TargetOne

I'm getting errors like this too upon trying to load saved costumes. It may have something to do with the costume parts menus having moved stuff around?

If I click the "repair" option, it changes various parts. Then I can go back into the costume editor and re-select the original parts. But considering I have nearly a hundred different costume combinations saved (over 50 for my main character alone!), it'd be a hell of a lot of work to update them all manually.

Please, devs, look into this!

Good Gawd.

*drowns in awesomesauce*

Copied from a post by Hyperstrike:

Five more costume slots on all characters???

Twelve more character slots per server???????

*faints dead away, with an oddly happy smile*

What kind of PC do you have? What kind of speakers? Do the speakers connect to a soundcard, to motherboard audio jacks, or to a USB port (some do, bypassing any built-in PC sound)? Have you updated your drivers? If you're using a discrete soundcard, have you tried moving it to a different slot?

You might find a utility program that will show you the SMART status of the drive. SMART is the drive's internal diagnostics, which should tell you how close the drive is to outright failure.

Also, most drive manufacturers offer free diagnostic tools you can download to test the drive. (Some might need to be put on a bootable DOS disk, though there may be ways to put them on a bootable USB flash drive or CD-R instead.)

But, yeah, a relatively new drive should not be causing errors. Back it up ASAP and look into getting an replacement from either the place of purchase or the manufacturer.

This probably goes without saying, but it all depends on how well they're designed and built.

Often, a set of headphones that has the main input line going to one earpiece, will have the thinnest of wires carrying the signal over to the other earpiece, and that wire just comes loose or breaks internally after enough tugging/pulling/twisting.

A wire or solder point may break anywhere between the mini-plug and the terminals on the speaker driver. And the more stuff placed along that path (e.g. inline volume controls), the more chances for things to go wrong.

Personally, I've not seen a set of headphones in recent memory with wiring that was really robust enough to withstand the rigors of intense (or even not-so-intense) gaming sessions. Sure, some manufacturers may use things like fancy braided cord sheaths to reinforce the cable, but this is no real substitute for heavier-gauge wiring. But, if heavier wiring was used, no doubt some people would complain the cord was TOO thick!

Frankly, most headsets nowadays are poorly constructed. It's not just the wiring that breaks too easily. They're often designed with swivel mechanisms made with cheap plastic axle pins, which break far too easily, or headbands also made of cheap plastic that can snap in two if bent too far. Heck, I hear stories of headphones that broke days after purchase, just by being dropped onto a carpeted floor.

I think the people who design these things REALLY need to take a step back and reevaluate their quality. The headphones need far more robust wiring, soldering, swivel and adjustment mechanisms, etc.

Win.

My own main problem with the "find team" window is, I wish it would remember all the settings I had made the LAST time I had used it.

Say I want to start my own pick-up group. I open the window, set it to restrict the search to my current zone ('cause I prefer not to have to wait for people to cross multiple zones to get to my team)... build my PUG, close the window. Do a mish or two, then decide I need more members, so I open the window and click search... whoops, it finds people from all zones, since I forgot to re-select the current zone.

My other gripe is, the UI elements (scrolbars, radio buttons) in this window are WAY too small to easily click on. (This is a problem I have with the CoH UI in general, but it's especially annoying in the find members window.)

Are you planning on overclocking? That DDR3 2000 memory might be overkill if not. If I were you, I'd go for memory with a lower data rate (but also lower latency), like DDR3 1600 or even 1333.

For the CPU, I'd forget about the hex-core and go with a quad-core. There still aren't many games that even use more than one or two cores, so unless you plan to do a LOT of video editing or media recoding, there's little point to a hex-core.

I will say that the X6 has that Turbo mode that automatically overclocks it to 3.7GHz, if no more than three cores are in use at a time... which would apply to most games. But for the same price, you can get an X4 that can run at 3.7GHz all the time on all cores. Or, if you prefer, spend less money and get a lower-clocked X4 965 or 970, which you should easily be able to overclock to 3.7GHz or beyond.

And the videocard? I'm of the camp that says, get the fastest single-GPU card you can afford. (Not all games benefit from Crossfire or SLI.) The money you save on getting a quad-core CPU instead of a hex-core, would let you afford a Radeon 6870, giving you 30-40% faster frame rates in most games.

Congratulations and good luck, EMpulse!

