Miuramir

This. I wouldn't want some of the 10k drive-equipped performance servers I've heard near me when I'm playing, and certainly not when I'm watching a movie.

Also note that moving from 7.2k RPM to 10k RPM drives may or may not give significant load time increases. Revolution speed mostly helps random seeks on different parts of the disk; CoH zone loading should be more concerned with sustained reads of fairly large files in close proximity. A more significant metric is probably sustained transfer rate.

Make sure the system is actually capable of handling SATA Rev. 2 ("3 Gb/s") properly throughout; while it's rare for a single spinning-media drive to be able to push more than the 1.5 Gb/s path can handle, if you're thinking of upgrading to a SSD you'll be able to take more advantage of the 3 Gb/s path. (If price is really no object, plan for SATA Rev. 3 at nominal 6 Gb/s and high-channel or paired SSDs, although at that point you'd have to wonder if you'd do better just loading up a 64-bit system with 16+ GB of RAM and putting all of CoH on a RAM drive...)

Exact quote seems to be "I don't think ANY mobile graphics chip is going to be able to push ALL the features of UM on High with an acceptable FR."

At this point, we're pretty sure that you want a card in the 1,000+ GFLOP range to turn Ultra Mode all the way up for quality, and it's not clear how much frame rate hit you'll get even at that level. Note that the 5770 they talk about is about 1,360 GFLOPs, respectably over that 1k figure. As of right now, the best available mobile graphics chipset I found stats for appears to be the brand-new ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5770, which clocks in at 520 GFLOPs according to ATI; basically *half* of what you'd want for so-so turned up performance. (And I don't even think there are laptops using this available yet.)

It is possible we'll eventually see a dual- Mobile 5770 laptop, although it's not going to be small either, and that would require SLI / Crossfire support working; even then, you'd barely be edging into the mid-range.

There are some "laptops" that use full-sized desktop GPUs, with special high-power power supplies, noisy cooling, and very short battery life to try and handle them. It's arguable whether they are really laptops, and Posi specifically said "mobile chipset" anyway, which would exclude them.

None of the above is intended to mean you *can't* run Ultra Mode on a laptop, just not turned all the way up. The 9800 GT is described as the minimum suggested buy-in for Ultra Mode, and it's a 500-GFLOP class card; the Mobile 5770 and the GTX 280M actually exceed that, and even the much more available and cheaper GTX 260M is only a hair behind that.

Generally, it will mean that you'll get no benefit from having the second (or third, etc.) card; and in fact will usually see slightly *less* performance than a single card, because there's still some communications overhead between the two cards. Depending on how your motherboard and related components work, you may have further drawbacks; for instance, some older motherboards could run one x16 slot for a single card, or two x8 slots for SLI. In that sort of situation you're effectively at a single x8 if they don't fix things.

If they don't get it working, two GTX 260s in SLI will therefore give you technical capabilities equivalent to one GTX 260, but slightly to moderately less actual power due to overhead.

What is a more complicated question is the "two cards in one" cards, such as the GTX 295. Depending on exactly how this is done, it used to be that some such cards were internally SLI / Crossfire, and you'd only get the benefit of running half of it. Note that even currently, running two GTX 295 is described as "Quad SLI".

(emphasis added)

Some out of character questions if you don't mind:
* By "either", do you mean that there will only be a single event in one location or the other, and we'll have no idea which characters / side to be in? Or is it RPing why there will be an event on both blue and red sides? If the latter, will they be simultaneous or sequential?

* Will the event use GM scaling code, so we can bring whatever level characters we feel are most thematically appropriate? Or do we need to bring 50s?

* Will Midnighter Club access be required to fully participate in the event? Cimerora access?

* Is meeting around the "outside" of the Midnighter Club a good idea, or should we be gathering somewhere else (meeting at train / boat to escort to club, inside the club already, etc.)?

* What is the rough estimated time expected... in particular, is it reasonable to plan on making it to both the Victory event at 3p PST and then the Triumph event at 4p PST?

