Miuramir

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Most games charge monthly fee only or up-front only. A few money-grubbers, the most expensive MMOs, charge monthly and for major expansions. CoH is somewhat unique in charging monthly (an industry topping $15/month) and for major expansions and for minor expansions too.

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"Industry topping" is not an accurate statement. For only one example: FF-XI charges $14.95 / month plus $1 / month per character slot, sells a major expansion about every 18 months, and is just getting into selling minor expansions for $10 and some weird real+virtual item specials. It's still going strong after more than 7 years with a worldwide player base of over 2 million... at least an order of magnitude more than CoH.

Also, every MMORPG I'm personally familiar / involved with that even allows gender / major character appearance rewrites charges at least $10 per incident. $10 to be able to change fundamentals every 30 seconds on all your characters forever is a remarkably low price; I'd not be surprised if it's the lowest of any MMORPG of it's scale or larger.

Something else that doesn't get brought up much: when was the last time the price went up on the basic subscription to CoH? As far as I know, the answer is "never"... which means in real terms, the cost is decreasing. Just about every other regular expense I have has gone up noticeably over the last 5+ years. For a company (division) that is expected to not only hold its own, but show profit growth, the choice may well have been to either increase the base cost, or sell more add-ons.

Nominally, 1x AGP is twice as fast as PCI. Most AGP slots are 4x or 8x, for a total of 8 times or 16 times the speed of PCI respectively. You're almost certain to get better performance from an AGP card than a PCI one.

Don't limit yourself to what is available locally; borderline gamer grade video cards using old busses are a niche market. On a very quick look, this GeForce 7600 GS from Newegg seems to be a starting point, although note that it needs a power supply of at least 350 watts (+12v rated 20A or better). You may be able to do better, or your system may not be able to run even this; I'm not an expert on older cards.

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It's a cable modem, not dialup. It gets 100 Mbps. And i'm the only one using the modem.

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Note that cable internet service is inherently a shared medium. The maximum transfer rate is the total maximum transfer rate shared out for everyone on that run of cable / connected to the same device on the cable company's end. Depending on how things are wired, that might be just you (very rare), a few apartments, everyone on a floor or in a building, an entire block, or worse.

The cable companies frequently try to reduce costs by putting in only the minimum amount of capacity to serve a mix of ordinary users. In other words, they tend to assume that many of their users will just be doing light internet surfing and checking email. When you have a situation where many of the users are heavy users (streaming video, online gaming, etc.), performance often suffers.

It's entirely possible for performance at peak times to be worse than dialup. Some companies are trying to manage the problem by putting in rate limiting or traffic shaping software, which doesn't improve the total bandwidth but attempts to share it out in a hypothetically more balanced fashion. Depending on you and your neighbor's usage, either the presence or absence of this could be a problem.

Also note that cable internet service is asymmetric; there is far less upstream capacity than downstream. Online gaming and VOIP consume considerably more upstream capacity in proportion, compared to web browsing, file downloading, or the like.

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So then it's basically randomly selected from the eligible sell orders?

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Lowest wins, but breaking ties is best described as "effectively random unless you look closely". My best guess after helping spend an evening testing it, is that the RNG is re-using a seed in a fashion that it shouldn't. (It should either be continuing to generate subsequent numbers off the seed, or starting with a new seed; it appears to be re-loading a seed and starting the (same) generation sequence.) With nearly a dozen people and several hours we didn't generate nearly enough data points to nail down the exact details.

On the other hand, we couldn't really figure out a way to leverage it to make any significant sort of market advantage; putting up for sale for 1 less Inf, or offering to buy for 1 more Inf, will trivially trump any weirdness with tiebreaking.

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The web page display on the updater is broke. Instead of the mini-page that normally shows, it links to the CoH main page which doesn't fit.

Pic to show it happened.

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I was going to post about this, but on the system I first saw it (W7 RC x64, IE8), it appears to clear itself up once you exit and restart the launcher. Will try on the XP system soon.

Setting up a tab with only the NPC chat is a good idea, as apparently a lot of people are not seeing the instructions.

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Mastermind power: This is a click power, and is currently bugged. Its intended function is to strip Reichsman of his invincibility ability. Currently, it appears to do absolutely nothing. : (

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Reports are mixed, but part of the problem may be that the Mastermind power may be a melee-range PBAoE. Try standing right next to Reichsman to trigger it.

