Profile: Somnulus
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• • Darkfall: video and beta

  • Just downloaded and watched video.

    1. Personally I don't understand the comments about the quality of the graphics.

    The models are reasonable, and easily on par with World of Warcraft in design. Of particular note for myself was the skinning of the mounts; when I was watching the lizard-like mounts, I noted that the joins between the legs and the torso were very smooth, with no breaks in texturing, which I found refreshing.

    The textures that I saw throughout the video were seamless (as opposed to the texturing in Vanguard on release; in many areas, the textures were stretched and disproportionate, which definitely detracted from immersion gameplay).

    Many of the environment textures were mediocre (walls, ground, etc) but they were definitely serviceable and again, at least on par with WoW and many other games.

    The armor texturing, lighting, and highlights were nice; not overdone, just enough to give that metallic feel without making it look plastic.

    The environments were very interesting; I liked the variety and I'm looking forward to exploration.

    2. The animations in general were not particularly dynamic, but then again, for me personally, I am definitely willing to exchange complex animations for the smooth operation of the client.

    For a PvP-oriented game, you also have to consider animation times as a balance factor between classes; more complex animations take longer to complete, which means (as we've all seen before) that attacks with longer animations normally mean the player is dead before the animation/attack completes. It looks to me like they made a serious effort to balance caster, ranged and melee animations to try to ensure that each classes' attacks took approximately the same amount of time.

    That's a good thing; again, no player enjoys being killed simply because spell A, bow attack B or melee attack C takes eons to complete as compared to other classes.

    If that was the balance they were forced to strike, then it's completely understandable.

    3. The combat actually looked fast and difficult (from a survival viewpoint) which, in my opinion, should make it interesting. I can see a high frustration level starting out as people acclimate to getting their backsides handed to them on a regular basis, but once groups begin forming effective strategies, I think it will make for some very interesting battles.

    The one thing that slightly concerned me from the video was that it appeared that the creature-based humanoids (orc-types, wolf-types, etc.) tended to dominate combat; I'm hoping that isn't the result of a developer bias towards those races but just the result of the combat video they actually decided to use.

    If it is the result of developer bias, that is going to be a real issue. PvP-oriented MMOs are predominantly made up of min-max player populations; if the first edge is race, and being an orc means you can hand a human, dwarf, elf (whatever) their backside every time in combat, then it stands to reason that competitive players will want to succeed and will choose the race with the highest survivability.

    That, of course, leads to a serious population imbalance.

    4. Vehicle combat looked good; it wasn't overdone, which is fine. Screw complex particle effects if they are going to detract from client performance. Anyone who has seen a cannonball actually hit a ship knows that it really isn't all that damn impressive. About the only thing that would add to their existing cannonball impact animations would be debris and visible structural damage.

    Again, although it would be nice to see splintered wood flying everywhere and see ships fly apart, if it's going to bring combat to a crawl, no thank you.

    From the first ship combat, it seemed clear that you could board ships, which is good.

    The only thing was that I didn't see that occurring during the larger ship battle; to me, that would be integral to a smaller force defeating a larger force. While your smaller ships engage the larger ship, a boarding party swims across and tries to take the larger ship. At a minimum, it would force the crew of the larger ship to respond to the boarding party and take the pressure off of the attacking smaller ships for a brief time.

    In my opinion, just based on the video, the game play looked solid and the combat looked interesting.

    I do agree with earlier posters who mentioned that they seemed to gloss over crafting pretty quickly. Then again, in a promotional video for a game that is largely billed as PvP-centric, I can see the rationale for emphasis on combat.

    I will definitely be giving it a go. We'll see how the playability pans out. If it is indeed a large, open "sandbox" type world and the PvP is balanced well, it will be very enjoyable.

  • Posted: 8/30/08 1:57 PM
    Darkfall
• • It's been a couple of weeks...

  • ---

    Originally posted by Gazenthia
    

    ---

    Originally posted by bjornarg

    
    As I said before, very few players have issues that make the game unplayable.
    

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    Female characters physically attack 30-36% slower than male characters. It hasn't been officially noticed yet, they are only looking at female assassins right now.

    3850 ATI cards are yielding 7-27 FPS still

    Looking at socketed items crashes the game

    Massive class imbalances, and I mean MASSIVE

    Player made cities are pointless

    etc etc
    There is a lot more work to be done yet. I would suggest you keep waiting.

    ---

    Haven't noticed females attacking slower.... had two females from a guild working as a team on Stormrage (FFA PvP), level 20s, and they were double-teaming and ganking 25-29s left and right. So apparently either they knew what they were doing or they haven't noticed the slowdown either.

    Ran the game first on two HD3650 ATI cards in Crossfire and it ran just fine, averaging about 26-32 fps on medium to high custom settings.

