Tuesday night, after Margie watched me got pounded into the concrete in City of Heroes: “You know, I might like to do that.” Followed by, “So tell me about the different archetypes and power sets.”
Wednesday morning, over the phone: “You know, you could set me up on one of the slots on your account, and then while you’re at your Search Committee meeting tonight …”
Last evening, before I ran off to said meeting, I sat her down at my notebook, and watched her build a character …
Greetings to Bud Strong, Natural Scrapper (Martial Arts/Super Reflexes), latest hero in Paragon City! “Don’t make me come over there!” And he smokes a stogie …
Margie was about a quarter of the way through the tutorial when I left on my meeting, and when I came back two hours later, she was still sitting in the chair (with only one tech call in the interim — “What do I do when it says ‘Mapserver Disconnected’?”), though I know she’d gone up to put Kitten down.
By the end of the evening — a far, far later evening than I’d have gotten a pass on without comment — Bud Strong was up at 4th level, and Margie was having tremendous fun with various disorienting attacks and killer kicks. Great stuff. And we ended up chatting about for another half hour in bed after that.
So I transferred the install Zip file over to her machine, and she’ll probably kick off the install process-and-patch process today. Which then means we can both play. Bud will have to be rebuilt on Margie’s account (or whoever she wants to run), but I look very much forward to teaming up with her (and maybe trying some Defenders or other Controllers to do so).
And I don’t feel guilty at all … After all, every addict loves to see his friends get hooked, too.
Huzzah!
Muah.
Ha.
Haaaaaaa *cough*.
Actually, I’m wondering how long it’ll be before we get sent to the movies so Jackie and Margie can have Girl Smite Out.
Doyce…
Ow…
Oh the Pain…
A Dave pun, and not from Dave.
I’m so jealous of all of you. Every time I try to log on, I have such tremendous lag that I can’t do anything. Usually, after 2-5 minutes, I get Map Server Disconnected. I suspect bad cable lines, and since the cable co hasn’t done anything about them in the 20 years I’ve lived here, I don’t anticipate they’ll do anything now.
*sigh*
But I do envy you.
I feel your pain.
We have intermittent “bursts” (a day or two) of high Mapserver Disconnected (or Disconnected from Mapserver, which is a different error) frequency (2-15 minutes apart). Annoying. But I’ve also had long periods of no or few problems, It’s within the bounds of tolerance.
And … “Girls Smite Out.” I’m dyin’ here …
I actually have a further secret agenda behind getting CoH installed on Margie’s machine — I couldn’t get near mine between about 6 and … well, after lights out. And I wanted to play. Though it was fun seeing Margie do so. She get’s such a cute smile on her face as she kicks the snot out of paramilitary thugs.
My wife and I have been playing Star Wars Galaxies together for nearly a year, and now we’ve both moved on to World of Warcraft. It’s been much more fun than playing these games alone — in fact, I probably would have given them both up ages ago if we didn’t play together.
When I first put together a home network (ages ago, and up in the office), one of my vague hopes was that Margie and I could network play something like Doom or another FPS. Never quite happened, for a variety of technical and aesthetic (just not her cuppa) reasons. But I think teaming with Margie will be a blast.
Regarding rubberbanding, Map discons, and general lag.
1. Check it out after some updates: Lee was having MULTIPLE map discons this last week. Yesterday’s patch made them go away. Yay. That is the sort of thing that can come and go.
2. Mess with screen resolutions and chat window sizes. Also, drop that particle-count setting down: I don’t care how high is *says* it can be… lower it (can’t remember what mine’s at, but I know the laptop’s is down somewhere around 2000 to speed it up… maybe lower). The only thing particle count does is set the detail level on ‘auras’ around your character from powers and the like and other ‘moving’ things in the background (water, trees in the wind) — they still “show up” when it’s set lower, you can still see the power’s on, and it doesn’t slow your machine down (it’s a HUGE resource pull, because such things are ALWAYS moving). Jackie’s brand-new machine was lagging a few weeks back (Particle Count: 24,000) until I changed this to something more sane.
I group with Lee’s Force Field defender a lot, and lowering the particle count when you’re surrounded by about three shields at once, alongside other people who are similarly ‘dressed’, is a MUST. Even then, my machine struggles when we’re fighting in watery areas, or when there’s lots of animations going on in my background (*coff*AtlasPark*coff*).
In my experience, the worst place for these things is Atlas Park. Particularly right smack dab in front of HQ, where everyone and their mutant brother are showing off all their sfx (“Look at me! Look at me!”). Hell, even down in the basement I have the problem (perhaps because the system is trying to keep track of all the sfx in the viscinity and *then* deciding I can’t see it?). Galaxy City is much better.
The sand bag area at the AP entrance to the Hollows is similarly problematic. Exterior cityscapes are sometimes a problem (complexity of what’s around). Interior missions are, ironically (and, thankfully) the least unstable.
I’ll tweak that particle count thing.
This is my sole worry on duel gaming from home — that the added traffic of another machine will add enough lag to cause the machines grief.
CoH installed and updated half finished. Should be up tonight. So Dave where should I set up camp? Champions? Atlas Park or Galaxy City?
