Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhh
Quote:
Originally posted by 1000101
<quote from article>
Most people are running 512. Perhaps you should make this the defacto standard? If a person doesnt have 512, I suggest pricewatch.com You can get RAM dirt cheap.
I really do not see a reason to invest in more RAM only to run a game that lacks any efficient memory management.
If Funcom tells me that 256Meg with well tuned fat16 filesystems (for speed) and a permanent swap partition is too little memory then I only laugh.
The only program Iknow that chokes on my system is AO.
I won't go into technical details, but AO's internal memory and graphics handling is simply poor.
We know that Funcom is currently working on this (see the indication in the patch notes that you will no longer see the attack/cast animations of your foe unless it hits you, due to "optimizations")
Maybe I am wrong, but my impression is that the texture and mesh loading lags have become far peskier than before the latest patch.
Anyway, to add up to my previous article, I played a bit today, quite bored by the neverending mission scheme and got quite frustrated again by various bugs. l searched a cave mission three times without finding the mission item (am i stupid, are my eyes bad, or is it a bug? Many told me the same happened to them, always in cave missions...)
Then I logged off after 7 consecutive failed tries to leave the shop, each taking a few minutes... "Area change was not initiated on server"...
I think I am getting a taste of CL.
</whine start>
Hmmm - I really would prefer not to whine, I am ready to leave AO, but I feel sad about it.
I had much fun playing my chars. I also enjoyed much soloing, as I am not always in party mood.
Maybe it is funcom's intention to disencourage players from soloing, or maybe I was used to solo too high mission levels until the patch.
Maybe I am a bad player, but I cannot find joy in regularly dying and losing the exp when encountering a bunch of red engineer NPC that cast swarms of even more reddish droids.
And please don't think that I set the difficulty slider too high. This even happened after degrading mission ql to the first higher ql step above the own level. This should be acceptable for well-equpped chars, but with these unbalanced NPC pets it isn't.
Please don't take this as unreasonable whining, the NPC pets are admittedly still not balanced.
As I don't want to be a paying software tester, I am thinking about cancelling my account if there nothing improves. There are still 8 days left to the next billing, so I think I will simply not go online the next days, until something changes. If Funcom doesn't do the necessary fixes, I'll cancel in the hope that they get their ass up in the next 3 months, so I might have FUN playing AO again.
</whine end>
Sorry for the language... I am not very amused about my today's playing experience...
Have fun...
Ànnoyed Online, Yours
Katerchen
New major bugs - please fix before even thinking of CL
Hi...
Today, Monday in the morning, I thought about re-checking the playability of the game, as my internet connection to the server is perfect at this time.
I didn't play for long, though.
I had to unwillingly verify two new bugs that I already noticed on the weekend.
Now I know that these are real bugs and not peak-hour-connection problems.
These are:
Bug 1: Whompa Lockup
Often when you enter a whompa, your PC will lock up for quite a long time. You might mistake it for a crash, because the freeze time without hard disk activity can last many minutes. I don't know the reason (client memory thrashing? server not transmitting the new zone information?), but this is none of my business.
Fix this Funcom, it is annoying to sometimes need about 20 mins from Borealis to Avalon.
Bug 2: Calms are broken now
I had to repeat an observation I already had some times on weekend.
A mob that was successfully calmed and being displayed in the yellowish calm haze might attack you any time.
Yes. It can surprisingly attack you anytime. The special thing is that this can happen anytime during the calm nano's active time and that the monsters remain being displayed as calmed while they attack you.
It looks like as if calms now have a chance to break by themselves.
I couldn't find this announced anywhere and also because of the mob being still displayed as calmed - there is also no message that the calm would have expired, so this must be considered as a new major bug. (No, no reflect shields etc were active, no AoE attacks were being used etc... it was clearly a bug)
Conclusion:
I hoped to have enjoyable playing.
But it was not very enjoyable.
You will understand, that I do not want to pay for AO as long as it has been downpatched to a beta quality stage.
Now is Monday. Please fix the bugs asap, or I'll cancel my account in time before the next payment would be due. That is next Monday.
Learn from your mistake, fix the bugs first before working on the expansion packs.
Thank you.
Annoyed Online,
Yours
Katerchen
Can the answer be simpler?
You say that the speed issue with loads of people wearing loads of armour/clothes/weapons, along with all the headroom that adds to the amount of network traffic that has to go between client and server. And that this is a possible tactic to reduce the gameplay of people on slower connections or those with insufficient video ram/ system ram or hardware support because those people would still be loading all this data from the network and disk and then possibly getting into a infinite loop of swapping.