Is it just my imagination, or have the devs (or at least, the rednames) been more active than usual in-game lately?

In the entire two-plus years I've been playing CoH/CoV, the only time I EVER saw a NCSoftie (recognizable as such) in-game was during special events. But in the last, I dunno, two weeks, I've seen several. Heck, just last night, I saw BOTH NCSoft Freitag and NCSoft Beastyle in Pocket D, within a half hour of each other.

Granted, spotting these fine folks chillin' in the D is hardly the same thing as seeing them running through the streets performing good/bad deeds, but it's more than I'm used to.

Yes, it does. It works just fine.

Windows' Service Packs just roll together all of the bug-fixes that were pushed out since the initial OS release. These updates are critical for security and stability reasons. While it may be true that certain updates (mostly in the days of Windows XP) have, in the past, caused certain third-party programs to break, by and large most people never notice any real change in the way their systems run.

Skipping a Service Pack in this day and age is not a good thing.

A lot of problems like this can be traced to the fact that, for security reasons, Windows 7 does not want programs to write to their own folders within "Program Files" or "Program Files (x86)". This is why Windows provides the Virtual Store... it diverts writes intended for "Program Files" to another location, tricking the programs in question into thinking they are writing to their own folders within "Program Files". But as some have found, this virtualization doesn't always work well.

An easy way to work around this is to never install "City of Heroes" (or any other frequently updated game, for that matter) into the default location within "Program Files"/"Program Files (x86)". I always do a custom install instead, and make a new folder elsewhere on my hard drive. In fact, I have a separate drive partition just for games.

So, if you have this problem, you might try uninstalling and re-installing to a different location, or possibly try the procedures found elsewhere on this forum to move your CoH folder somewhere else. (Those procedures were written for backing up and restoring CoH in the event a hard drive needs to be wiped and Windows reinstalled, but they should work equally well for moving CoH to a different folder.)

How much "stuff" is between your PC and the landlord's WiFi router or access point? Are you next-door neighbors, or are there other people living between your place and the landlord's? (They don't even necessarily need to be in-line, merely nearby.)

Most WiFi uses the 2.4GHz band, which is subject to interference by cellphones and microwave ovens, among other things. The intermittent operation of these devices nearby can cause maddening drop-outs in wireless networks. A microwave might cause a drop-out only a few seconds long, while a phone conversation could drag on for hours.

Also, there are only so many WiFi channels to go around, and many wireless routers/APs are often left on their factory-default channel by their owners, so the channel could be getting crowded with users.

Factor in an unreliable adapter, as Texas Justice attests to, and you have a very tenuous connection at best.

I would find out which channel the landlord is using, and scan for other access points in the neighborhood (your WiFi software should be able to tell you how many APs are around and what channels are in use). Then see if you can't talk the landlord into switching to a channel as far from the most-used channels as possible. (There are 11 channels, 1-11, with some overlap in frequencies between adjacent channels.) In other words, if most APs in the area are using channel 6 (as is often the case), try getting the landlord to change to channel 1 or 11.

Many WiFi routers/APs also have a feature where they can automatically select a channel to operate on, based on current local channel usage. If the router/AP is set to this mode, any wireless clients should follow along if the channel changes, since they are associated to the router based on its SSID (wireless network name) and security settings. You can see if the landlord would be willing to switch to this mode, if he hasn't already.

Good luck.

Gotta agree with Psygon.

I highly doubt the faster cable tier would make any noticeable difference. Network latency is dependent to some degree on bandwidth, of course, but not as much as other factors. The higher speed would only really affect the bandwidth from the cable company head end to your house, while most of the overall network latency comes from the rest of the Internet between the cable head end and the CoH servers. And "lag" within the game is dependent not only on network latency, but other factors as well (server load, routers, etc.). The 15Mb tier would be great for streaming HD video, though.

As for the SSD, the only real benefit would be to let you load into the game and zones faster; if you're the impatient type and have money to burn, go for it.

By the way: I'm no programmer, but I imagine Windows 7 does provide means for a game to determine how many channels of audio are available (e.g. 5.1) and address them directly. Then the game could remix its own sound across those channels and create its own 3D positioning. But this is hardly the same thing as DirectSound 3D, which I think had methods for a game to simply state where a sound should be positioned in 3D space, letting the API do the work of actually remixing it and adding delay, reverb, and echo effects.

(Someone correct me if I'm wrong.)