    My current card is a single HD3870 x2 and I'm averaging 38-56 fps, jumping into the 70-90 range in less congested areas on maximum settings with some tweaks above the default max.

    Many PC gamers for some reason simply can't seem to reconcile themselves to the fact that you actually need to do some tweaking to get the best combination of performance and visuals. They just throw on the medium setting and complain when performance is less than expected.

    Sometimes it's just one or two settings that make all the difference; reduce the amount of foliage, limit the number of shadows, reduce your view distance for landscape, remove grass, etc. All of these minor tweaks still yield excellent visuals in AoC and improve your performance.

    Also, some people think that just because their video card supports a certain level of shading that it should do so under all circumstances flawlessly. Just because your card manufacturer states that X card supports Shader Model 3, that doesn't mean that you will get the same performance on every single game where you use Shader Model 3.

    Tweaks... for a PC gamer, it's de rigeur.

    For class imbalance, about the only real complaint I have so far is the same complaint I had in DAoC and just about any other MMORPG that features PvP; stuns, mezzes and holds.

    The maxim should really be all or nothing in this area. If you plan on giving stuns, mezzes and holds to one class, you should just plan on giving them to every class. That way, the

    Haven't had any involvement with player cities, so I can't really comment, nor with socketed items. So I'll take the player's word for it who have had experience in those areas.

    Overall, the game has played smoothly from the moment I installed it to the current date. The quests are interesting and playing on a FFA PvP server really enhances the feeling of danger and excitement, particularly when you have those quests that require a lot of travel.
    

  • Posted: 6/11/08 9:08 AM
    Age of Conan
• • Need serious help with PC issue!

  • ---

    Originally posted by chryses
    

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    Originally posted by Somnulus

    
    

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    Originally posted by chryses
    Yesterday I bought a 2nd 8800gt to install on my PC and go SLi. I have ran SLi a couple of times with older cards and normally its plug and play.
    After installation I received an error I have not seen before.
    * i get to the windows logo just before it loads and then the screen goes blue and I get an error, something like...
    A problem has occurred and windows needs to shutdown to prevent damage. The bios in this system is not fully ACPI compliant.. stop (0x00000002, oxab96440; 0xe1d48a20, 0x8ab96600)
    * I obviously took the new card out, still same error.
    * swapped cards over, same error.
    * cmos bios, managed to get to windows once on safe mode but it had absolutely nothing there.
    * tried reinstaling windows, now instead of hanging on that blue screen it goes into a reboot cycle.
    
    My specs: motherboard Asus A8N32-SLi, 2 gig of ram, 8800gt 512, AMD 4800, XFi soundcard....
    I dont think its the video card because in the past I would not get anything or really bad glitches when it was. For once I am really lost and I have built my last 4 PCs. Has anyone come across this error and fixed it??
    Any help would be awesome, thx
    
    
    
    
    

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    First, check your power supply, because that is what the computer uses to manage Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI); how many watts is it pushing? On an SLI system, the lowest recommended (if I remember correctly) is 500 watts; but power supplies rarely deliver their rating. So if you have a 500-600 watt PSU it may possibly not be delivering the full power required to run your dual card system.
    This is particularly true if you are using a generic PSU.
    It is also possible that it is just a BIOS / OS communication fault from installing a new piece of hardware.
    Normally when you get a BIOS warning error like that from the OS, it means that previous settings on the BIOS have become incompatible with new hardware installed.
    Because of the way that Windows is designed today, it takes all of its hardware cues from the BIOS; so if there is a conflict or error there, that would stop Windows from functioning properly.
    My other recommendations if it's not the PSU (if you haven't tried these already);
    1. Shut down the computer, unplug the power supply, and open the case.
    2. Find your CMOS jumper and put it in the CLEAR CMOS position (normally I think on a three peg jumper, the CLEAR position is 2-3)
    3. Plug the computer back in and power it up so that it clears the CMOS.
    4. Shut down, unplug the power supply again and find the CMOS battery; remove and replace it, just to be on the safe side.
    At this point, your CMOS and BIOS should be reset completely to its default factory settings. So any changes you may have made (overclocking, other adjustements) would be cleared.
    Go ahead and plug the power supply back in and start the computer.
    If you get no BIOS errors, you may or may not see the Windows DOS start options screen asking if you want to start normally, etc.
    Select "Start Windows Normally".
    If that screen doesn't come up, and Windows starts normally, you should be good.
    Let me know if any of this helped, please.
    
    

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    Thanks Somnulus..
    Funny enough I had the PSU issue before (1 year ago) because I had a 500 watt PSU and the computer did start but would reboot every 5 minutes. So I purchased a pretty expensive Corsair 750 watt which had some pretty good reviews for performance and cooling.
    I found the error message on windows and it said that it was obviously the BIOS and it could be due to new hardware being installed. So I cleared the CMOS and BIOS and tried it again. Semi success I guess...windows wanted to repair or something so I did a clean install which is fine since I have a hdd just for booting it. I managed to get through to the windows but now its not recognising my sata drive for some weird reason. I am sure I could mess about and get it working also but I was playing with the idea of really updating my PC so in my anger went and spent a ton of cash on the latest technology and hopefully it will turn up on Tuesday. New mobo, cpu, DDR3 ram, cd, hdd, keyboard, mouse....basically new build...
    