It is possible your card is trying to tell CoH that it's a "combined screen", with the width of your laptop's monitor plus the width of the external LCD; this can upset games since the size and/or aspect ratio is out of the expected range. Try your card's control panel and setting to "clone" or "dual" rather than "single" or "span". As another poster noted, it may also be helpful or necessary to run CoH in Windowed mode.

I suspect the odds are reasonable that it's just a normal invasion week, possibly slightly spiced up with the appearance of Rikti-fied devs. However, I'm hoping it is more, and we do have a bit of a clue. The Devs have a (comparatively) new toy, which is the tech to do the zone meta-events and countdowns that we've seen applied to the Halloween and Winter events this year.

My guess is that the most likely change is for them to introduce a similar addition to the Rikti Invasion event, probably following the model of the Halloween event as it's a little more similar. Filing the serial numbers off of Halloween to Rikti-fy it is fairly easy; we could have multiple portals that had to be taken down (along with defenders), which then spawned a GM to be finished off.

Something conceptually more like the Winter event would be even more interesting, because it'd imply someplace new (or at least revamped) to go. Kill a minimum number of Rikti in a zone to spawn a Rikti GM; defeat the GM. But at the last minute, the GM teleports, and you have a short window in which you can go through the portal yourselves to continue the battle on the other side; in the mothership, in a cave complex, or whatever.

This sort of thing could be done almost entirely with existing tech and art assets, which is important given the demands of GR. The main thing you'd want might be some new "lead Rikti" to spice things up... and hey, we've got the Rikti-fied mods hanging around now. (Which might well be, or have originated as, some sort of play on GM = Giant Monster and GM also = Game Master; I can imagine someone saying in a meeting that they needed to design a new Rikti GM, and someone running with the alternate interpretation for the heck of it.)

My thoughts were along the line of the Electronics mini-game from Sid Meier's Covert Action, which was used with slight variation for wiretapping, defeating electronic locks, bomb disarming, etc. It was effectively a pipe game variant including simple digital logic elements, where you swapped out "chips" (tiles) with various internal elements (sometimes unknown) while trying to connect certain areas and not others (e.g. make a path that powered the door latch but not the alarm).

While this is a seemingly popular stance, it's frequently ineffective in terms of price / performance over time. The cost of many components is priced non-linearly; at the low end, a few dollars buy a lot of improvement, whereas at the high end, a lot of dollars buys only a little improvement. Additionally, Moore's Law and related changes has a strong effect on how much power you get from your money over time.

If you have an approximately fixed budget for computing over a span of several years, particularly 4-5 years as is common for students, blowing it all on a top of the line system at the start will on average give you far less performance by the end, than saving some for upgrades or even replacements.

E.g. if you have $3000 to spend over 4 years, buying a $3000 computer now is a bad deal. You're probably better off spending half to two-thirds of it now, and saving the rest for a major upgrade or partial replacement (moving some parts over) in about 2 years.

Also, in terms of Going Rogue, not only will we have a better idea of actual performance closer to launch, it's far enough away that video cards will hopefully have some major performance increases between now and then. The time leading up to Christmas is also somewhat problematic, as some of the better choices for graphics cards right now are in short supply, and cost more than they "should" because of that.

This. My long-standing process recommendation runs something like this:

1) Figure out what you need to do
2) Figure out what environment you need to do it in (high reliability, mission critical, industrial, portable, etc.)
2) Figure out what software will best do the job
3) Figure out what OS will best run the software
4) Figure out what type of hardware will best run the OS
5) Figure out what hardware will give you the best overall price / performance within the selected type

Performance can either be requirements, in which case it's part of step 1; e.g. if your goal is to run Ultra Mode, that eliminates a lot of choices right off. It can also be part of the final step 5 optimization; how many dollars are you willing to spend for a few more FPS?

Most hardware is priced in a very non-linear way; at the low end, spending even a few more dollars can get a far better result, whereas at the high end, spending a lot of dollars extra may only get you a very small increase in performance. When you add in Moore's Law-like effects, you'll usually be better off getting something less than top of the line, and using the money saved to start saving up to replace sooner. For similar reasons, if you're largely concerned with running software that's not out yet (Going Rogue), you'll probably do better buying the hardware closer to release.

