Father Xmas

It doesn't matter if she has 160GB or a 1TB hard drive, if an application's working set, the amount of memory it's churning through while running, is a lot more than the amount of free "real" physical memory, the program will be slow. Period. 20-40MB/s read/write speed from a hard drive sounds fast until you compare it to the 6000-12000MB/s read/write speed of real memory.

OK, you have a 512MB machine running Vista. Now the game itself uses somewhere in the vicinity of 400-700MB of memory itself (CoV, PvP and new Faultline zones are the worse). Vista takes up a bit more memory than XP so in all likelihood you are using 300+MB before you even start the game, so with the game running, alot of it in "memory" is actually on disk in the swap/page file.

Now when you zone, the game dumps 100-200 MB of resources of the old zone before it can load the resources of the new zone. If the data it is getting rid of is in the page file, it first must be loaded into real memory from disk and then discarded and since reading from the HD is a good 50-100 times slower than real memory, it isn't a quick process. When new data is loaded the reverse is true. The new data must be loaded first into real memory and then it ends up being swapped into the page file to open up more real memory to load more data. It also can be a long process.

You can get an idea of how long it takes because the freeing of the old zone data is done when the generic game splash screen is up, loading of the new data is done with the zone specific splash screen is up.

This is why people like saying everyone needs 1 to 2GB of memory, once you do this, the load times can be reduced to 10-20 seconds.

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thanks... any explination why its that one?

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First process of elimination.

<ul type="square">[*]You say you have a 7800GT so clearly the GeForce 8800 series can't be it. [*]The GeForce Go 7 series is for laptops, only the ones that nVidia has agreed to support directly. [*]Quadro is nVidia's line of professional CAD workstation graphic cards. [*]RIVA 128 / 128ZX was nVidia's chipset that came before the first TNT card nearly 10 years ago.[/list]That and nVidia subscribes to the "unified driver" concept of one driver per OS that covers all their desktop video cards. Usually. They have sunset support for some of their older video cards like the GeForce and GeForce 2 (but strangely not the inferior GeForce 2MX) in XP. The Vista drivers only support series 6, 7 and 8 cards and their Quadro equivalent cards.

Also it's not unusual for them to have "special" drivers for brand new models when they first come out, currently the 8 series falls into that category for XP support.

Select "GeForce and TNT2" then the last window will list OS choices.

Latest story at Zap2It - Some spoilers
Paley: 'Heroes' plays to the crowd

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Okay, I understand, and if I agreed with you I'd have been upset too. But again I don't think this is his final solution. He was asking for FAQs, and we happened to have one.

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And that is where our opinions differ because when you PMed him about your own efforts, I'm pretty sure that in his mind you "volunteered" to do the work and with his sticky link he washes his hands of the common questions project.

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The comment about your getting an LJ was just because I really feel like you're making drama where there shouldn't be any.

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Well, you were the 2nd who suggested that.

Peace, it's been a lovely chat.

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1. A long while ago, Livejournal posted the statistics for many demographics of it's users: age, location, gender. While the "teen" category outnumbered any single other age category, it wasn't by much, and all the other categories combined FAR outnumbered the number of teens on Livejournal. So it is *not* all teens, or even /mostly/ teens, posting drama (or nondrama for that matter).

2. The CoH livejournal community has relatively few teens in it at all, and it's all CoH related (as in, not dramatic suicide attempts), so your comment about what the majority of LJ is or is not about is completely pointless.

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I'm sorry for my incorrect characterization of LJ. My limited exposure to LJ's contents as well as 3rd party news reports (I should have known better than to listen to the press) and friend's anecdotes never casted LJ as a source of information. I do know people who post there, sharing baby pictures, staying in contact with friends from back in their con attending days and such. Most of those communities that they belong to are simply a list of people with liked interests and not an organized in the way you have organized your guide.

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3. This forum is populated by a large number of trolls, wanks and more drama than has ever appeared in the CoH LJ community. Ever. There's more drama here in one /day/ than in the entire history (some years now) of the CoH LJ community. So once again, the argument that the CoH LJ community doesn't have anything valid to contribute is false.

