SuperOz

Hi all.

I've done some asking in the Technical and Devs' corner forums, but I have to admit to still being somewhat in the dark over Ultra Mode and just what does what depending on the setting (presumably there will be varying degrees of quality sliders like in regular graphics mode) and the video card.

And I know nothing bar nothing about Raedon video cards beyond that people have said they've been problematic with CoH before. I am rather hoping for a Dummies' Guide to Ultra Mode that someone will write up to help me (and other people a bit confused) find their way to a new video card and if so, which one.

Can anyone shed light in a way that doesn't require me to have a degree to understand?


S.

I'm becoming convinced that a major Positron update in terms of looks is going to come through Vanguard armor, which is probably the best looking in terms of high-tech in the game....

S.

Well....it's not, really. Aside from making their own real-world banking system and the whole point of the game (from what I've read) is to run around and get more real-world money from doing stuff and investing your own money into the game.....

Freaks me out as a concept.

S.

Okay, I've read a large number of the posts in here (including all of Posi's) and I have to admit to still being a bit confused. It's one of those times I could use a guide to video cards, or just the game website telling me the minimum and recommended requirements.

I'm sitting on a i5-750 chipset in a Gigabyte GA-P55-UDR3 board with 2gig of DDR3 RAM onboard, with my video card (nVidia 9600 GT) apparently being my only weak point. Now in Australian dollars, what's a reasonable price for an American buyer hurts an Aussie a bit. Add to that I haven't quite understood what the 'reduced quality' represents in the tiers of Ultra Mode. Less reflections, less draw distance? It'd be nice to know as an ordinary PC user with just enough video card knowledge to be dangerous () whether I should really just be holding off on any decision regarding video cards until Ultra Mode hits something close to a final form.

I've always bought nVidia, and until I started reading this thought 'hey, I'll just buy more of these guys' stuff, it works for me'. I think Ultra Mode for Dummies (and this definitely includes me) would be a real help about now.


S.

Just as a quick note to demonstrate what I was talking about with Planet Calypso:

https://account.entropiauniverse.com...-requirements/

I've never seen an MMO with such high requirements.


S.

Hello all.

I'm asking this a little in advance as from what I've read over in Developers' Corner, the final numbers and specifications of what Ultra Mode is going to run and be handled by don't seem entirely in yet. We have the guidelines handed out by Posi, and that's reasonable enough.

My situation is as follows: I have a very strong PC at the moment, running a i5-750 chip with 2gig of DDR3 RAM (I'll be going up to 4 soon) and a Thermaltake 650W power supply on a GA-P55-UDR3 Gigabyte motherboard. The video card however is a (by modern standards) a slightly lowly Nvidia 9600GT 1GB.

Now, I have no problem running most games; I play LotRo on Very High settings, Champions on Very High settings, and the PC shrugs and goes 'so what?' when it comes to playing. I have very few problems at all.

Now I see the guide to Ultra Mode and wonder where I sit in that spectrum. Posi notes your processor might affect where you sit in terms of performance, and I'm a good generation or two above the recommended specs for running CoH. That being said, I've been looking over prices for video cards out here and it seems Raedon is becoming the more readily available of the cards out there. I know nothing about Raedon cards and how that's going to affect my overall play. I've always bought Nvidia.

I think I also wouldn't mind knowing just what the range of settings in Ultra Mode are going to look like. Like most people, I've only seen the HeroCon videos and screenshots, but I don't have a frame of reference for where that falls.

However, I did recently try a game that I saw at a convention, Planet Calypso. Now the requirements on that game were massive; my rig as it stood put it into the Medium High range of system and video requirements. As it used the Crysis game engine (or so I understood at reading), it seemed comparable to the situation we'll be getting here. Would I be wrong in that?

I'd like to hear from experienced hands where I might sit and also ask for some guidance about Raedon; I'll be pouring through the Ultra Mode thread to understand more, but I thought here would be a good place to start.


S.

My only question with this comes from prior experience....thus far, every boxed product that's been available for this game has shown up in Australia, and that includes the Collector's Edition of CoV and the AE version as well. I was surprised to see the latter on shelves out here, but there they were.

So obviously the question is whether the same will be happening again, as I would like the physical product, but I will happily buy the digital product if not.

S.

Is that a given though or just speculation based on the hiring that's gone on? I've never read anything suggestive that resources are heading in that direction.

S.

Hi all.

This particular thought's been rattling around in my head for a little while now, in part due to the announcements about Ultra Mode and the various improvements to the game. Whilst I think it's great that investment is being made into CoH and this will improve the game for the long-term, I of course wonder what long-term means and if there's thought made to the future.

