The Tuesday Night Fight Club

Posted: **Sat Jan 06, 2007 12:35 am**

I have a L6 wood elf ranger (Wylea) on server 1. Currently poking around crafting and woefully short on coin.

I would not mind trying another class or two...

Posted: **Sat Jan 06, 2007 2:54 am**

Your wood elf must be on Kojan. Wood elves were not available until recently and I don't have any characters on that continent but it might be fun to make one and try it.

We have:

lvl 7 gnome sorcerer and rogue on Qalia
lvl 9 high elf sorcerer and cleric on Qalia
lvl 9 dark elf necro and psionicist on Qalia
lvl 11 barbarian rogue and shaman on Thestra
lvl 14 ranger and blood mage on Qalia but they need to move to Thestra
lvl 17 warrior and cleric on Qalia

For a few weeks Qalia was the only continent open so most of our characters ended up there.

Hope to see you in game soon!

Posted: **Tue Jan 09, 2007 6:11 pm**

Yeah lag is absolutely horrible for me. I'm getting framerates of 3 and 4. At some points I feel like I'm playing a slide show.

Otherwise the game is quite interesting. Though I have to agree with the morons who don't read the quest logs and actually do what they say. The only quest that is giving me problems is the one they say is to find the gnoll camp and steal some crates or foodstuffs. I scoured the south western countryside and could not find a camp that even had them. But by the time I did find a camp, my game was so laggy I had to log.

One other note that I have been noticing is looting issues that once you do loot, you are unable to heal over time. Not even magical healing returns your lost hit points. I end up having to log out to fix the issue.

Oh, and has anyone else been suffering from 'You have been disconnected from social chat' or something like that. Your still logged in the game, but all the mobs disappear, and you can't complete any quests or interact with any NPC's once that happens. Its frustrating.

Posted: **Tue Jan 09, 2007 6:50 pm**

Lag seems to me to be improving a little which is surprising given the recent increase in the number of players. Newbie areas are a madhouse with people racing to kill mobs when they spawn before anyone else does.

Where have you been playing Tarrax? My guess is Halgarad since you seem to favor barbarians.

I've not noticed a connection between looting and healing problems, certainly don't want to avoid looting! I see the "disconnected from social chat" messages and don't really understand what that means. When I can't interact with NPCs it seems that a crash is imminent. Crashes seem to happen frequently - I don't know if that is because of high server population or because of all the patches they are doing now to get ready for game launch which should be in about 3 weeks.

I made a wood elf bard to try and catch up with Wylea but am stuck at level 4 1/2 trying to collect poison from a poison pot. Rumor has it that one person can loot it right after a server reset but it is bugged for everyone else. I'm hoping they fix it in the next day or two so I can follow the intended quest progression.

Posted: **Tue Jan 09, 2007 7:15 pm**

am stuck at level 4 1/2 trying to collect poison from a poison pot

Is that the one where you get the poinson from a cauldron in a wooden tower? If so, that quest has been broken for some time now. Skip it.

Also, here are some performance tweaks I pilfered:

Important to note that while this WILL work for many of you, it won't
work for ALL of you (I'm rolling back my drivers and then defragging
after this, but if that doesn't work, it certainly didn't work for me
yet)

Also, I don't think that ANY of these tweaks are "supported" so before
you do ANYTHING, make a copy of the file you are about to change and
save it somewhere in the event that you need to revert back to basics.

I'll try to make this as clear and easy to follow as I can.

#1 GENERAL Tweaks
A) FIRST, be sure to defragment after install. Seriously, this has a
HUGE impact on the game's performance.

B) Turn off your AV program and/or Firewall. I know you hate the idea
of it but try it, if it doesn't help then you know you can leave it
on.

C) Google the program RivaTuner 2.0 and set the card to force shading
at 2.0. if anyone else figures this out please let me know.
personally I think this program stinks. THIS IS AN ADVANCED TWEAK
don't mess with anything else unless you know what you're doing!!!