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True enough, that was why I thought an officially organized FAQ with answers from the the "non wanks" forum regulars would provide both recognition as being a legitimate source of information and as an attributable source of answers, as in look at this post, that people can use.

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4. Quoted for Truth, we didn't create that thread to answer Lighthouse's call for FAQs. I started it because a friend kept calling me and asking me questions. When LH called for FAQs, I asked him if I should move all the posts to this forum, but he thought a direct link was good enough. It's not "the official FAQ" - it's just a link to some good information.

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Yes, I understand that now, Martavius_, Kung_Ru and Naienko has stated as such soon after my first post. What I didn't make clear, and I apologize for it, is that it seemed to me to be Lighthouse's solution, by linking to it, instead of organizing one himself on this forum.

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5. There are a lot of people who have LJs and play CoH, who avoid the official forums like the plague. Not only for reason #3, but because even when you search for answers on the forums, either they're very hard to find or just not here. Note in my OP on LJ that I said "these are questions that people are having a hard time finding." My friend, for whom the post was originally created, DID look on the official forums, and couldn't find answers to his questions. And how would a new player know to go to paragonwiki or warcry without being directed there, let alone what kinds of questions to ask? Paragonwiki doesn't have a "start here" article. We were trying to come up with something that we could point people to, and it happened to also coincide with what LH was asking for.

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Which was why I thought that an official common answer FAQ was a great idea. Search is a bit easier to use now after the forum software update but it's not Google. You really have to choose your terms right, remember the + sign for inclusive keywords and kick the time span up to at least a month to have a chance of finding the thread with the answer you are looking for. I can see why people give up searching for answers that haven't been answered 3 times over the last week and simply ask again. Now on the tech board there is a sticky post that was organized by a player for common solutions to technical problems. I've cut/pasted and attributed to it in the past for some questions. I was hoping for something like that on the player questions board.

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And I'm sorry, but I have to call you on this:
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Give the people who have been helping out on the forums for years a little official recognition for their efforts. Not rewarding some other group of people.

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You are totally coming off as being jealous that some other community or forum out there might possibly have something to contribute, and you're not a part of it. And that's frankly very immature.

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I don't care about recognition personally. My helpful posts are a drop in the bucket compared to others. And even if they don't want the recognition, recognition is deserved for their efforts. I hate it when I see a helpful regular post a reply only to get jumped on by a bunch of trolls who says he's wrong and then proceed to spew incorrect information to the masses. For the newbie (good connotation, not noob, bad connotation) who does he or she believe? The person with the correct answer or the 3 guys with the wrong ones? If they choose quantity, not knowing any better, the damage is done. "The forums are incorrect, don't look for the answer there." Same is true on the help channel, some just enjoy giving out the wrong information.

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Naienko- I did point LH at the post. It was specifically me who did so. But you're absolutely right that if FatherXmas is convinced that crying over trivial matters is all LJ is good for, he certainly seems to need to make himself an account. : (

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Now I've never resorted to personal slights to anyone who replied. Broad sweeping generalizations about LJ posters yes, but not about anyone of you in particular.

Let me reiterate for the Nth time here. My problem isn't with LiveJournal or your work on it, it's with what seemed to me as Lighthouse using your guide as a solution to last weeks assemblage of common questions and recent policies that seem to post exclusive information about the game and access to developers to other sites. I shouldn't have to join the Warcry forum just to ask a question. It simply seems that NCSoft would rather talk to anyone but the players.

Naienko, the chain of events appears, from casual observation, including Lighthouse's choice of wording, that a link to LJ's help file is his solution, by calling it out and linking to it, to last weeks collection of common questions. I've looked through it and it's a good start. I wouldn't think a journal style site could be indexed that way.

However my objection stems from what appears to be a slight from the NCSoft community rep to those players, and I don't consider myself to be one of them (I'm primarily a lurker at heart), who either help out constantly with answering questions on the forums about this game that we all enjoy, or with those players who went above and beyond the call with off forum efforts like ParagonWiki or Red Tomax's guide.

If he, Lighthouse, wants to officially give you a call out for a job well done then great. However if this is just a case of praising your efforts, then why not also praise ParagonWiki and NoFuture, which have been around much longer, in the same sticky post at the top of this board?