Several posters talking about Ultra Mode and the additions such as power customisation, Walking and the like mention how the dev team had to overcome the old Cryptic game engine (often described as a patchwork quilt held together by bandaids; not my words) and were able to do so with the extra resources. So now we're getting a game that meets our expectations.

So what of a 'City of Heroes 2'? What kinds of expectations would we want that aren't being met already in the Going Rogue expansion (War Wall-less zones, for example) or gameplay improvements?

For my own part, it's hard to pin down what I'd want to see other than a little wishlist. This in turn probably means having a game who's minimum system requirements would be higher than what we have now, but I see that as something of an inevitability anyways as when people will go to replace a part in an older system, they'll find they have to buy a whole new computer just to maintain a minimum.

So.

Environmental interactions would be a must for me. Love it or hate it, superhero battles where things are busted up is just a staple of the genre, and we only currently get it in Mayhem/Safeguard missions. I'm an open fan of CO's ability to heft objects around and throw them, and DCUO is going a step forward with powers being able to do the same. Yes, it's physics-intensive, but it's one of those visceral things I'd want to see in a superhero game.

Interaction is a good word to describe some form of PvP between players. I know DCUO is opting for a form of 'open PvP' where if heroes and villains encounter each other in a mission, they can opt to fight each other. I don't mind that in principle, but it should be by the same token entirely optional. You may not want to do a form of PvP at all, and it shouldn't be a mandatory part of the game. CoH/CoV always suffered a bit to me because the only places you could meet and wail on a bad guy were...PvP zones. Give me an system whereby bad guys and good guys can share the same space to some degree, and I'll be very happy.

As much as exploration to different areas of the world or universe are common to superhero comics, I'm not so sure they can be done justice in an MMO. By that I mean to display the exotic and make it seem exotic is a trick for most games, unless they're on a console where the resources can make it plausible. But more important is a consistent game world. If a moon base or another world is mentioned, I think it's incumbent for the game to follow through on that. In the case of CoH, the Rikti homeworld's been mentioned for a while now, and it feels a little like being shortchanged to not see it after all the effort you as the player may have made to at least know it exists.

The last two things are probably the most problematic to see coming about, but here goes:

The first is a 'secret identity' system. Sometimes I think systems like this where it has little do with missions or combat get lost in the shuffle of MMO's, but again, it's a staple of superherodom. You could make an argument for player housing (aka bases with furniture by Ikea), but I think more story-driven contacts could work better. For example, using an editor at a newspaper as well...your newspaper contact for missions (at least some of them). It's thematic, it suggests you as the reporter are investigating the story which only your heroic counterpart could solve. In fact, as I type it, I see existing contacts in this game could be modified for that purpose based on your choice of Day Job.

The last one is partly based on my time in Champions Online, and that would be a more open style of Power Proliferation. I think the powersets here are incredibly well-balanced for the most part and work quite well. Obviously, people want concept builds where you're super-strong and super-fast (a SS/SR tank/scrapper sort of build) or more relevant to the near future, perhaps a martial artist gunslinger. I do have some confidence in this simply because of the huge range of proliferation already done in this game (probably more than most of us who play are remotely aware of) and would love to see that continue to a point where you could (in theory) have any mixture you were after.


So, that's my thoughts on what a City of....2 would or could be like. What's yours?


S.

I wonder....what is this 'snow' you speak of? All I see out my window are blue skies and feel the soft warm summer breeze....

*runs like heck*


S.

Those are quite nice....I'm just a little envious of our soon-to-be Praetorian cousins.

S.

Not that I won't be playing Going Rogue, but they got all those very nice badges for their signatures!

Regular heroes and villains should get some shinyness too, right?

I'm just sayin'....


S.

I seem to recall Posi's post where he laid down some tentative guidelines for what level of detail you'd get and 9800's are about the lowest of the range with the 260's and 285's being top of the range. That wasn't final, however.

S.

I think both. There's always a theory that runs about MMO development that whatever you get wrong in one game, you can't fix but try and improve on in the next. It strikes me that the NCSoft team want to try and buck that trend with what they've been doing lately, but I'm wondering if there's things that just can't be fixed (due to the game engine's age or things that are 'set in stone') and yes, if there's more serious issues as well that only something like a 2.0 version of the game could address.

S.

Hello all.

I've written to the forums asking and wondering before what ways the game could be improved in, but I've never really wondered before now about what is broken. And I don't mean this in a malicious way...

Browsing other forums about other MMO's out there, I noticed some comments about Champions, which I also play and I definitely take on board the comments about some aspects of game balance and play that wind up being indicative about the pace of game development and so on. So it got me to wondering....