D) In the in-game settings, change sound settings to "Hardware"

E) In the in-game settings, set the resolution to 1024x768

F) In the in-game settings, turn off HDR

G) NVidia 6xxx series users, Tru using the older "71" series drivers.
Linky goodness (Link en francais)

H) ATI users (I'm one myself) by far, ATI users with AMD proc's tend
to be having the most problems aside from the Nvidia 6xxx users.
I've been told to try the catylist 6.8 drivers (which can be found
Here) I am currently using these drivers and still have the older
6.7 driver install program, I can't find it on the web, but I
haven't really searched for too long. the original filename is :
6-7_xp-2k_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_34826 so for those who want to try a
driver rollback, there you go.

I) Also for ATI peeps, Rumor has it that the Omega drivers
(www.omegadrivers.net) give some folks SIGNIFICANT increases in
quality and speed. UPDATE!!! My personal test shows only a ~1 FPS
gain and what's worse is that the Omega drivers don't support
OC'ing for the 1300+ series of cards. DOUBLE worse is that
reverting back to the Catalyst 6.8 drivers no longer allow ATI tool
to OC my ATI 1300pro and deleted my openGL drivers which the ATI
installer didn't like re-installing (I know, weak card. Give it a
rest already)

I) Someone previously suggested starting the client and then
Alt+Tabbing to desktop, bringing up the Task Manager, Going to
processes, selecting the VGClient.exe file and setting the priority
to high. might work for some.

J) TURN OFF Hardware Occulsion while in the field and TURN IT BACK ON
in town. The FPS gain in the field (for me) is close to 10!!!

#2 VGCLIENT.INI Tweaks
go to:
[install drive]:\ProgramFiles\Sony\Vanguard\bin\vgclient.ini

Open it using notepad and make the following changes:
AnisotropicFiltering=off (which supposedly works for NVidia folks VERY
well) Side Note: ALSO go into your card's propertied and change this
there as well

UseJoystick=False (I don't know why but this did give me an extra 3-5 FPS)

UsePrecaching=True (For NVidia folks and some ATI folks, this is the holy grail)

UseTrilinear=False (For some folks this was an incredible boost)

UseCubemaps=False (I only noticed an ugly load screen, the game still
looks fine to me)

ReduceMouseLag=False (this has worked for a few folks as well)

UseTripleBuffering=True (Only do this if you also set the vsync)

UseVSync=True (it gave me a few extra FPS)

UseSound=False (You lose the sound but can pick up nearly 5-10 FPS!!!)
Side note: instead of turning sound off you CAN set
LowQualitySound=True instead!

GlobalHardwareSkinning=True (gave me a noticable bump 2-5FPS-ish)

TextureDetailWorld=5 (this controls the texture details, raising this
to 5-7ish can save you a significant amount of memory and reduce
stuttering. This can range from 0-7, 0 being the most detailed
textures to 7 being lowest texture detail)

RenderQuality=5 (Setting this to 5 sets the game into "very high" mode
but coupled with a higher TextureDetailWorld setting, it will give you
the special effects of very high with the memory
requirements/stuttering of a low or medium settings)

(NOTE: Changing the in-game drop-down graphics settings to Medium or
High (or whatever you change it to) changes BOTH RenderQuality and
TextureDetailWorld to their default settings. The trick is to adjust
all the in-game settings FIRST, THEN mess with the .ini settings for
these two and don't flip between low/med at all in-game since that
would reset this change)

Now look for the [Engine.NullRenderDevice] Heading.
There add the line: CacheSizeMegs=64

This is rumored to be the workaround to the sysconfig.ini overwrite
issue I'll be mentioning in just a second.

#3 SYSCONFIG.INI Tweaks

When you start Vanguard the autopatcher will scan your filed and
update the sysconfig.ini file (but thankfully, not the vgclient.ini
file) When it has finished updating you'll have the "PLAY" button.
BEFORE CLICKING ON PLAY! go to:
[install drive]:\ProgramFiles\Sony\Vanguard\bin\sysconfig.ini

and find the entry that says: CacheSizeMegs=32 and increase that. Some
say use 128, others say 256 and still others say 512. I say to just
play with it and find the one that works best for you.

Then click on FILE and SAVE it. THEN click on play.

I hope that this helps everyone. at the very least it SHOULD help
cleanup all of the "why are my FPS so low?" posts out there. (I don't
mind if you want to sticky this) If the above didn't help you then
chances are that you need to upgrade some hardware in your system.
First try getting your gaming rig up to around 2G or better of system
RAM. After that you might want to consider a full system update.