Lately it seems that NCSoft wants to tie this game to as many external sites as possible by having exclusives on those sites. What's next, Statesman's MySpace page? Ghost Widow's Facebook page? Hey lets all get together in Second Life to form a CoH community.

BTW I would be just as annoyed if he called out some SG's site instead of LJ. If I go to a public park everyday and watch the same group of volunteers clean up day after day and when the time comes for city to recognize the effort they instead praise another group, one who I've never seen, for the effort, I will most vocally point out the injustice. That is how I took Lighthouse's post.

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LJ did not take over LH's consolidated FAQ request. I quote from my post:[ QUOTE ]
Take a looksee at the dates. The LJ post predates Lighthouse's request for a consolidated FAQ by A WHOLE MONTH. The LJ post is NOT the consolidated FAQ that Lighthouse requested.

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That isn't the point, Lighthouse's original post in this forum was this Sunday after his request for common questions points to the LJ community site as the place to find the answers. It doesn't matter that the LJ community started their FAQ a month ago. What matters is the following.

1) Lighthouse's announcement of a forum purge of old posts on the 11th of January.

2) The forum regulars point out that such a purge would reduce people's chances of finding answers to questions that have been answered, sometimes several times a week.

3) Lighthouse's post in Player Questions a few hours latter asking for a list of these commonly asked questions.

4) Six or so days later on th 17th, Lighthouse posting a "good job" message for those posting in that thread. Strangely Lighthouse comments on who wants to do the work. Funny, I thought he would at least try to coordinate this effort.

5) Six days after that, Lighthouse posting on the 23rd that the CoH LJ community is hosting and providing the answers. Sounds a whole like he decided to give you all the job, building off what you had already.

Sorry, THIS resource should be HERE on THIS forum with THIS forum's "experts" providing the answers with the effort led by or at least coordinated by the Community Relations Manager or his underling. Give the people who have been helping out on the forums for years a little official recognition for their efforts. Not rewarding some other group of people.

Martavius_, I too respect you from the posts of yours I've read online. I'm simply not on often enough to provide quick useful replies. If I'm lucky maybe twice a day, 3 times a day on weekends. I also tend not to chime in if someone has already answered a question correctly and isn't spreading FUD. However if the answer is wrong, expect me to come out with swinging with links proving my point. If nobody answered and I know the answer I will. At this rate I'll never be a Forum Cartel member but I don't care.

However my problem isn't really with the CoH LiveJournal community or their FAQ. My real problem is Lighthouse asking the helpful people here on the forums for a list of common questions on these forums whose answers could be posted in a location that wouldn't be deleted by the forum purge. And after collecting such a list, passed it off to an entirely different group of people to answer at another site. It didn't need to be LiveJournal, it could just as well be some other 3rd party community on another site.

It doesn't matter if LJ is free and open. If someone opens an account as BillZ or Lady_Athyna and aren't us and post incorrect information it sullies our reputations here.

And sorry if I cast LJ in a negative light. If I ask my friends and associates the first thing they think of when I say LiveJournal, teenagers blogging that their live sucks because their folks won't get them a HDTV/PS3/iPod/Trip to Cancun, is the first thing that pops into my friends minds. LJ is not The Well. People don't go there for factual answers.

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Sorry if I go off on a bender here but why the heck LiveJournal?

At least with ParagonWiki or somewhere on this site, those of us who have been answering people's questions in our spare time and aren't a LiveJournal member could help out instead of having to be "in" with the CoH/CoV LiveJournal community to help out with this FAQ.

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What 'in'? I'm not aware that anonymous posts are turned off at the moment, so anyone can come by and add their information to the ongrowing pile. If they are banned right now, well :shrug: information such as this can't be in too many places, and not everyone knows about the official forums, ParagonWiki, or RedTomax's site. Not to mention, a number of the things that came up are things that previously could only be found out by finding this forum, registering an account, and asking the question (possibly including hoping not to be piled on by people tired of hearing the same question over and over).

Information wants to be free. What's your beef with LiveJournal?

