T_Immortalus

There are quite a few bugs I wonder "WTH?!" about.
This game has more of them than any other game I have played, but I think most of that is because they don't have as thorough patch notes. It was probably a stealth change we "didn't need to know about" that we now know a little about or need to know about now because it messed something up. LOL

Just fine?

Sorry, I couldn't resist. This game has a lot of "eccentricities".

1) I'm not suggesting that they "gimp the game". I'm suggesting that they work on the efficiency of the game to give us the same graphics using less resources, as they should do and every other game ever does.

How do you think we get better graphics over the years while computers stay the same size, lower price and even smaller size?
It's all about "doing more with less hardware and more efficient software".

I'm essentially suggesting they do what common sense says they should already be doing to keep their product running and make it a product that people want to stay with more and more over time as well as new people want to join over time with competing games coming out that have the advantage of hindsight to help them trump CoH.
Nothing can stay the same over time if it expects to last. It needs to change for the better, never for the worse.


2) It's not fine.
Just look at how poor performance can be, and is, with just a bunch of mostly low level players in Atlas Park or Mercy Island. It doesn't take that many players without many powers and with most of them being unused because they are not in combat for things to perform poorly.
I get 60fps in First Ward and 60 FPS in Talos Island with my settings, but Talos Island looks a lot worse. I go to Southeast Cap Au Diable and I see a severe frame-rate drop though due to the inefficiency of that area. Cap Au Diable looks better than Talos Island but is clearly worse than First Ward. Why is it that there is no consistent efficiency throughout this game for similar looking areas?


Here are two experiments that will prove my points:

A) Take note of your frame-rate with "/showfps 1" in a place like Imperial City that is sure to make it obvious when a change occurs. Don't move at all. Open up your options window to the "graphics and audio" tab and look at your frame-rate. It will be cut almost to half the frame-rate, for no apparent reason. One options window can destroy the frame-rate; why?

B) Open options again and go to your window opacity slider. Drag it from the far left side of the slider to the far right and back a few times then release it.
I bet your netgraph will go ballistic, accelerating the tracking of your ping so that it fills with blocks of high ping that even shows yellow when you usually have green netgraph.

Those errors should never happen. That's how "not fine" the game is, and those are just little nuisances that are easily fixed by avoiding doing those things.




Another example is how poorly the game performs in Incarnate Trials with only a maximum of 24 people.
How do you and the developers expect anyone to be able to have a Hamidon raid with 50 people as the maximum hard limit of the zone when less than half that causes severe performance drops.
(Don't deny it. Even your frame-rate and latency drops a lot at those times.)

It probably is, and definitely should be if not, common sense that a hard limit on a zone is there to ensure a certain "adequate performance" threshold above "bad performance".
50 is the "adequate performance" threshold for The Hive and The Abyss and probably other zones, and yet those zones see horrible performance even well below those numbers.



Honestly, City of Heroes isn't very "massively multiplayer" for a "massively multiplayer online game". At this rate, they will have to lower "people per zone" limits a lot more to be able to accommodate all the extra data from new incarnate slots, new IOs and ATOs and everything, new salvage and reward currency, new power sets, new archetypes, new power numbers for each and every new power, new animations and everything else that will ever be added to the game.

Seriously, you can't keep adding and adding and adding while expecting performance to stay the same "just above bad" level of performance.

They need to "cut the crap". No game or product, or life itself, gets away with piling on more accumulated junk year after year without "Spring cleaning".




City of Heroes severely needs reorganizing and "trash" removal.
Do you deny that statement? Do you really think everything in the game is absolutely useful even moderately often and could not work better? If so then even the developers disagree with you because they change at least some things, like the new "looking for group" chat channel that they once had and removed and have now brought back.

Change is the only constant in the universe. The only thing that can be done is minimizing the damage or making that change for the better.
City of Heroes needs to change for the better because it failed at minimizing the damage, which is not a mark of shame as it is harder to prevent issues than to change later to fix them.
"Hindsight is 20/20."

Nvidia cards have an overheating issue.

You can solve the issue by downloading this program direct from Nvidia and setting your fan speed manually to at least 65% rather than lettign it ramp up from the factory 30-40% after it gets hot:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_...ools_6.06.html
You may need a different version of this software for your graphics card, but that one works for my GTX 465.

TJ, it's still the game though.

Other games use OpenGL just fine, and it is an established and popular graphics language. OpenGL isn't at fault(or maybe it is and games need to stop using it).

So obviously, it is how City of Heroes uses it that is the problem, if it is OpenGL and not some other issue with City of Heroes.




Also, it would be more helpful to post the obligatory....

Follow the instructions here for us to best help you: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=231628

It just seems like billboards and trees and some other things are being drawn a lot farther away than they used to be.
It all just started tonight when I logged in. It was not an issue yesterday, though something makes Imperial City perform worse than even First Ward by a lot.


Also, the billboards being blank issue definitely started tonight, and it certainly is odd. The billboards don't show anything until I look at them for a few seconds, even if I came around a building corner right next to them.

My guess? I think something with the billboard replacement code, for the in game real life ads system, was broken today. I know that system is enabled by default, according to the CoHHelper report, since they removed the option for it with the program's apparent end. So, that would make sense that the billboards don't know what to display at first, taking extra long to display what they should.

If you think most people do not have "frame-rate slowdown" and/or "high ping at times" then you are not playing this game.

Go join a Hamidon raid or rikti mothership raid or Nemesis Invasion or just go to Atlas on Freedom server or any other heavily populated and/or active area.
You will see your frame rate take a dive and experience lag(high ping) more than usual in those situations.

FYI, that's normal for this game, but not normal for every game and certainly not "impossible to solve".
This game definitely could perform a LOT better, relatively simply.

It doesn't matter what character I play, and it only happens when teamed and only with certain characters/players on the team and usually when a lot is going on and usually when the others have incarnate abilities active(level shifts especially) and far more often in AE.

The knockdown animation and sound thing doesn't happen that often. The trays or team windows blanking out is more common, and the freezing to crash(or needing force closing) is the only sure thing(though I have seen the trays blank and team window blank very rarely not freeze it or crash it).


I don't know what is causing it, except the "always teamed" and "certain circumstances making it more common".

Still, I wonder how effective UAC is, not even accounting for the probability of a person clicking "allow" without reading or outright disabling it due to the annoyance 99% of the time for every 1% that it could help.