General Discussion

Originally posted by Kryogenic

 

Originally posted by Brynn

I'm not looking forward to the carnage. I will stay on Tortage. I don't like FFA-PvP.

For the people who have good computers and having problems playing, there have been a lot of tips given. I know experienced players know these. The most important are the usual:

1. Make sure you have the latest drivers.
2. Defrag. There is a lot of data, and it gets fragmented. After a large download, always defrag.
3. Don't try to play with all options on high. Try moderate and increase gradually so you can see what is causing problems. Especially, turn off the bloom and shadows, initially.
4. While it's open beta, it's still beta, meaning the devs are still running data parsers. The game you are playing is not the game that is being released.
5. I have no doubt there will be a patch after release, there usually is.

 

Aside from the afformentioned things to do to increase performance, there's one huge one that cleared up all my frame rate issues and most of my hitching:

Go into the in-game options and disable NPC names. You won't be able to see the names on any NPC unless you mouse over them or target them, but your fps should jump up considerably.

I was getting frustrated as I'm running over 2 gigs RAM and a 512 MB Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT. I just couldn't figure out why my fps would be 1.6 when I looked out into an open field in the daytime setting, but when I faced a rock or wall my fps was around 52, and this was when I was running on Low.

Once I turned off NPC names I was able to crank the game up to high to play with around 26 fps, but opted to bump it down to medium and then adjust some other options until I was satisfied with around 36-40 fps.

All in all, I think that it's a great game and the combat system has really grown on me. t first I thought it was rather gimmicky and too complicated, but once I got used to it I love the animations and the depth it adds to fights. For you WoW lovers out there, I got talked into reactivating my WoW account to play with some friends and I just can't do it after playing AoC. The combat seems even more stale than it did when I got burned out on WoW the first time.

Nothing beats throwing your 2 handed sword and impaling your foe with it, and that's not even a finishing move.

Oh no, it sound like old SWG lag :p

First, their policy of talking about things is a refreshingly good experience - compared to the endless silence I always had with SOE.

I am not sure if a FFA PVP is my taste of things, I will try it out, but if there is only mindless zergfest and death every 5 seconds I might log off very fast. I fear some will band in groups and terrorize the world, so I am not going to see much with my lv 20 chars and the open world. I wish they'd make an option not to participate in PVP so we can explore the continents a bit.

Thanks to MMORPG.COM, now we have all the details about this subject. Thx MMORPG.COM

Originally posted by Sinkael

I think we can finally silence that stupid rumor that this is an old Client, said in game and I will say it here. That theory makes no sense whatsoever is is complete rubbish cooked up by fanbois.

Fanboys are fanboys, even if 95% of computers of the planet are crashing when players launch AOC , they'll say it's players fault. They're fanboys, that's all. And ridiculous,. Most of them have been VG fanboys, TR fanboys, lotro fanboys before beeing AOC fanboys: same people.

Originally posted by Riker99

The two people who posted very decent rigs with problems have a common thread...

They are running Vista...

I highly suspect that performance on Vista will be significantly lower or more hit and miss than on XP at release.

Furthermore, add the complicating factors of  "are they running 32-bit or 64-bit Vista?" and "are they running DX9 or DX10?"  to the "are they running XP or Vista?" question, and you have alot of crap to deal with as a developer.

This is one of those times in game development where you have to bridge onto a new OS and its always a little hit and miss sometimes.

This time is even more complicated due to the change from DX9 to DX10 and the graphic cards that go along with that (GeForce 8000 series, Radeon 2000HD series).

If AoC can provide solid performance on Vista and DX10 a few months after release, it will be a great boon for the game development industry as a whole, as it will prove that Vista and DX10 can in fact perform better than, or at least on par with, DX9 and XP (Crysis absolutely failed at this goal, with DX10 performance being absolute crap).

And thats the point, isn't it?!

Edit: Thought of one more thing.

Crashes under Vista may not be the game's fault at all. The programmers may have followed the OS API perfectly to the tee, but if the code of the OS itself is buggy for certain aspects of the API, then utilizing those aspects will cause issues.

The solution is either Microsoft fixes the problem (unlikely in a reasonable timeframe), or the developers try to workaround the issue, which may or may not be possible.Debugging these kinds of issues is particularly painful as development could have centered around one buggy aspect of the API, forcing that entire part of the software to be redeveloped.

So atleast for me the game runs quite well except for the first day I tried it, had alot of stalling and long loading times. But after that it really runs great, dont know why it was like that the first day. Btw, I always deactivate my antivirus software when playing games like this, since they seems to scan all files that the computer access.

It's too bad so many ppl have problems, I hope funcom can fix most of the performance issues ppl are having. Would be sad to see this game fail, then it would be only WAR left to take on WOW. Would be better if AOC and WAR did it together ;) When there's competition, the games usually get's better :P

Originally posted by eric1000

And yes, I have seen the same rumors that it’s old, but it’s not entirely true.

FYI saying its not entirely true also means it's not entirely UNTRUE. He did not by any means put to rest the rumor that it is an old client.