One possible suggestion; could you set up your back-end tools on the EU Training Room? The network path from California to Germany and back will give you a predictable lag element (speed of light delay, approximately 0.05 sec each way, plus switching losses), and depending on the connection possibly a variety of other issues.

You could also try setting up a double-tunnel VPN, where you VPN out to a system elsewhere, and then use that system to VPN back into your office test box. If the encryption is set up correctly, everything remains highly secure, you're still acting on the same system you started with, but you've
injected a round-trip delay and some potential network problems.

I've not actually done this, but I think one could write a iptables (firewall / routing) rule under Linux that would check an external plugin under specified circumstances, which would discard packets with a user-defined random behavior. Routing your connection through said box would then simulate various levels of lossy connection in an even more controllable manner.

In general, talk to your network people, and possibly your technical QA test folks; you of all people really ought to have the tools one way or the other to test in an environment with various combinations of delays, packet loss, and load at the push of a few buttons.

If someone hasn't created tools yet to script a Hami / ship raid sort of setting with 3-4 dozen sock puppets firing off powers so other things can be tested in that sort of environment, they really should. (This is the sort of thing that AE would be great for if it were more powerful.)

Thinking outside the box... couldn't you (aesthetics aside) replace the weapon draw animations with a single frame that's merely the final state? That would presumably reduce (re)draw time to two 1/8 sec "Arcanatime" ticks at worst, possibly less. This would visually be nearly identical to "instant weapon", but not require rearranging the way sequencers work.

Personally, I don't want it; the fluidity of the Archery set on my agile blaster, and the "shing!" of pulling out the broadsword on my scrapper, are important parts of the look and feel of the game I would not give up for a barely-detectable increase in damage output, or even a noticeable one. If we could make wishes, I'd like for a few of the most common cases (such as Air Superiority with a melee weapon out) to get their own "hilt smash" animation, as much for the looks of it as anything (so we don't have swords suddenly disappearing either); but I'm aware of the level of work involved.

After a quick skim of my logs: At 22:25, Ghost Falcon initially asked for folks to help out spawning a WL in Siren's Call. I finished poking at some potential issues with cane-bought badges and switched characters, and joined the Siren's Call team by 22:32 (IIRC I was about the 5th), and had personally opened 11 presents (4 Nice, 7 Naughty) and killed about 29 Frostlings (plus 13 Blight but no Snow Beasts) by 22:44, when Ghost Falcon checked the count and said we needed 273 more frostlings to spawn a Winter Lord. The count is therefore strictly over 300, and given that the team was dispersed opening presents individually, probably at least 400; my guess is it's 400-600, probably 500. We spawned him by 22:56, as a note; AFAIK there were never more than a single full team in the zone.

Of course, it may have been changed subsequently, or may yet be adjusted.

Note that this implies that a solo character acting entirely unopposed would be hard pressed to spawn a WL in less than 4 hours of continuous open-and-eliminate, and it's likely to be rather more (unless synthetic team size difficulty affects Present spawn sizes, which I didn't think to test). Larger teams are substantially more effective than the sum of their individual efforts, even (especially, really) if they're dispersed and not acting as a team in the usual sense. A full team going at it in a present-rich zone should be able to spawn a WL in 20-40 minutes, I'd estimate.

That was just to try and test the co-op, and some of the potential for things to go wrong because of that (especially with the changes to where people get kicked out to).

The requirement to spawn a Winter Lord in a zone is strictly based on the number of frostlings killed in the zone, spawned from Naughty-result presents. This is a zone-wide counter which does not decay (although server resets may reset it). Theoretically a single patient person could do it by themselves. The number required is probably in the general vicinity of 500 at the moment (almost certainly more than 300, yet not too many hundred above that), although that could change. Note, however, that the number of frostlings that spawn from a single Naughty present is based on team size, so a large team turns presents (with a limited spawn rate) into frostlings more effectively. NPC-killed frostlings seem to still count.

The zone limit for a single Lord Winter's Realm is 50. If there are more people trying to enter, multiple zones will be created; this is easiest to cause when you get near-simultaneous WLs defeated in multiple zones.

