an issue when the high-level TFs don't require a big team (and some of the later high-level TFs don't).
It also gives players more leeway in choosing characters to use for a TF, and that's also a plus. Still, faction-specific zones could be pretty neat too...

Actually, the transition seemed to start earlier than that.
At first, the Rikti seemed to use a consistent sentence structure. Then later on, word order suddenly seemed to become in flux. At least that's how I perceived it.

It gave the impression that the writer(s) of the new Rikti dialogue wasn't involved with the initial design of the Rikti "language", and tried to preserve the general (superficial) appearance of the language, without actually keeping any consistent sentence structure.

Of course, it could have also just been a fluke.

I used to think that the Rikti speech pattern was interesting.
Then any semblance of consistency disappeared, and it basically became an: exercise: in: adding: colons: everywhere.

It'd also be a great opportunity to advance that (largely neglected) story line.

I'd be perfectly happy with an issue containing nothing more than a Blood of the Black Stream EAT combined with some BotBS-specific content (HEAT-style, not VEAT-style) and some general content relating to the BotBS.

Not that that wouldn't take a lot of time of course...

When in doubt, go with Comic Sans!

(sorry, don't know the real font)

CoH has not been shy about using more than 1GB of RAM in the past, even on systems with less memory than yours. I mentioned 1.2GB because that was the number you mentioned in the post I replied to. If you had not only been skimming my posts, you might have noticed that I have previously mentioned that other memory usage numbers you have quoted are not necessarily excessive either.

If high CPU usage was the issue, you would not necessarily get "corruption all over the place", you would get slow performance for other applications. Slow performance for Ventrillo (specifically due to high CPU usage by other programs) is one known cause for sound issues with said program.

Yes, your processor *should* be able to handle the load, but, as you may have noticed, *there appears to be something wrong*. The interesting thing is then to determine *what* is wrong, and being able to rule out things that are *not* wrong is very helpful in that process. Note: Rule out, not dismiss.

Also, it seems somewhat unlikely that high memory usage *on its own* would cause the system issues you are describing. In your extremely experienced opinion, does it seem likely that a program using less than half of your (rather significant) available memory would cause the severe reactions you are seeing? You may want to run that by your professional tech friends too.

As I've said from the start, it's very possible that i17 comes with a memory leak, but a high memory usage is not in itself proof of a memory leak. Ruling out other possibilities helps. Figuring out why it's happening to you but not everyone else helps. Narrowing down the exact circumstances in which the problem occurs helps.



Now, this forum is a place where players can get help from other players. You should ask yourself what your purpose here is; do you want to vent, or do you want people to try and help you?

If it's the latter, I would suggest that you drop the attitude, stop insulting and neg-repping the people who try to help you, and *start answering questions*, regardless of how silly they may seem to you.

Posting the CoH Helper/Hijack This reports that were previously suggested could also be helpful.

Clearly the only viable alternative is to make one of the costume pieces he uses unavailable for us mere mortals.

How about pants?

Again, 1.2 GB memory usage doesn't seem excessive on a system with 3+ GB RAM (frankly, I'd be more concerned if it never grew beyond 1GB). Also, with 3+GB of RAM, you'd have plenty of memory left even with a program using 1.2GB. So, while maybe there could be a common root cause for the instability and "high" memory usage (and again, I'm not convinced that 1.2GB is excessive), it doesn't seem likely that high memory usage alone is causing your performance issues.


Did you check your CPU usage with CoH + Ventrillo running?

Have you tried shutting down other 3rd party programs/services (most notably the ATI HotKey Poller)?

Do the CoH lag issues persist when you have NO other programs (including Ventrillo) running?

Does Ventrillo continue to exhibit sound skipping if you set CoH's processor affinity so that it only uses one of your processor cores?

Have you tried limiting your FPS?

If high CPU usage is the problem, there are some ways you can reduce it.

First, make sure that Vsync is on. Simply put, with Vsync off, the game renders things as fast as it can, regardless of if the monitor can keep up or not. With Vsync on, the game waits for the monitor, which leads to tiny pauses, effectively reducing CPU (and GPU) usage. You could also try to enable Triple Buffering in your graphics drivers (this often helps when Vsync is on). It might be a good idea to try with it both on and off though.