You also might want to clarify your initial "No reason not to use them" for the Stalkers right up front; technically the stealth can be recharged, but you only have 4 smartbombs. A fair number of reports mention that they used them up immediately or early on and didn't get much advantage. Additionally, team coordination is helpful; if a stalker fires a charge off shortly before or after the team uses the corr + dom combo, it's going to be largely or completely wasted.

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I think it'd be fun if everyone was just locked out of their primary server every exp event.

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The whole concept of a "primary server" is the problem here. You have to make a deliberate choice to put all your eggs in one basket, and anyone with much previous MMORPG experience or common sense would be aware that there are drawbacks to doing so. Putting all your eggs in the particular basket that's well known to be overflowing and have the handle come off occasionally seems like an especially bad idea.

Presumably, for those rare people who have a "primary server" with all of their toons, there was some perceived benefit to doing it that way. A reasonable person would look at the ratio of benefits to drawbacks and either decide that they weren't getting the performance they desired and adjust their behavior, or that they knew the disads going in and were adult enough to not whine about the drawbacks they'd accepted.

As a side note, given the occurrence of network or datacenter problems affecting either the West or East coast servers as a group, it doesn't take much to realize that it's a good idea to play some on servers on the other coast, so you're not locked out. See the wiki entry for Servers for more info.

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...At one point I had it telling me that every space character was using 6 characters of storage. Then it said it wasn't.

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There's a layer of pseudo-HTML filtering going on *sometimes*. I'm guessing the 6 spaces for a space is the HTML code for NBSP (non-breaking space) with some sort of escaping. Why it is putting in pseudo-HTML sometimes and something much closer to ASCII sometimes, seems to be kind of a mess.

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It seems that all of my video cards are dead. I gave the 9600 to the person looking at it......it would not work in my PC or his. He pops in another card in my PC and gets a good signal. So it's not the motherboard going bad. (I hope)

Looks like it's time to get a new card.

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Be careful about this; if you've had several video cards go bad in short sequence connected to a particular system, the likelihood that there's something wrong with that system that is *causing* the cards to die is significant. Usually this would be the motherboard, the power supply, or heat. Upthread you said you replaced your power supply; that may have fixed the problem that was killing the cards.

Still, check carefully for bulging or oozing capacitors on the motherboard, and if you can see inside the grill with a flashlight, the power supply. Recheck all the power cable connections. Be aware of any unusual behavior, so you can hopefully catch problems before they get worse.

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He already has the 185.85 drivers.


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The OP may want to back off to a yet earlier version.

I'm getting rock-solid performance under Windows 7 x64 RC (build 7100) with the 181.71 driver for W7 beta, which is what the updater recommended. (Dell XPS M1530 with a GeForce 9600M GT.)

If I'm reading the OP's output correctly, they are on W7 x64 build 7201, which AFAIK is a "leaked" build, as opposed to an official one from Microsoft. It's fairly likely that driver support will be a bit erratic. It's also possible that you got a buggy (or hacked) copy.

Also note that for some systems, the recent NVIDIA drivers recommend specific BIOS updates; you may want to check that your system BIOS isn't too far behind current.

Just to make sure, you've manually copied over the various folders and files that locally-stored MA content uses, into the correct places?

The next thing to suspect is folder or file permissions. Make sure the account that you're using to run CoH has permission to read and write to those folders. Depending on how you moved the files over, they may still be owned by the user you were on the laptop. More recent versions of Windows are more picky about this sort of thing.

FYI, I'm getting rock-solid performance under Windows 7 x64 RC (build 7100) with the 181.71 driver for W7 beta, which is what the updater recommended. Dell XPS M1530 with a GeForce 9600M GT. Based on various things, you may want to stick to drivers that meet WDDM 1.1.

186.03 is now out for W7 x64, but I've been holding off since there are various reports of weirdness, and frankly the previous one is working pretty well.

The 186.03 page mentions that it implements OpenGL 3.0 and significant PhysX changes... it's not surprising that there are some issues. (What version of OpenGL is CoH written to anyway?)

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Jerk! Idiot! Moron! Loser!

LAUNCH FIGHTERS!

Sorry.

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That's exactly what I was thinking, in that little voice, too.

Man, I love that game. I'd pay 20 bucks for that game if it came out on Steam.

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What would you say to... ABSOLUTELY FREE?!? And we'll throw in some optional extra remixed music as a bonus!

The Ur-Quan Masters
See above for details, but the vast majority of Star Control 2 was released to the fan community by its original creators several years ago. The current implementation is still technically beta numbering, but fully playable on a wide variety of platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.).

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If I end up playing at a resolution *lower* than the native res, what kind of effect will that have on framerates?