There are multiple (5?) LWR maps; as far as we know, chosen at random. It is possible to travel between LWR instances only if they are using the same map.

The event is co-op... with some luck. You need a hero and villain WL defeat within a few minutes of each other, and it's not clear whether the random map selection issue may make it less likely to connect up.

Hazard zones didn't seem to have presents. RWZ and Croatoa didn't have presents. Siren's Call *did* have presents, and it appeared to be possible to have a co-op LWR that way. We were running short on people, and didn't get to fully test the implications of switching from PvP in Siren's to Co-op in LWR.

To my knowledge, there were no major "appear outside of map" sorts of problems like the last test. There was one minor incident where a Northern Light was summoned (or got knocked) underneath the ground; and in addition to the known issue of WL not spawning in Port Oakes, they couldn't get the WL to spawn in Mercy either.

In general, Lord Winter seemed a bit more manageable, yet still a problem for smaller groups. He still has 226k HP, and summons 3 AVs at 75%, 50%, and 25% HP so the "Reichsnowman" nicknames are at least partly applicable. The Northern Lights were still annoying; a larger group may want to detail someone to sweep duty to keep them cleared off.

With the possible exception of the fact that the two lowest Villain zones don't seem to be working properly, the event is probably workable. Unfortunately, the balance scaling still only works over a fairly narrow range; if you mob it with 4+ full teams, it's not a serious challenge, yet with less than 2 teams, it's a tough fight that may not succeed. I would really recommend at least 2 teams; the odds of getting a win on this with 8-12 people are not great.

(Yes, some uber teams may be able to do it with significantly less, but at a minimum you've got to do something north of 300,000 HP + 113/sec in less than 16 minutes, plus survive the stuff he and his friends throw; there's also some time lost running after the Winter Guardians, so actual time available is probably in the 14 minute range. Side thoughts... that's in the neighborhood of 470 DPS collectively. I'm guessing the minimum is at least 3 and probably 4, and that assumes two 250+ DPS grade uber scrappers, one tough ranged person to deal with all his support stuff (by tanking or elimination), and probably some sort of support / healing person; I'm not even sure that's possible, and it's a level of performance beyond 99.9% of the players. Test PuGs of 8+ were not reliably pulling it off.)

P.S.: Props to the NCSoft folks and particularly Ghost Falcon for being helpful and approachable during all this; I personally got a much better feel of working as a (admittedly somewhat chaotic) team to collectively make this event better than I have in previous testing.

That is an "integrated" graphics chip, which was low-end even 4 years ago. It's so old that comparing it to modern cards is difficult, but to pull one number out that I can find over a wide range, texture fill rate, it's rated at 850 MT/s. The 1,000 GFLOP-class cards that seem to be the low baseline for Ultra Mode are rated around 25,000 MT/S. Your graphics are around 30 times slower than the baseline, in other words. Additionally, it's highly likely that support for at least OpenGL 3.0 will be required, and your card doesn't support that. I would estimate that there is a very high chance that you will not even be able to turn Ultra Mode on for a screenshot, and that even if you can you are going to get frame rates in the very low single digits just standing there.

This thread in the Tech forum has some more detailed info; I suggest reading it.

In your case, not only are you going to need / want a new graphics card, but there's a serious question as to what your system can take. Particularly, what sort of graphics card slot it has, and how much power your power supply can provide at +12v. There's a substantial chance your system is not even capable of upgrading to the newest or most powerful cards; it may be more effective to look at a new computer than swapping out parts.

You may want to make a post in the Tech forum with info on what you have now, and what your budget is (or continue this thread with the info).

You're either ignoring some important factors, or have a different definition of level playing field than I have. In general, lack of transparency, obtuse cycles, complex feedback, difficult interfaces, and similar factors give strong advantages to manipulators over occasional consumers.

In the real world, commodities traded on exchanges are usually bought by professional buyers, who regularly purchase the same or similar products. They have the means and incentive to spend time and effort developing the same sort of models and market understanding that the sellers do, and it's comparatively balanced. In contrast, the CoH buyer is far more frequently a one-off purchaser, or a small quantity; many of the most valuable items are limited to only 1 or 5 mechanically, and have additional practical limitations.