    

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    I completely understand your frustration; I've felt it many times before myself.

    In the long run, a new computer is always a good investment if you spend the money to ensure that the system you put together now is going to remain viable at least three years down the road (in order to pace with Moore's Law and a few other notables in the hardware / software industry).

    On the SATA drive issue; does the BIOS recognize the drive? Also, what version of Windows are you running?

    Vista has a funny way of not recognizing SATA drives after it formats them; I'm not sure why, but when I first installed Vista Ultimate on my own new system, it found and formatted the root C drive for installation, then reported that there was no drive to install Windows.

    Then on reboot, it found the drive again and continued the install. Once Vista was up, my other two SATA drives were not showing in Explorer / My Computer.

    I had to go to System Management, set the drives and format them there for the system to show them in Explorer / My Computer. Which is odd compared to earlier versions of Windows, which would normally still show the drive, but it would simply be inaccessible until it was formatted.

    Anyway, good luck with the new build!
    

  • Posted: 6/08/08 2:44 PM
    General Discussion
• • Vista 64bit ?

  • Running rock solid on my system, 4GB PC8500 OCZ Reaper 1066.

    Zero issues.

    Here's my system specs for reference;

    Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 3.0 ghz
    4GB OCZ Reaper PC8500 1066 RAM
    320GB Seagate Barricuda SATA300 HDD
    Sapphire Radeon HD3870 X2 1GB DDR3 RAM

    Average 38 - 56 FPS on almost complete max settings. Game looks great and runs beautifully.

  • Posted: 6/07/08 5:03 PM
    Age of Conan
• • Need serious help with PC issue!

  • ---

    Originally posted by chryses
    Yesterday I bought a 2nd 8800gt to install on my PC and go SLi.  I have ran SLi a couple of times with older cards and normally its plug and play.
    After installation I received an error I have not seen before.
    * i get to the windows logo just before it loads and then the screen goes blue and I get an error, something like...
    A problem has occurred and windows needs to shutdown to prevent damage.  The bios in this system is not fully ACPI compliant.. stop (0x00000002, oxab96440; 0xe1d48a20, 0x8ab96600)
    * I obviously took the new card out, still same error.
    * swapped cards over, same error.
    * cmos bios, managed to get to windows once on safe mode but it had absolutely nothing there.
    * tried reinstaling windows, now instead of hanging on that blue screen it goes into a reboot cycle.
     
    My specs: motherboard Asus A8N32-SLi, 2 gig of ram, 8800gt 512, AMD 4800, XFi soundcard....
    I dont think its the video card because in the past I would not get anything or really bad glitches when it was.  For once I am really lost and I have built my last 4 PCs. Has anyone come across this error and fixed it??
    Any help would be awesome, thx
     
     
     
     

    ---

    First, check your power supply, because that is what the computer uses to manage Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI); how many watts is it pushing? On an SLI system, the lowest recommended (if I remember correctly) is 500 watts; but power supplies rarely deliver their rating. So if you have a 500-600 watt PSU it may possibly not be delivering the full power required to run your dual card system.

    This is particularly true if you are using a generic PSU.

    It is also possible that it is just a BIOS / OS communication fault from installing a new piece of hardware.

    Normally when you get a BIOS warning error like that from the OS, it means that previous settings on the BIOS have become incompatible with new hardware installed.

    Because of the way that Windows is designed today, it takes all of its hardware cues from the BIOS; so if there is a conflict or error there, that would stop Windows from functioning properly.

    My other recommendations if it's not the PSU (if you haven't tried these already);

    1. Shut down the computer, unplug the power supply, and open the case.

    2. Find your CMOS jumper and put it in the CLEAR CMOS position (normally I think on a three peg jumper, the CLEAR position is 2-3)

    3. Plug the computer back in and power it up so that it clears the CMOS.

    4. Shut down, unplug the power supply again and find the CMOS battery; remove and replace it, just to be on the safe side.

    At this point, your CMOS and BIOS should be reset completely to its default factory settings. So any changes you may have made (overclocking, other adjustements) would be cleared.

    Go ahead and plug the power supply back in and start the computer.

    If you get no BIOS errors, you may or may not see the Windows DOS start options screen asking if you want to start normally, etc.

    Select "Start Windows Normally".

    If that screen doesn't come up, and Windows starts normally, you should be good.

    Let me know if any of this helped, please.

  • Posted: 6/07/08 1:05 PM
    General Discussion