Dave will have his own answers, but for my money, Atlas Park is to be avoided whenever possible. Much lower idiot quotient in Galaxy. That’s me. 🙂
Margie
Champions seems to be the one everybody has most of their Characters on.
Champion is the server (where everyone is).
After the Tutorial, you are given the chance to report to Ms. Liberty (Atlas Park) or Backalley Brawler (Galaxy City). Choose the latter. Lower population, and easier map to maneuver in (both around HQ and to get to the train station).
Um, maybe I’ve missed something, but don’t you need 2 copies of the game to set up two accounts? I’ve never paid much attention to it, but I always thought the CD key installation business was to ensure you had to buy a new copy if you wanted a second account.
I do know that two people can’t log into the same account at the same time, and that the account being logged into doesn’t have to be one set up with that copy of the game. But I still thought it was one account per copy.
Re; Particle count.
The laptop’s at around 2500. The PC’s at 9000. I tweaked the PC down to 2500 and notice no real drop in image quality at all.
No real speed increase, either, but I’m in a ‘simple’ area.
(Also, Triumph server is the one Jackie and I go to when Champion’s down 🙂
David:
Nah, you can install 100 times to 100 machines off the same CD, basically. Just installing the software never asks for the installation key… and you don’t have to leave the CDs in to play or anything.
To get a new/different login ID, however, you need to enter your Installation key. You can only use the same Install Key once, and it then gets attached to THAT login you register. You can buy a new Install key for [Price of Software at Best Buy], off the NCSoft website.
Once you have the install key entered (thus creating your account at NCSoft), you can register a new login id.
The Login ID has the monthly fee connected to it.
So it’s:
* Download (free, technically)
* Install Key (costs ~$45)
* CoH ID, linked to Install Key (monthly fee)
Hey, Margie, welcome! I have a friend who is using my 2-week trial, so I created a Science-based Scrapper yesterday. Look for Power Fists if you want to team up. (Every other variation of the name “Power Fist” was take. He hopes to someday have a monthly team-up book with Iron Man. Dave can explain.)
Lowering particle count didn’t help with rubberbanding while moving. Switching from Prestige Power Slide to Sprint did! Which means Avocet wasted some Influence on Enhamcements for PPS. Ah, well.
Unfortunately, I’m still laggy in combat. The villains may get several shots in while I’m waiting for a punch to be thrown. (I wondered how a switchblade had a range of 50 feet, before I figured out it was lag.)
Reducing your render distance might help with the lag. When I was running CoH on my old computer, I had to turn it down so low every zone looked like Dark Astoria.
Lowering screen resolution might help too.
Essentially, turn everything as far down as you possibly can, then ramp things back up until you hit a balance between quality and lag.
Or, spend a few grand on a 3.4 GHz CPU and whatever that huge bad-MF video card I got is, and enjoy the show.
Oh, and another weird problem: Ever since I rotated the camera to get a screenshot of my character, the camera has had a tendency to drift, forcing me to hit Page Down to center it. This is usually just annoying, but can be downright dangerous if I’m trying to thread my way between groups of tough mobs. Anybody know of a fix for this?
It almost sounds like a key is partially stuck. That behavior doesn’t sound like it’s something software-wise.
It depends on what key you used to swing the camera around. Personally I use the middle-mouse button/wheel, becuase as soon as I let off the button, the camera-swing ends and I can use Page Down to reset it.
Some other keys that let the camera swing don’t automatically shut off, and have to be ‘de-toggled’ with a second keystroke.
Check your list of commands and see if you notice a command that does that.
Okay, I figured it out. When I bound Autorun to the middle mouse button, it unbound Rotate Camera… supposedly! There seems to be some sort of stealth binding going on with that function. No amount of unbinding and rebinding would prevent it from rotating the camera when I used the button to toggle Autorun off (if I moved my hand ever so slightly to the side while clicking). The only solution seems to be to unbind Autorun. So now, of course, I keep clicking the button while Avocet ontinues to run straight into the group of Penumbra Elites.
Suggestions?
Run!
It is really…
really…
REALLY hard to change or overwrite the default bindings for your mouse, and several of the default keys on the keyboard (F6 to F10… +, I think, et cetera).
What I’m saying it, you’re better off just training yourself not to do that.
It can be done — it only took me about a week or so to unlearn “F” as follow and relearn it as “Fly”… I only accidentally dropped out of the sky and into a group of baddies about a dozen times during the process. *weak grin*
The only thing I can think of would be this:
Leave the middle button bound to the autocamera.
Bind lshift+middle button to your autorun. That should work.
I’m thinking of rebinding F9 (“Hi, I’m a 5th Level Mutant Blaster who loves cooking and long walks on the beach. Wanna team up?”) to something more useful (like, “Wait!”).
2005 in Review
Started thinking last night about the big changes in and around my life over this last year. So here’s my personal retrospective Top Nine (because I couldn’t think of Ten),…
Valentine’s Day
Well, once our yummy dinner was done, we hopped on … … well, that was after I’d commented to Margie that it was about this time last year that I’d roped her in persuaded her that playing CoH might be…
Valentine’s Day
Well, once our yummy dinner was done, we hopped on … … well, that was after I’d commented to Margie that it was about this time last year that I’d roped her in persuaded her that playing CoH might be…