You can artificially limit the frame rate even further to reduce CPU usage even more. By typing "/maxfps <number>", the game will not render more than <number> frames per second. A lower value should result in lower CPU usage, which *might* help (if nothing else, it might help rule out CPU usage as being the issue).

("/maxfps 0" will remove the limit on maximum fps)


You could also try increasing Ventrillo's priority (locate it in Task Manager, right-click, select priority), and see if this helps. Note that some programs can become greedy when their priority increases, which might render other programs unresponsive.
edit: Apparently there's an option for "Process priority class" in Ventrillo under Options/Misc



Note also that it is possible that there are issues with the interaction of CoH and Ventrillo (similar to the reported issue with the ATI HotKey Poller), and that it might not be this easy to work around it.

Have you checked if disabling push-to-talk in Ventrillo makes any difference (that would also require keyboard polling)?

i17 came with significant changes to the graphics system. Things have changed. Just because the problems started with i17, that doesn't mean that the cause couldn't be the *interaction* of i17 and something else (like drivers, something with your computer, or Ventrillo).


When more memory is available, many programs will end up using more memory (taking advantage of what is there). CoH is one of those programs. Since you have a lot of memory, you can expect a high memory usage. With your memory, a 1.6 gig memory usage doesn't necessarily seem too excessive (hey, I'm getting 600 megs just by going to the login screen). Even if it's using more memory than before, that's not necessarily because of a memory leak, it could just be using more memory (remember, graphics system changes).

At any rate, even if CoH is using 1.6 gigs of memory, you should have plenty of memory left for other programs. Doesn't it seem a tad odd that memory leaks would be causing your Ventrillo issues when by all rights there should still be plenty of memory left for Ventrillo (I haven't used Ventrillo in a while, but I'm sort of assuming that they haven't upped its memory requirements far above 1GB)?


On the other hand, there have been reports that CPU usage has gone up in some cases with i17. There have also been claims that the increased CPU usage is interfering with voice chat programs such as Ventrillo.

Have you tried monitoring your CPU usage while CoH + Ventrillo are running?

3rd party applications have been shown to cause issues with i17. Have you tried turning off all 3rd party applications (including Ventrillo) and check if your CoH issues (lag, sound skipping) persist? Yes, I know that this is not an acceptable long-term solution, but at the moment it is known that some 3rd party programs cause issues, and they are trying to determine which ones (presumably so that they can prevent these issues from happening).

Have you disabled the ATI HotKey Poller?


Is your Vsync on or off? Turning Vsync on can in many cases reduce CPU usage.


Again, it's very possible that i17 introduces a new memory leak, but it seems to me that you're focusing too much on "high memory usage, must be memory leak", and thus potentially overlooking any other possible causes. It definitely couldn't hurt to try to rule any other causes out.

What happens if you go straight to the tutorial?
Instant crash?

/gmotd

(Global MOTD, separating it from the MOTDs for the... uh... Global channels).

Hmm. That's great. Do you happen to know what value they used? Maybe the limit is higher than what was said in the Beta patch notes (7). Or maybe the problem is just limited to Test for some reason...

It would also seem to confirm that it works "retroactively", which is great.

What programs/services that "should" be running can vary, based on your computer and the programs you have installed on it.

A list of the programs/services you disabled can be found in the same place you disabled them, with msconfig under the Startup and Services tabs.

If you want to try to track down which program(s)/service(s) is causing the issue, you could re-enable them a few at the time (there's a checkbox for each item), and see if/when the problems return.

Once you identify a set that causes the problem, disable them one at the time, until you can (hopefully) narrow it down to one (or a few) programs.

I'd suggest that you start with the Startup items, and leave Services for later.

That was added in Open Beta.

Yes, the More info feature was asked for in Closed Beta, but since it wasn't available at the time, there was no need to ask for a way to minimize that extra information.

The request to be able to minimize the item info was presumably made too late to be considered for the build that was pushed Live. That's unfortunate, but hopefully they'll be able to add it Soon(tm).