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First, because it's LiveJournal. A place nearly populated in its entirety by angst ridden teenagers who think the rest of the world would care about their bad poetry, high school drama and personal problems that if they look back in 10 years will realize how truly trivial and meaningless those things were now that they are adults.

Second, here in this forum, I have a pretty good understanding after 2+ years of reading the Tech and Player Question forums who is a source of good information and who is some angry player with an agenda spouting hearsay and antidotes as truth.

First yet me apologize in advance if I spelled your handle wrong or I overlooked you. If anyone want good info on ATI problems you listen to BillZBubba, general tech problems Houtex and Wolf_Shadow are names one can trust. Want to understand how defense works, Arcanaville. Sarcastic comments about your system, Shego is their with a friendly jab. Others like Lady_Athyna, Zloth, Lemur_Lad, Frost, LiquidX, TonyV, and maybe a dozen more who names escape me at the moment who answer questions regularly on the Player Question forum, are good reliable sources of correct information. I doubt they have the same handle on LiveJournal. Emoboy26, AngstyGirl16, AngryOldGuy and Muppet_Toucher (OK, I made these names up as an example, don't get upset) carry no weight, no reputation with me as a reliable source of information. Sorry I don't know them from Adam.

Third, why do we need to outsource this to another community? We have one here already. What, are those of us who put in the time here, day after day are less worthy than those who choose to shun this forum for their own? It's just like the Q+A with the devs over at WarCry now. Why? Why can't they answer us here? Why do I have to go over to some add laden website to ask a question and get an answer. It would be like wanting to ask your congressman a question at a "town hall" style meeting except for some reason it's being held in another state.

When Lighthouse first announced doing a common question answer thread, I mistakingly thought the outcome would be a sticky and locked post at the top of each thread with 50 - 100 common questions with answers from those in this community who are generally acknowledged as reliable sources. A thread that would be updated regularly, supervised by Lighthouse and his lackeys (even if it's just a PM to the original writer asking to look over their contribution to see if it's still correct). On one hand it would be an officially sanctioned FAQ by players for players and second it would at least acknowledge the work that these players (even if they don't care it would have been nice) have been doing all this time to help out this game. Instead they get the shaft by the powers that be (Lighthouse) for another group who I haven't heard of before in the two and a half years I've been playing this game and reading the forums.

As for your witty little comment about new players not knowing about the official forums. Where the heck would the official forums be huh? LiveJournal wouldn't be my first guess.

Sorry if I go off on a bender here but why the heck LiveJournal?

Why couldn't simply be posted here in the forums and/or toss a cookie and a link at either ParagonWiki or Red Tomax's site?

At least with ParagonWiki or somewhere on this site, those of us who have been answering people's questions in our spare time and aren't a LiveJournal member could help out instead of having to be "in" with the CoH/CoV LiveJournal community to help out with this FAQ.

At least it wasn't MySpace.

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Who is the woman next to Hiro???

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It's Simone. I have the issue of Time, their web pic cuts off the Sander's family, Niki, D.J. and Micah (Jessica's reflection had to come from somewhere), and Matt who are further to the right.

Edit: Oops, Micah isn't there. My bad.

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Would Cryptic, at some point in the future, consider multiple small updates instead of big issues? Like say 6 small issues a year instead of 3 big ones?

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I felt a great disturbance, as if thousands of programmers suddenly cried out in terror...

As someone who now develops PC applications for a living, any more than three times a year would seriously limit what any one release/issue has in it. It is simply the fact of fixed overhead for each release eating an ever greater percentage of the schedule leaving less time for the actually work. A week or two each of planning, alpha testing and bug fixing, beta testing up on the test server and bug fixing all adds up to a good chunk of time. If you do a 6 times a year there will be only four months of time where real work is done every year. You end up never having enough time to do anything big.

Now you could have multiple teams working on different releases at the same time but it has a different set of problems. Lets say that Team A starts to work on a release for 4 months from now and Team B starts to work on the really cool release for 8 months from now. They both start with the same current code base. Now as Team A does it's development, they may change the a bit of code/texture/geometry/etc that Team B didn't expect to change or that they may have changed differently. Now Team B could spend a chunk of there time every week trying to keep up with the changes that Team A has been making or they could wait until Team A is done in 4 months and try to integrate all the changes at that point. And it gets even more complicated if you add a 3rd and 4th team into the process.