A market manipulator or market profiteer can focus on a limited number of items / niches, and it is both useful and practical for them to develop a detailed understanding of how those niches work over time. A purchaser looking to outfit a character is by contrast shopping over a wide variety of items, and given the general opacity of the CoH markets, even given the same amount of time (which is unlikely) will have it spread far thinner.

So while the same information is *theoretically* available to everyone, in practical terms due to the extremely limited amount visible at any given time it is only *practically* available to those who have both a fair amount of time and a good distribution of it; and there's a strong bias in favor of depth vs. breadth.

As a comparison: when I was active in the crafting and markets in FF-XI, the in-game info listed the last 10 sales, with price, date, time, seller, and buyer. An external website kept track of the last 25 sales in full detail, and at least the last 100 sale prices. Handy graphs displayed trends, there were links to related items and information about how the items were made or sourced, and useful basic statistical info was right there (min, max, average, last price; typical volume per day; average pricing trends over several intervals; cross-market comparisons; etc.) In this setting, it really was a level playing field; a first-time buyer who had never looked at the market for an item could have a respectable understanding of the mechanics and flow in a few clicks and a minute or so. Looked at in this sort of light, the workings of the CoH market is dramatically more opaque.

See, what would happen is that BAB would put it in since he had a spare moment, many would think it was cool (although of course some others would decry it), and then there'd be some hideous interaction where someone ran through Atlas with a horde of Hamis after them and crashed the server, and they'd have to take it away.

And then there would be post after post asking "But why is the run gone?!?"

• Was it Heroes only, or did any Villains experience it?
  
  Personally experienced 3/3 on heroes, 0/1 on villains. Incidentally, this involved being kicked from at least 2 different maps heroside.
  
  
• Did you exit by clicking on the portal, or did you wait for the timeout to kick you from the zone?
  
  AFAIK it only affected the people who were kicked out of the zone by timeout. In each case of mine that was the case, and based on conversations I think that holds for everyone.
  
  
• Did you just enter the first instance and stay there, enter the second and stay there, or enter the first and then transfer to the second?
  
  In the first (coordinated) test, entered the hero (first?) instance then transferred to the other via the on-map cave portal. In the second and third hero side spawns, there was only the one instance.
  
  
• There was a short period when entry to the second did not work at the white present. Did you try and enter the second zone during this period and fail?
  
  No, and this would have only applied to the very first spawn in any case.
  
  There was one initial coordinated spawn, then at least 2 more hero ones which I was at; then another hero one that I missed while we were trying to get a villain one to spawn, then the second (final) villain one which barely missed being co-op (less than 30 sec), and possible one more hero one although I'm not sure.

Not quite The key thing to understand is that a DVI ("white") plug has all those pins so it can carry more than one type of signal; just because the plug physically fits, doesn't mean that it's going to get you matching or high quality.

DVI-A (A for Analog) uses certain of those pins to send an analog signal; this is basically the same as an old-school VGA ("blue") plug has, and you can get a simple cable or passive adapter that will convert between the two. Some cheap devices claim "DVI interface" but only support DVI-A, and are therefore no better quality than VGA.

DVI-D (D for Digital) uses certain other of those pins to send a digital signal; this is basically the same as the video-only portion of a basic HDMI 1.0 signal, except that there are much higher minimum requirements for HDMI devices. You can get a simple cable or passive adapter that will convert between the two.

DVI-I (I for Integrated) uses all or most of the pins to handle both DVI-A and DVI-D on the same physical plug. If you use the proper cable to plug it into a DVI-D-capable device, you get the better signal, but it's still backwards compatible with older devices by simply using a different cable / adapter. Hopefully, most quality devices with a DVI interface are using this by now, but buyer beware.

The best results are from end-to-end HDMI, with all devices HDCP compliant and supporting at least HDMI 1.3a (HDMI 1.4 is nominally out, but still very rare). Barring that, you'll get nearly as good basic video quality out of a DVI-D or DVI-I in digital mode to HDMI, but you may loose out on support for some of the advanced features of your HDTV (deep color support, Dolby TrueHD, etc.) and you have to run your audio separately. Involving analog anything will basically destroy any advantage of having a HDTV, and depending on the size and resolution may not work at all.