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What you would want to do for CoH is to still set it (and your desktop) at the native resolution of your LCD, but adjust the render scale in CoH down to something less than 100% of that. This will leave the 2D elements such as text and power icons looking sharp, but reduce the amount of 3D work your card needs to do.

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EDIT: It also seems to me that the documentation for USMT is written as though it's purpose is to migrate from one computer to another, not to a clean install of an OS on the same computer (i.e. wipe the hard drive and install).

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The original design was for people doing a move + upgrade. However, I've used it with an external USB drive to go back onto the same computer after a reinstall a number of times, and it saves considerable effort. The more customized you have your various settings, the more worthwhile it is to use, basically.

Note that it doesn't restore the actual programs; you re-install your software *first*, and then run the USMT as pretty much the final step. It should move not only most of your files, but all the various registry settings that control how you use the various programs. If you've got files stored in weird places elsewhere on your hard drive it's not going to find them, however; have to move those yourself.

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Of course I'll end up doing a clean install anyways since I'll be wanting to use the 64-bit version of Windows 7, but that brings up the matter of what to back up and how to do it. When I upgraded from Vista to XP (yes, upgraded) I realized I'd forgotten to copy several folders off my desktop, which had contained my Mids builds. Spent several hours digging around in recovery utilities to get those files back.

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Look into the User State Migration Tool, aka USMT. I've used the USMT 3.01 successfully with various versions of XP and Vista, and 4.0 is coming out to handle Windows 7. Can read from XP Pro, Vista, and 7; and write to Vista and 7. It reads from both 32 and 64, but you can only write 32 to 32, 32 to 64, or 64 to 64.

Post the info suggested, but as a first look those sorts of problems are usually caused by weirdness with resolution. It looks like your monitor has a native resolution of 1440 x 900 (16:10); make sure your Vista desktop is set to this properly, and that the game is *also* set to this. You may want to make sure that Vista is properly recognizing your monitor while you're at it, which sometimes involves downloading an optional driver.

It looks like your monitor has both VGA (analog) and DVI (digital) inputs; make sure only one is connected, preferably the DVI. You may also want to explicitly set the input, rather than leaving it on auto-detect, if that's an option.

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I think you're still misunderstanding a bit, and I'm not doing that great of a job explaining so I'll leave it to someone else to try to explain the difference between the a 32-bit OS vs 64-bit OS, and 32-bit machine vs 64-bit machine.

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Let me try a quick stab at it. Consider if the system's internal addresses were phone numbers. Person A is the information desk for a company that uses a 4-digit internal extension system. Person B is an international operator for a megacorp.

Person A can re-route people a lot faster, as they have to type far fewer numbers; but can only access a small set of phones; if the company hires more than 10,000 people, they can't have their own phones. There may be some tricks you can use, like assigning one phone to a group, but you have to do a lot more work and it's awkward.

Person B can access a huge number of phones, but has to type a long string of numbers every time to do so; they can do more, but it takes more time to even route to a phone down the hall.

If A's company got bought out by B, A could continue to work without having to retrain if someone programmed a special prefix for all their phones to make them compliant with B's larger network, and A only dealt with their old employees. It allows them to still operate, but they can't access any more than they could; and there would likely be various sorts of odd circumstances where things didn't work as expected.

If B tried to go to work at A, they'd basically fail, as they'd be trying to be doing things the system couldn't handle all the time.

So... A is 32 bit, B is 64 bit. 32-bit hardware can basically only run 32-bit software; 64-bit software will basically just fail (there are weird exceptions, which basically come down to writing a fake 64-bit system as an emulator, which is always slow). 64 bit hardware can run 32 bit software, which may be faster, but will not be able to take advantage of all the memory and other features. 64-bit software on 64-bit hardware will allow you to fully use what you've got, but may be slightly slower on identical tasks.

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What I want to do is spend $300 on a new desktop and then over time secretly upgrade it.

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That's gong to be tricky at best. You may want to start by looking at the FatherXmas $600 system. You can drop the RAM down to one stick of 1 GB, and go with a really cheap video card, as both are easy to upgrade later.

Newegg currently has a discounted open-box NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS for $23, which should actually be marginally playable.

However, that only gets you down to about $400, not counting shipping. That system would actually play CoH (although not smoothly, but there are people playing on worse). Spending any less than that initially will cause you to spend *more* later, as you're basically buying an entire second (better) computer on the installment plan.