Just a silly thought, and please excuse me if this is absurd, but it makes sense in my strange little mind ...
Instead of kicking people out of an area when there are too many people there, which to me will spoil the fun of whatever event is going on, why not allow those people in but only transfer what is needed as a bare essential. Such essentials might be their name, level and anything that the AO client relies upon to make the game work client side. Then such people would be represented in the world as a generic look (maybe a ghost of some kind) until you select and *t* target them.
First off, I realise that network traffic still has to be sent and recieved to say what these people are doing, but you are not sending any data that might not be important, nor clogging up the users hard disk, graphics card and memory with excessive things to display and manage.
The trade off, obviously, is that in a very crowded area, some people will be just like dummies in appearance :p until targetted, but atleast everyone has a better chance of participating in an event or attack if they choose to.
It seems it could be possible to have a client side setting too, to limit how many people in an area can be seen be the client in full detail and at what threshold they become temporary ghosts. And ofcourse, this number would be rolling in that if your limit was 30 characters in detail, and you target your 31st, then one of your detailed chatracters would have to roll off to ghost mode if resources are low. Therefore people with high specs can get full depth and beauty in crowded areas, and low specs can still know who is there!
In my little world, this solution would be more acceptable to me than restricting the ability to participate...that is if it is possible to do in reality, which I wish not to make any claims that it is - because I don't know! :)
One last comment about the polygons being optimised to increase frame rates and memory usage etc... One reason I came to AO straight after its BETA period ended was because it looked so nice. The reason I stayed was because I got hooked to the game. I would still hope in light of this that AO would still look as beautiful as it does today. I hope the optimisations don't make the game look like DAOC or EQ.
Please, not again...this is meant to be Anarchy!
Crowd control: I have some very real concerns over this proposal, and I have to say it smacks at the ultimate example of a lack of technical imagination. No offence intended to game director, but this could ultimately open the way to destroying AO and denting some what its quality of reality.
Quote:
“This article is not the easiest of documents - and I am sorry about that.”.
So am I. I would find a document like this difficult to write as I would know that many of the players would equate it as “We don’t want to spend money on faster hardware so we prefer to take your money and handicap the game for you.”.
Quote:
“If you connect these things you will see that we might possibly get a problem. People have experience what they call "lag" in many situations while playing the game. Usually this is when you get into an extremely crowded area with a lot of other players. To call this "lag" is actually a wrong definition of the problem.”
Hmm, I tend to class lag as the data transfer rate between your servers and my client, not the slowdown of a heavily textured environment. You should be giving people the option in there settings to allow their own limiting of crowding. You could also enable the limiting of textures for crowded areas as an option in the client setup. This would blow away most of your “client “ problems, but I tend to think that the issues are more with the servers being underpowered for popular areas. Please dont patronise us with this, 99% of the players know the real score here.
Quote:
“People can crowd in - so many with so many different looks - that other people coming into the area freeze up or sometimes experience client crashes when your computer tries to load more than the size of the 3D card memory. (You get lock-ups from infinite swapping...)”.
This is actually the fault of the client, not the users’ graphics card. As I pointed out in a erlier post, YOUR client likes to re-render the textures and polygons again and again and never seems to clear them away afterwards. Also I was under the impression, especially where I have been developing graphical systems, that the correct use of the graphical interfaces prevents the card from attempting to load textures beyond its physical ability. If for some reason you have an exotic solution to this then again it’s the client which should prevent these crashes by managing its resources better. Given that EverQuest doesnt give these problems I would have to ask why does AO?
Quote:
"Digression: I confess that writing about this makes me uncomfortable. In an ideal world I would very much have liked to have a system were we could handle any number of characters with an infinite number of polygons and textures with 120 frames per second on any PC.”
In an ideal world we would have a client that could manage the graphics properly and prevent slowdown. In an ideal game world we would NOT have limits on the number of visible players set by system administrators but would allow individuals to decide this.
I think that most readers know the difference between slowdown caused by graphics and lag caused by busy servers. The original article does not mention the lag when one is trying to leave a zone, or a room or an almost empty play area such as Broken Shores. It does seem to me that either AO have lost the technology plot a little and have not understood the players experience, OR, they are fully aware of the problem, know it will cost them money and are looking for a cheap solution at the players expense. Given the "inspired" game development and the fact that high levelers are leaving in droves I would tend to think the latter.
We are not fools AO, you play around with us, we simply go and play with some one else.