Either way isn't an enjoyable way to develop software, I've done it both ways. There isn't a happy medium.

ARRRGGG! I hate it when the long, crafted post of mine vanishes within moments of posting due to the stupid fact I didn't thread it off the OP.

Once more with feeling.

I develop software for a living. I've worked on projects that must have a major release every year due to trade shows. They also need to have minor releases 2-3 times a year to fix bugs or add specific features targeted at a limited number of customers.

First, people seem to forget how buggy I7 was. From the pet AI to broken missions to mexican magic stores to busted trams. Fixing the worse of these will take time away from developers working on the next release. Time is the only resource a software project uses and can't be recovered. Some of the delay may be coming from a renewed effort to find and fix the really stupid bugs before it even gets to the test server.

Second, even though the basic framework of how safeguard missions will work is based on mayhem missions in CoV, you still need to create all the content for those missions. There is a contact for every normal zone and each of those need a number of missions you can run plus the big safeguard mission at the end. Even if these missions are relatively small when compared to normal missions, constructing all of them will take time.

Third, Veteran Rewards. This has to work right out of the gate, otherwise there will be a lot of POed players. There is additional content that needs to be created, costumes, animations, base bling, mechanism to claim respecs and choosing powers.

Forth, a relatively old threaded interpretive language written by an astronomer in the 70s. Sorry, couldn't help myself ... again.

Fifth, disruptions in the planed release schedule, the dumping of the paid update and rolling those planned features into future free releases. Also the change in lead for the project may have had some disruptive effect.

Sixth, the surprise release of GvE with it's goody pack of costume and powers might have had a minor impact, along with the Halloween event. Even though a large part of the event was the same as the first one in 2004, there was enough added to make it non-trivial.

That's the bulk of what I remembered writing last time. Now watch this whole thread get nuked by the time I get back to checking it out again in a few hours.

OK, if all you get is a little blue or red (CoH or CoV) loading bar then my guess is a video card/driver related issue. Please post your DxDiag for all to review, instructions below.

Cribbed from Visceral's sticky at the top of the board.

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Direct X Report:<ul type="square">[*]Go to the Start Menu and select Run...[*]Type out the word 'dxdiag' (no quotes) and click the OK button[*]Run ALL the tests (yes, it may take a while)[*]Save the report to a file for later use[/list]
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Both glad and sorry to hear about your "promotion". I hope Tabla Rasa does much better than Auto Assault.

You were always a fair and good community leader. You provided us players a conduit to the developers and for that we will always be grateful.





See what you've done, you made Santa cry.

May your defenses hold, your attacks always hit and your PUGs be enjoyable.

Father Xmas.

Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can. - John Wesley (1703-1791)

When you first see him he unlocks the newspaper missions for you. Click on the "Newspaper" contact for a choice of missions. After doing 3 he will give you Mayhem Mission and once you contact him after that, he'll give you a choice of contacts to go on from there.

Assuming you have both games "adding" one to your NCSoft account and "upgrading" that one with the code from the other, just run the game CoH or CoV. You should have 12 slots per server and when you choose a slot to create a new character you will be asked Hero or Villain. Once the character is there on the server, when you choose it and enter the game, the game will go to the correct area, Paragon City for heroes, Rogue Isles for villains.

Nope

No

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It doesnt take more than a month to hit 40 for most ppl,

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Spews milk and cookies out of nose.

A month! Maybe if you play every waking hour in 8 man teams set to the highest difficulty. What about story arcs? Badge collecting? Exploring zones? I've been playing this game since Aug 04. I have one toon in the low 40s, one in the low 30s, one in the mid 20s and a dozen or so below 20. Only able to play 3 or so hours a night. 4 - 8 hours if involved in a trial or TF. Some days not at all. A month! Do you watch dvds in FF to avoid all that annoying dialog and plot just to get to the sex and violence? Bet you complain about lack of content too. A month! HA!

Name: The Swashbucklette
Server: Victory
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