While I'm not sure I approve of the subterfuge angle... if you do, make sure you get a case you're happy with and can handle whatever you eventually want to do with it, because that's the one piece you'll probably not be able to upgrade on the sly

Social engineering may be your best bet here. Try selling on the fact that $400 - $450 gets you a basic, solid piece of equipment that can be inexpensively upgraded and should last for several years. $300 gets you basically junk that you're stuck with. (In fact, in that price range I'd seriously consider getting a nice netbook rather than a terrible desktop.)

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-ran the game in safe mode. which suprized me it did the exact same thing on the lowest graphics settings.
-ran the /showfps. when i clicked on each box they both were way above 20 reaching 40+. Though the box i cam from woudl drop to 15 & 7 till within seconds frezzing.
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You're probably having one of two problems: either your system can't keep up with running and displaying two clients, or your network connection can't handle the bandwidth for two clients.

If it's your system, it might not be the graphics. Your system will generally be limited by whatever the "worst" part is; if it's the graphics card, upgrading it will help... but if it's the CPU, that's not going to help much. It's all interconnected, and frequently what graphics you can use end up being limited by your power supply, for instance.

To try and give an example with imaginary numbers, let's say your graphics card has an arbitrary performance limit of 4.5, and your CPU has an arbitrary performance limit of 4.8. You'll be seeing a performance of 4.5, based on the graphics card speed. If you go out and buy a better graphics card that has an arbitrary performance limit of 5.5... you'll only actually see a performance of 4.8, because now the CPU is limiting your system.

The 9400 isn't that good of a card for running one copy of CoH, and I'm not surprised that two copies are a problem. If you can run and afford a better one, you might want to consider it. A 9600 GT is only about $75 these days, for instance, *if* your system can run one. (And if you can't, the new low-power 9600 are interesting, although I've not actually heard from anyone who has tried one yet.)

Try the following: Turn most of the graphics settings down (or even run in safe mode), and in *both* copies run *all four* commands:
/maxfps 8
/maxinactivefps 2
/showfps 1
/netgraph 1
This will look pretty bad! However, you can use it to help figure out what part of your system or network is the problem.

If things are slow but predictable, you can start gradually turning up the FPS numbers to see what your system can handle. If you're still having problems, keep an eye on the netgraph, which should be like a field of short green grass.

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Although the origin of this could probably be traced back to Catwoman.

[/ QUOTE ]Actually, catgirls are rooted in Japanese bakeneko legends.

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True, although the American interest in them is probably due to different influences.

An archetype is an archetype, though. You could go all the way back to Bast in ancient Egypt.

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Both anthropomorphic alien races that share significant traits with animals, and what we would now call genetically-engineered human/animal hybrids, have been a mainstay of English-language science fiction for rather longer than "anime" has been a phenomena. To pull one major serious classic out, I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Ballad of Lost C'Mell (1962) yet. Another widely-read case would be many of the works of Andre Norton, featuring a full spectrum of normal but skilled cats, telepathic cats, cat-like aliens, cat/human hybrids, and so on.

For various reasons, probably including many influential SF writers being of a disposition that prefers cats to dogs, cat-people of various sorts have been unusually prominent. The vast majority of settings that have animal/human hybrids have cat-people as one of the major types, and there are uncounted numbers of alien species that "just happen" to be rather like anthropomorphic cats.

When comic books latched onto the "person with the proportional abilities of an animal" meme, cats were immediately obvious. Catwoman appeared in Batman #1 (1940), and was particularly memorable in the TV series. Not all adaptations of cat-metahumans are great, admittedly; the infamous Pumaman comes to mind quickly. But that sort of thing is to be expected in such a large sample, even if you're not being as pessimistic as Sturgeon's Law would indicate.

On yet another angle, computer games have picked up on cat-aliens and cat-people since the graphics were good enough to show them. The Kilrathi from the groundbreaking and award-winning Wing Commander (1990) come to mind as one of the early examples with both good graphical design and reasonable plotting. They are, of course, strongly influenced by Larry Niven's Kzin (1968), and in turn have been the basis or inspiration for many others.

In short, cat-people and cat-aliens have been a major part of science fiction, comics, and computer gaming pretty much as long as they've been around.

Recently, the Japanese have been combining these trends with their own mythological heritage (with a significant borrowing from fox-stories), and more recently yet there's been a strong trend toward making them cuter and/or sexier (and generally, less competent individuals; AnnaPuma and UniPuma would be disgusted with most of these). This, of course, seems to be the sort of thing that younger fans gravitate to, so it's probably not surprising that some (many?) kids don't know much about their history or take them seriously.