We tried to include the best we had on a stable approach, but in our eagerness to please we wanted to get a few additional fixes out (hence we pushed the launch back a couple of hours). In order to reach the May 1st date some of those fixes led to unwanted side-effects which weren’t discovered in time. For some, it got a bit rockier than we wanted. We are running an extensive survey now, and from the first few hundred replies (which should be statistically correct), it seems that most people are actually having tons of fun AND good performance. We are humble about it though, and admit that things could have gone smoother, but the experience some people have had now has helped us to improve for launch, which is what really matters.

 

I said that this is what had happened in an earlier thread and the fanbois came out in force with the 'It's an old client, it's not the release client' mantra.  Well sorry to say I told you so but I TOLD YOU SO :)

 WTF are you talking about? He states in the article that this ISN"T the release client and you are telling fanbois that  said it wasn't that they are wrong?

Reading is fundamental:  "I must stress that it was, and is, beta, and the verdict should come for our launch version, not the version three weeks before." That is directly from the article and says right there that the open beta is not the release client....

Anyway, kudos to Funcom for finally coming clean and telling the truth about what happened, players respect that a lot more than half-assed lies about old clients.  Hope you get it sorted and have a good launch guys.

Again he didn't say it wasn't an old client, he talked around it by saying this:

We have heard that the Fileplanet Beta client is actually an old client and won't be the one used on release. Can you speak to that?
Funcom:	It for sure won’t be the one we have on release!

 You show me one place he states that it is not an old client. The closest he comes is by saying : "And yes, I have seen the same rumors that it’s old, but it’s not entirely true." Which again also means it's not entirely untrue now doesn't it?

If I was owner of this game and company I would kicked everyone in FUNcom in the ass. There is no excuse to give the public such crappy experience with the product you are trying to sell.

It seems like most MMO companies never learned some basic buisness rules. IT seems like they are controlled by some nerds who have no prior experience in the buisness world.

Just ask your self. Would you buy a car that did not preform as it was ment to?

I have had enough of half ass finnished mmo's.. If you can't make it play, don't make it at all.

Originally posted by URMAKER

Originally posted by Sinuous

Originally posted by tinywulf

Me, and two friends are in Open Beta, all 3 of us have vastly different systems from low end to high end.

All of us are experiencing the problems, the crashes, the lag, etc.

 

One of my friends wants to play it so bad he reboots like every hour or something just so the game runs ok.

See once the game crashes one time it fubars your video somehow to the point only a reboot fixes it (for the game) , otherwise the game ctd's like every 2 minutes.

WindowsXP is more stable than a game, never thought i'd see the day!

Anyway, my point is this game is not ready for launch, and I won't be buying it. It's just plain not ready.

Wow........that's an old-ass bug!  They fixed that one months ago on closed servers.

odd that i still have this problem then isn't it

also now after this client is crashing constantly on logging in after that, i did a file check and it did not find any problems...

Originally posted by fatpanda

Originally posted by eric1000

And yes, I have seen the same rumors that it’s old, but it’s not entirely true.

FYI saying its not entirely true also means it's not entirely UNTRUE. He did not by any means put to rest the rumor that it is an old client.

We tried to include the best we had on a stable approach, but in our eagerness to please we wanted to get a few additional fixes out (hence we pushed the launch back a couple of hours). In order to reach the May 1st date some of those fixes led to unwanted side-effects which weren’t discovered in time. For some, it got a bit rockier than we wanted. We are running an extensive survey now, and from the first few hundred replies (which should be statistically correct), it seems that most people are actually having tons of fun AND good performance. We are humble about it though, and admit that things could have gone smoother, but the experience some people have had now has helped us to improve for launch, which is what really matters.

 

I said that this is what had happened in an earlier thread and the fanbois came out in force with the 'It's an old client, it's not the release client' mantra.  Well sorry to say I told you so but I TOLD YOU SO :)

 WTF are you talking about? He states in the article that this ISN"T the release client and you are telling fanbois that  said it wasn't that they are wrong?

Reading is fundamental:  "I must stress that it was, and is, beta, and the verdict should come for our launch version, not the version three weeks before." That is directly from the article and says right there that the open beta is not the release client....

Anyway, kudos to Funcom for finally coming clean and telling the truth about what happened, players respect that a lot more than half-assed lies about old clients.  Hope you get it sorted and have a good launch guys.

Again he didn't say it wasn't an old client, he talked around it by saying this:

We have heard that the Fileplanet Beta client is actually an old client and won't be the one used on release. Can you speak to that?
Funcom:	It for sure won’t be the one we have on release!

 You show me one place he states that it is not an old client. The closest he comes is by saying : "And yes, I have seen the same rumors that it’s old, but it’s not entirely true." Which again also means it's not entirely untrue now doesn't it?

and that relese client is different is clear they will turn most debugging off for it to use a bit less memory and a bit improved performance, it will probably add a few fps for everyone but i guess it will not be a stellar gain from deactivating debugging.