In your particular situation, I would suggest getting a male DVI to female HDMI adapter to plug into your video card, and then run an ordinary male-male HDMI cable from the adapter to your HDTV. HDMI cables are thinner and (theoretically) cheaper than full DVI cables of the same quality, particularly for longer runs, since they don't need to have provision for the old-style analog wires. This way later on when if you go true HDMI, you'll not need a different cable. (You'll also need to separately wire your PC's audio into either your HDTV's audio inputs, or your stereo / surround system.)

Side note: Buying HDMI cables at someplace like Best Buy is a bad idea; many A/V places make much of their profit on overpriced cables and accessories. It's not unusual to see lower-grade cables consumer priced 3x to 4x the cost of higher-grade cables ordered online.

DVI (M) to HDMI (F) adapter examples:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.1279
http://www.ramelectronics.net/audio-...HDMIDVIR2.html
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812186016

Not necessarily. The HeroCon demo was a simplified chunk of Praetoria (far less going on than would normally be the case), projected at low resolution (projector was probably only 1024x768, or maybe 1200x1024), and they presumably had an incentive to make it look as good as they could by bringing the best portable hardware they had access to; and it still seemed to have some frame rate issues and glitches. There have been games that came out with the highest-end graphics options too complex for then-current hardware to handle smoothly, with the expectation that in two years or so it will still look great; it's possible they're shooting for something like that.

There is likely to be a huge span of people with cards that are *capable* of running Ultra Mode, but that aren't going to get frame rates they're happy with when it's turned on / up. Something like a GeForce 8300 GS has drivers available that supports all the way up to OpenGL 3.2, and may well be able to turn Ultra Mode on; but given that it's got literally 1/46 the horsepower of a modern single card like the GeForce GTX 275, you can't expect anything other than a slideshow. (And there are people with performance rigs running stock with more than three times the graphics horsepower of the 275, and probably well beyond that when you get into exotics.)

My guess remains that if you've got a 1,000 GFLOP-class card that fully supports OpenGL 3.2, you're probably in the green; the number of people who have performance substantially better than that drops off sharply. It's entirely possible they'll work some magic and bring usable Ultra Mode performance down lower than that. There are huge numbers of people with, for instance, GeForce 8800 and 9600 series cards in the 333, 500, and 667-GFLOP class range that it would be great to bring the (literal) shiny of Ultra Mode to with reasonable performance; it's just not clear how much they're going to be able to do for those with older hardware if their goal is to make something that looks good on *next* year's good hardware.

From a redname: As of tonight on Test during Winter Event 2009 testing, Ghost Falcon said that the plan was to have a separate test server for the initial Going Rogue Closed Beta. The normal Training Room would remain open for the usual uses, and for testing bugs and patches to Live, at first. At some later point it would progress to the main Training Room server(s) as with a normal issue.

Guesswork: This may well be handled similarly to the Mac Client test. If one takes his comment about making off with TR02 literally, and they haven't upgraded it, it's going to be a bit on the weak side once things crank up; my recollection is that TR02 is substantially less beefy than a live server or the main TR.

This also implies that they're less obliged to wait until after the winter event to start GR CB; it's in fact possible that they're already running it for internal purposes.

Disclaimer: YMMV, void where prohibited, plans do not survive contact with the enemy, we have met the enemy and he is us. It makes sense that they'd do it this way, and it seems like it's their plan, but I'd be careful about making any complex plans based on Test nevertheless.

I'm not completely sure that they drop before Lord Winter is killed. However, this is one of the things I want to test tonight; see if a small team capable of opening presents and defeating a single Winter Lord to get the gate-box, but with no realistic chance of taking Lord Winter and friends down, can just clear out the smaller stuff for canes.

Either this is an intended strategy, and it's important to know that it's WAI and about what to expect from it; or it's not an intended strategy, and we should make sure it gets patched before things go live.