One final thought. if you are running through a Router, try plugging
your computer directly into your modem to bypass and packet filtering
that your router might be doing. I've heard rumors that this has
helped a few people more than a little.

Finally, I will be adding to this as people send me their own findings
and tweaks (or until I lose the abillity to edit the post ot this gets
lost somewhere)

Posted: **Tue Jan 09, 2007 7:24 pm**

Good Grief!

If one has to monkey with their drivers and settings that much to play the game, it won't sell to anyone but geeks.

Posted: **Tue Jan 09, 2007 7:24 pm**

I've been getting a bit bored with the "play for 15 minutes then crash" routine. They cannot even keep their forums stable let alone the game engine. I also found an area with a bunch of "invisible" platforms, so you cannot get to the NPCs

Wylea is 7 ranger / 9 blacksmith now. Got killed north of CB and not sure if I'm going to recover the corpse. My only reason would be to find out when you can actually make something of use as a smith. At L8, best I could do is a pommel. Not sure where to get the other recipes for crafting a full weapon.

I started a human sorcerer (Seari) in Thestra to check out spells a bit more.

I also started a half-giant dark knight in beta 2 because the beta server was down. Main note here is the huge number of players with half-giant characters. With 30+ low level people soloing in the starter area, the first aggro contest got really old really fast.

There is so much broken and missing that I am suprised they went to beta 5. It will be a complete disaster if they try to lauch by the end of January. Horizons suffered a horrible death for doing just that, among other things.

Posted: **Tue Jan 09, 2007 7:43 pm**

Also, it looks like Vanguard is a champion RAM pig. People have indicated that Vanguard alone will eat up 1+ GB and that there is a big performance boost going from 1 GB to 2 GB.

Not really an option for me - would cost $300 and I am already in the doghouse for blowing my budget on furnishing the apartment in Boston.

Posted: **Tue Jan 09, 2007 10:19 pm**

I bought a new ATI 1300 PRO card today. I will install it tomorrow...wanna play EQ tonight.

That is all I am putting into machine for VG, I have 1.5 GB of Ram...for EQ2 beta.

Posted: **Thu Jan 11, 2007 3:26 pm**

Looks like they are launching their "Lead Zepplin" on 1/30. They have so many outstanding stability issues, broken and missing features, and untested content that I am seriously thinking of not buying until 2/29.

By comparison, WoW was highly refined at release and Horizons was horribly broken.

Posted: **Thu Jan 11, 2007 4:17 pm**

Sounds more like the "Hindenburg".

Posted: **Thu Jan 11, 2007 4:17 pm**

I was gonna preorder but will wait now. I am installing my new card today, if nothing is heard from me for some time, that is why. My present card is ATI also, so do I hope I do not have much trouble.

Posted: **Thu Jan 11, 2007 5:02 pm**

Does that ATI card use the Catalyst drivers? If so, I suggest looking at EQ and Vanguard boards for compatibility. I think the latest Catalyst drivers do not play nice with Vanguard.

Posted: **Thu Jan 11, 2007 7:10 pm**

I'm using the Catalyst driver that came with the ATI card. I'm sure it is several revisions old but have no plans to upgrade anytime soon. "If it ain't broke don't fix it!"

Until recently I was using a 9800 Pro. It ran Vanguard okay but is probably the bare minumum one can get away with. Using any of the recent Catalyst drivers my computer would randomly reboot while playing Vanguard. This would not happen when playing any other game. Running the optional version of Windows Update gave me a very old ATI driver (4.something vs. 7.1 that was just released) that I installed and never had a reboot. I switched back and forth several times whenever a new driver was released, hoping that the problem was fixed but always the same thing with reboots. Other players reported the same results using Vanguard with this particular card but most of the geeks insisted it was an overheating problem. Maybe so, but an overheating problem that I can fix by changing software doesn't quite make sense. (Perhaps the newer drivers make better use of advanced features that tend to heat up the card.)

P.S. I have an unused ATI 9800 Pro that I will give away to anyone who wants it. It's not the one which I recently uninstalled because I need to send that one in for a rebate.

Posted: **Thu Jan 11, 2007 9:41 pm**

Well, my new card is working so far. PoK is smoother, but I had no big problems before. With a program as complex as EQ you never know where you will get bitten on the butt though.

The Tuesday Night Fight Club

Who's going to play Vanguard?