If you've not been playing lately

[Xev]

[General Idiot]

Personally I stay subbed mostly for access to freeform characters but also because the more money they're making off the game, the more incentive they have to continue supporting it.

[blackjak]

After logging onto STO a couple of times I am beginning to think it's a bandwidth problem. I DC way more there than in CO. Probably because it's busier. I was in spacedock #11 at one point. Haven't seen RenCen hit double digits yet.

[Xev]

Had a nice solid connection early in the morning and everything was working great. Went to take care of some chores and afterwards when logging back on (as more people logged on......? *burns CO tech support hat*) things steadily went downhill. The familiar red flashing bars were back on the top and bottom of the screen when logging a toon in or zoning, the lag spikes were back although they weren't as bad as they have been. And now Xev is stuck in MI and I can't get him out. I tried all the regular tricks and I keep getting booted out of the game with the texture file error whenever I try to load him. 2 steenking levels to go to 40 with him..

Personally I stay subbed mostly for access to freeform characters but also because the more money they're making off the game, the more incentive they have to continue supporting it.

If I'd been subbed for awhile and didn't wanna lose access to my FF's and I really liked CO enough.. I might be tempted to stay subbed - and more power to anyone with a sub. No offense meant, for sure.

They sure aren't going to attract many new subs the way things are lately, though. I wanted to save up for a LTS and now I start to wonder why I spend so much of my fun time being frustrated for 'free' (ok, I've bought zen..). I wanted to try STO and now I'm thinking I don't wanna go through the whole process of getting invested in another game by the same people just to find out it's unplayable. As far as that goes... I wanna play NWN too! After all, I played the original. Seems a shame not to try the update.

CO is a great game when it works. I bet STO is too. They have to be consistently playable though. That's just a bare minimum requirement to me and I'm thinking, to other people with new sub money too.

Anyway..  : /

I hope they get stuff sorted out soon and am rooting for them. It was way more fun reading/writing about & enjoying the fun things in game.

- Bleh I still can't get Xev out of MI.. "Fatal Error.."

[General Idiot]

Texture file errors tend to more frequently be caused by a corrupted file somewhere rather than anything on their end. If it states a filename when the error happens, delete that file and relaunch the game and the launcher will download a new copy of it. Alternately, reinstall the game entirely though that'll take much longer.


As for STO, it's received a lot more attention and it does show. If nothing else it's at the bare minimum always playable in my experience. Even better, it hardly penalises you at all for not subscribing. Neverwinter I'm still not sure about. The combat is fun but does get a bit repetitive after a while because Cryptic's encounter design never managed to evolve beyond 'Beat on a big sack of HP while dodging a million adds'. Seriously, literally every boss fight in Neverwinter is that without any variation beyond slight but ultimately insignificant differences in the boss's attacks and the number and abilities of adds. And as someone who loved the customisation in all their previous games, the whole 'appearance is determined by the gear you're wearing' thing that was outdated a decade ago really irritated me. Especially when all the gear in 20 level ranges has almost the exact same appearance, and then they go even further and let you copy appearance from one piece to another but charge through the nose for it. A little thing in the end, but enough that I don't feel like playing it anymore.

...wow, that ended up being more of a rant than I'd intended. But meh.

[Xev]

I've had two things fix these Fatal Errors. Setting the video down, and replacing texture.hogg and texture2.hogg with saved backups and letting the game update them when logging back in. This latest Fatal Error appears to be with one of the texture hogs. They don't really tell you directly what file to go and find and delete and re-download.

I'm logging in in safe mode with backed up hoggs copied over from another drive and it's just not happening. If I had unlimited bandwidth I'd just DL the entire client over (and over) again..

Had this Fatal Error problem a few months into playing CO and it didn't show up again until Fatal Err0r.

Monday's are my Sunday and I've already spent a day's worth of bandwidth just trying to get things to work : /
2...steenking...levels... to 40! Then he finally gets his shield (The Mind AT) and can do some Gravi's..

CO is not the game for the internet gimped. ~ 40mb an hour in bandwidth on average for playing, and then there's the special times like these with the Fatal Err0rz.

[therain93]

That sounds like a weird issue that CoH had for a while too, where the game would crash trying to load some odd texture, like for a glove.  Eventually it went away, but my memory is way fuzzy on how it came about.

[dwturducken]

Not even close. Available evidence suggests COH ran on a farm of about 50 physical servers just for the maps, and a virtual cluster (think 10-15 servers that can migrate virtual machines between them as needed for load) for the global stuff. Not sure about databases, but I'd wager those were physical as well.

Weirdly, while you were not the person I was thinking of, I thought I remembered you arguing, in a different discussion, in favor of maximizing the virtualization of servers. It seems like, with the bulk of the assets resident on the client side, and the three games sharing a good portion of the back-end mechanics, as well as a few graphical elements, that running everything from one physical box (well, really two for redundancy) should be possible.

My experience with servers is limited to a Windows office environment and, to a much lesser extent, a Linux hosting environment, though, so don't take me too seriously. 

[Codewalker]

It would take a huge server to do so. I don't know about Neverwinter and STO (though I'd wager they're similar since Cryptic's engine is derived from the COH engine), but COH processes player physics serverside. That means the server has to not only use a lot of processing power, but needs a massive amount of RAM in order to load the full geometry for all of the zones.

[Brou]

As of tomorrow's patch, the emotes will be fixed. There will also be new looping variants of superdance, spacewalk, and the spinning intro of spacewalk.

There could be another surprise. Stay tuned.

[Xev]

/em cheer!

[DJMoose]

Yay!

[blackjak]

Hope it does the trick. I still think it's a bandwidth problem. Made my second account in STO on the Klingon side and went through the tutorial that ends up on Quo'nos that has lighter traffic than earth spacedock (think RenCen in CO or AP in COH). That is where I DC'd a lot before, but Klingon side has lighter traffic and I never DC'd. I did get some rubberbanding during the last space battle, but I play in a OSX wrapper so some of that is to be expected. Who knows though. It would be great to solve some of the problems in CO at least.

[Brou]

A dance pack has just been released.

[DJMoose]

A dance pack has just been released.

Progress?  Actual developer involvement?

For the record, all the animations are great.  And Air Guitar is just good fun.