Hyperstrike

So the name changed sometime after you created them?

Sounds like someone generic'ed the name for some reason...
Why? Idunno.

Keep us posted on how the build goes.

Honestly, DVRs are simply time-shifting. Not piracy. Yeah, it can get sort of absurd if someone builds themselves one that saves to some multi-terabyte drive array.

But, so long as nobody's SELLING the recorded video to others, I look at it this way.

They got it in one of 2 ways:

1. It was broadcast free over the air. If you didn't want people capturing it you (the content producer/distributor) shouldn't broadcast.
2. The person paid for the time necessary to capture the video (cable, satellite, etc). So you've (again, content producer/distributor) been paid.

These people don't have a right to additional revenues from the viewers. And it's not as if the quality of these broadcasts isn't compromised compared to a Blu-Ray movie or even a DVD, due to retransmission, compression and editing (See "Yippie ki yay MR. FALCON!")

Okay, not really feeling the case. But if you're happy with it, it's good.

Case is one thing but the card reader. I really tend to steer away from Rosewill peripherals. They tend to be a bit on the flimsy side.

You backed down from the Blu-Ray drive to a standard DVD burner. I guess. I shaves off a bit.

The Cougar PSU. I don't know Cougar's brand. I've never encountered them before. As such, I'd be VERY wary about them.

It's only $3 more, but I'd recommend a brand I know, Antec and this 750W PSU, before I'd go for the Cougar.

I'm a big Western Digital fan as far as hard drives go. I guess Seagate is okay. Had it been a Samsung or Hitachi I'd be screaming bloody murder right now.

For a very spare Windows install, you can get away with 60.
If you're going to load it up with other apps besides OS + Security Software + Games, look at the 120GB drives.

Sorry. Didn't intend that in a "OMG! N000000B!" way. I was responding to someone saying "There should be a "tell" for that" with "There is". Like I've said, even I was kinda stumped the first time I ran through it.

Thanks for taking this extra effort. It's always appreciated.

Honestly, I think the review was fairly kind to the CoH, considering you haven't spent an appreciable portion of your life memorizing the ParagonWiki and have limited exposure to the game.

People always envy/resent the 20 ton gorilla in the industry.

I wouldn't worry about it. As I said, your review was fairly kind to the game. Any informational flubs are going to be misunderstandings others are having as well. And I can't claim to have picked up the game immediately either. My first toon essentially got to 50 via street sweeping to and repeatable missions in the Rikti War Zone.

*Hides original build with 6-slotted Brawl in the Locker of Shame*

That and you're sitting in a room essentially talking to...yourself. It's kinda hard to be...effervescent and personable in a situation like that.


CoH's successor game did away with rooting for the most part. However, it's up in the air (especially here) about whether the sum total of what CO gained was worth the other things it gave up.

The difference in this game is that baseline, characters ARE tougher than they are in other MMOs. So running into a group and shaking hands with their face is an eminently do-able proposition here, even with "squishies", where in other games people start mentioning a guy by the name of Jenkins...

Understood. It's definitely a different way to game and cognitive dissonance is understandable.


Yep. The Enhancement system has every last bit of depth that the character generator has (if not more). Were this game based on a costume-based enhancement system, I'd have been gone after my first month.

Because you want them to be a super VILLAIN.

And we get into the alignment system...

Cool. Welcome to the City!

Also, if you decide you want to test out what the sub-side looks like, I suggest you check out this guide. Like Amazon, if you gotta pay for something, nobody said you had to pay list price.

Also, a few links for you to make life easier (if you haven't got them already).

http://paragonwiki.com

ParagonWiki is essentially THE go-to place for all your CoH info needs. Warning! PW is RIDICULOUSLY comprehensive! This can spoil things if you compulsively use wikis like a user-productivity virus. Pretty much every user-available command, option, contact, task force, etc, etc, et-freakin-cetera is in here. If you wanna know, this is the first place to go. If it ain't there, you either mis-typed, misunderstood what you were searching for, or it's some piece of BRAND FRICKING NEW esoterica that just hasn't made it in (YET!)

http://www.cohplanner.com/

This is where you can get Mids' Hero Designer.
It's a build planner so you can work out, in advance, power choices, slotting, and even specific enhancements. All without wasting a single precious Inf on gear in the game.

You have a metric butt-ton (as opposed to those wimpy imperial butt-tons) of options here. Including import and export functions so you can share builds on various forums.

http://cit.cohtitan.com/sentinel/

Titan Sentinel is a tool for pulling your current build directly out of the game so you can import it into Mids'.

http://www.cohtitan.com/

CoHTitan is the Titan network. It's the host for Mids', the ParagonWiki, and several other HIGHLY useful sites for CoH. They're good guys who bust their donkeys delivering to the community.

Honestly, if you're going over s-video, I wouldn't worry about it. You'll be running at low resolution for that and you'll only be limited by the CPU speed. You could turn your graphics settings all the way up and never notice a problem.

If you trade up to an HDMI setup you could run at whatever the native resolution of the monitor is. 720p is essentially 1366x768. Again, relatively low resolution so you can crank graphics settings up.

If your monitor's 1080p, you could run at 1920x1080 (but the text may be fuzzy). Around here you'll need to tweak your settings a bit, but not horrendously.

I honestly don't really notice a lot of difference on my setup between 4x FSAA and 16x FSAA. So I leave it at 4x and crank other stuff.

Essentially it's trial and error. And while a 580 would be marginally faster, it's not really going to 50% faster. So you can't really justify a 50% price bump to the 580 for a 8-10% framerate jump.

*Sign* DO NOT WAKE SLEEPING DRAGON! WILL EAT EVERYTHING IN ZONE!
--Signed "The last group of schmucks who got eaten"


Guy walks up to a huge hole in the ground.


"LEEEEEEEROYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY JEN-KINS!"

And we cut away to spare our poor viewers the sight of utter carnage that follows.


Ranger: We can make it out of the zone in about 3 minutes. How soon will the dragon have eaten everything in the zone?

Mage: About 2 minutes.

Ranger: Crap...

Hey. What's not to love when the game gives you quick flashes of.

*AUGH! DO SOMETHING HERE!*

Then

*OHNOEZ! DO SOMETHING ELSE!*

Then

*OMGWTFBBQ! DON'T DO THAT!*

If your TV has an HDMI connector, this is easily doable.
You'll want to get an HDMI-to-Mini-HDMI cable. They cost about $20-30.
Plug the mini into the back of the video card.
Plug the regular HDMI connector into the back of the TV, then select HDMI as your video source.

Then right-click on your desktop and go into Screen Resolution.
You'll see another monitor on there and it should identify as your TV.



Now note. The card is only set up to run two monitors simultaneously. That means 2 monitors, or a monitor and the TV. Not two monitors and the TV. So activating the TV will cause your secondary monitor to become your tertiary monitor and shut off.

*Insert knowingly evil grin*

One SMALL downside to the StepUp program. There's no cross-shipping.
You have to pull your card out of your system and mail it in. Then wait for the new one to show.

Can't honestly answer that. Suspecting it's "next to none". The original PhysX engine was geared towards the old Ageia software, before nVidia bought them out. It didn't recognize the nVidia PhysX drivers at all.

Now, there was a note a short while ago about how PhysX had been updated somehow. I suspect that, possibly, it works with nVidia PhsyX now, but I don't know for sure. As it is, the 560 is simply going to eat the 9500 alive in terms of PhysX performance.

Honestly no. You'll need to step up to a beefier PSU if/when you do.

More than likely it's "if". Realistically the majority of SLI implementations are built with SLI right from the get-go. Very few are actually SLI add-ons later on. Mostly this is because next-gen single-chip solutions tend to eclipse last-gen SLI setups.

On top of that, the system I've spec'ed is fairly powerful as is. Unless you're really looking to do multi-monitor setups (which I find unplayable). While SLI may help in some of your other games for maxing out settings, in CoH you get somewhere in the vicinity of ZERO gains from SLI.

Also, one of the reasons I opted for the EVGA unit is their "Step-Up" program.
Essentially you have 90 days from purchase. If they come out with a newer item in that time, you're eligible to "Step-Up" and get the newer card while only paying the difference between the list price of the new unit and what you originally paid for your card.

For instance, I had a GTX460 that I bought right at the tail end of 2010. In early 2011, they announced the 560. I swapped up to the 560 and it only cost me about $40.

You can't link properly to a wishlist that way.

Cheap and easy way of doing it.

1. Create the wishlist
2. Share it
3. View the wishlist and take the 8-digit number off the end of the URL (in your case "15954391"
4. Click on the tab for "public wishlists" and view one of them
5. Wipe off the 8 digit number at the end of the URL and substitute your own.
6. Hit enter and make sure the Wishlist that comes up is yours.
7. Share THAT URL.

You forget. I'm a realist by nature, for all that the bright and shiny people like to label it "pessimism" instead.

Eldorado has given you the links you need to help us get going. If you can drop the information you generate from the HOWTO into a thread in the technical issues forum, that'll help us get going.

While the game itself has been out a while, as noted, it's had several graphical updates and a couple zones have created and/or reworked to take advantage of these updates. The latest of which is the tutorial and Atlas Park.

Also, this game has lots of "visual spam" in it from a diverse array of individual power effects. Even really REALLY strong cards can be made to weep with despair in things like zone events and raids where you have dozens or hundreds of effects happening simultaneously.

Also, this game runs on OpenGL. This helps the game to be cross-platform in a way DirectX games cannot be. But, the drivers for OGL see less development and refinement than DirectX driversets do. And OGL's rendering model tends to place fiercer demands on hardware than DirectX does. As such, systems that scream through DirectX content post nowhere near the same framerate numbers in OGL-based games.

On top of that, you're running a Radeon-based card. While they're not "bad" with the game, there are numerous technical issues plaguing people who sport Radeon-based cards. Some of this can be worked around by staying away from certain driver revisions. But it doesn't eliminate the issues. And at the end of the day it's all a giant shill game.

And to put snow on the mountain, you're dealing with an entry-level mobile integrated solution. Mobile solutions tend to be less powerful than equivalently numbered devices in the desktop/workstation space due to thermal and power envelope concerns.

And while your video accelerator has dedicated memory, it's still going to try and "share" (see "steal") system memory too.

I don't want to discourage you. It may be that we can find some way of alleviating your performance problems. I just want to make sure you have all the "bad news" up front and are realistic about what can be done.

Heh. The mental image of that is priceless. Especially if you were playing a squishy at the time.

A team of stumped melee'ers around you wondering "Okay...what next?"
Then Arcana hauls off and headbutts her way through a book case while they stare at her, wondering if she lost her mind...

Tank: What are you doing?
Arcana: Opening *THUD* the *THUD* secret *THUD* door *THUD*THUD*
Tank: Oh... {Whispered to teammates} She's lost it, we should run away very VERY fast...

Yeah, before they got the indicator arrow working right, I was sitting in there going, no...that's just too cliché...WAITAMINUTE! Comic book!

*CLICK!*

As I'm unsure of which post you're actually responding to, it makes it difficult to know if you're replying to my reply to you from a day or two ago or my last post (which was blatantly obvious dark humor).

But thanks for devolving into name-calling. It's essentially the same thing as saying "Sorry! If I had been any more wrong I'd have imploded into a singularity of wrongness."

It's always gratifying to see stuff like that.

Praetorian Earth as seen from space...