What is broken as such with the City of games? I know one thing that stands out to me is the infamous clipping issue of costumes, but that seems to be a double-edged sword, as the more creative costumers out there embrace costuming and the happy accidents that occur as a result of it.

I know some of the Task Forces are 'broken', but only in the sense that their writing and designing isn't as polished (as Positron admits about his own Task Force) as it could be.

So what's broken? And more interestingly, can the broken bits be fixed? Obviously a lot of things (power customisation/coloring, walking, emotes and so on) have been addressed, but are these things still broken in some way? I'd really like to hear from people.

S.

A little while ago, I wrote asking about the mailing address for Paragon Studios, and this was to do with my Christmas project...and here it is. I got in contact with two lovely ladies who I thought deserved some extra attention, and they were the players of War Witch and Sister Flame. After some discussion with Flame's dad and War Witch herself, I decided I would continue my ongoing hobby of action figure customisation. Or doll figure altering for those of you not trying to sound tough with toys.

First up is War Witch. As per instructions, I have tried to make the War Witch figure closer to the comic book version

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e1...itch_Comic.jpg

with the final result here:

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e1...WarWitch-1.jpg

With some screenshots, and I do apologise for this picture being out of focus, I made a Sister Flame figure:

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e1...isterFlame.jpg

Here's the ladies with my first ever custom of my own character, Burnum:

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e1...urnumFlame.jpg

And Burnum and Sister Flame:

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e1...isterFlame.jpg

I will hopefully post another clearer photo of Sister Flame soon. Both figures are recieving their own custom backing board replete with City of Heroes 'packaging' which I am finishing up at this time and will post in the next few days. Alas, due to my PC having some technical issues, I can't get these finished and mailed out before Christmas, but this hopefully means the final product will be of a better quality.

Any and all feedback is appreciated.

S.

To clear up some things:

1) What I intend to send will be a solicited item....it's been in the works with none other than War Witch for some time now and I'll be making a special post in the near future involving her and a very well known acquaintance of hers. So contact will be initiated with her and postage will be arranged.

2) No sucking up or bribing is involved....this is a fun project I started on my own.

3) Noone else is getting what I'm sending.

S.

It must be the summer down here sapping my brainpower, but I've had no luck at all finding the correct mailing address for Paragon Studios that isn't a job application form.

Can anyone help?

S.

Just to respond to this; I found out through another friend that the BIOS listed for the motherboard (Gigabyte GA-P55-UDR3) was listed as having some problems which included the error you highlighted and the aforementioned keyboard/mouse disablement.

That's been updated and I'm watching the system cautiously.

S.

It's a 600W Thermaltake Litepower power supply, and is brand new. I'm not sure how to check for what wattage would be good for an Nvidia 9600GT would be, though....good to see consensus is forming, however.

S.

Update: The card requires a 450W supply, so I'm over it by a good 150W.

I just wanted to give this a bump; I've had the PC in for a week back at the shop where they ran two programs, BurnIn and 3DMark to test the system and only had one issue where they subsequently replaced the video card.

However.

Viewing Youtube streaming videos (only three at once) today caused the exact same issue (mouse and keyboard dropping out, system stall requiring manual reboot). Now, it seems to do no harm to the system, though I should point out there was a blue screen error earlier today that did a forceable reboot of the system (I didn't get to read the full notice, only that something had happened requiring the system to reboot).

There are two factors at work here that might help illuminate things; the first is that it's been very hot here in Australia the last few days (temps around 95 degrees) that could perhaps contribute to a system overheating, and the hard drive itself at just a mere 160 gig capacity is nearly three years old. Actually....I have also installed DivX codecs onto my machine to watch some avi files that I can't watch otherwise.

I've been racking my brains to figure this issue out: Is it the ADSL modem I have? Is it the motherboard? The video card? The hard drive? The codecs? If anyone can steer me straight, I'd deeply appreciate it. The hard drive was wiped and it's on a clean install also.

S.

Update: I've just had a friend who works in IT tell me that he had a system have pretty much the same thing happening...due to overheating. So a heat sink or a simple fan perhaps in tandem with an open case may be the solution. I'd still be interested to hear people's feedback, however. Just to nail down this issue once and for all.

Not an issue. I have a level 50 who's about what...three years old now? He was going to be retired as I feel I have little more to say with him as a character and with a story anymore, and considering he's an Australian Aboriginal creation creature, he'd see his death as part of the natural cycle.

But being over seven feet tall, looking a touch like the Hulk, and being a SS/Inv Tank...the Rikti would remember him.

S.

No, the headset is normal connections through the front panel. So then...the only way to test to see if it's a power supply issue is to use another power supply? I don't have a spare, unfortunately...but the parts are brand new and under warranty.

S.