Fair enough, i don't have an AMD cpu or ATI card, and don't generally play female PCs.
I hear there's a fixed AMD executable somewhere though - hopefully the rest is fixed with a patch.
I agree with the AI comments - I try not to rely on the AI though and just treat it as if i'm wandering around with a bunch of retards:D There's apparently an unofficial AI patch here: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=211156&c id=17198490 .
But yeah, to anyone reading this, just wanted to provide some balance - so I guess... if you're playing as a male on an intel system... its not all bad:D
Note that in all of those cases there was a jump to *different hardware architecture* (in some cases, huge differences, such as from PC to amiga - different endian-ness, custom chips, different memory model, etc) and most of the games would have been written in assembly.
Don't give me that "can't be ported" bullshit:D Not economically viable, or maybe not "worth the risk" or maybe the company is too lazy, but "can't" is bullshit:)
Sorry, brain fart for some reason i incorrectly remembered the pool/silver blades series being in Krynn, but now i remember i was thinking of another goldbox series... Champions of Krynn?:D
Point remains though - there's been plenty of other D&D worlds featured in games other than Faerun...
Multiplayer problems? I've played multiplayer exclusively (local LAN only, admittedly) since release and had zero problems. It actually surprised me how stable MP was, considering to the other issues the game has/had out of the box...
Wierd. For reference, I have a Pentium D 3.0, 2gigs of ram, SB Audigy2, Geforce 7600GT and have none of the problems you describe. I run in 1280x1024 most options turned on and get more than 14fps. None of the patches have broken the game for me. I run it on Win2k, but my housemate runs essentially the same machine with onboard sound under Xp and has had no issues either.
Both of these machines were purchased 6 months ago for around $1200AU, they didn't exactly break the bank and are by no means "high end"...
NWN1 was a bit sluggish on common machines when it was released, too. I must admit i haven't messed with the toolset yet, so on that I can't comment.
Something wrong with your box, perhaps? Driver peculiarity somewhere?
They're (Dragonlance games) both in Krynn, a completely different game world. Temple of Elemental Evil was also in another world (Greyhawk) and the Dark Sun games are set in well... teh Dark Sun world:D
I've been playing this game pretty hard in the past couple of weeks - and I too, was initially slightly disappointed, for about the first 4 hours.
However, the first couple of patches have made some worthwhile fixes, and the more you play, the "less bad" it becomes. I'm actually enjoying it, and have put more time into this game than anything else other than Falcon4: Allied force, and the original NWN in the past 12 months.
The biggest disappointments in my opinion are 1) the manual and 2) the ditching of the radial menus and changing how the quickbar works. However, give it a few hours to get used to, and figure out a few of the quirks that you may miss from a skim of the manual (such as the requirement to HOLD DOWN right-mouse to get the menu up, rather than just click) and the quirks become less of an issue. They're more of a "but NWN1 did it differently" issue than anything else.
The graphics are much improved over NWN - the second patch contains a few speed-ups that make a noticable difference to frame-rate. The campaign is a million times better than the original (think: baldurs gate in NWN+ engine). The toolset is still there. The game definately feels slightly rushed (perhaps to get it out before christmas) but its good to see that at least the patches are regular and beneficial - and I haven't had it crash yet, at least.
What I'm saying is that if you're a D&D fan, give it a shot, and keep in mind that it may take a couple of hours of fumbling around lost (if you played NWN) to get "into" it.
This is certainly something I've never encountered, I'm pretty sure networking code isn't so far down the priority chain in most engines that this is the case, netcode isn't something so processor intensive that there isn't room for it - if your machine is struggling to parse incoming packets and build outgoing packets then you're not going to have much fun anyway because your machine will be having even more trouble trying to render to screen.
I agree, its a bit of a stretch - however I *have* seen ping times on a machine go to shit when the cpu was hung up on something else. Admittedly, this was several years ago on Pentium 1 class hardware with a crappy realtek card.:D
But yes, I agree with you that it's fairly pointless. Take the $250 and buy a quicker cpu, next model up video card, etc... if there's no faster hardware for you to purchase (for gaming), well... you already wasted your money IMHO. Obviously business users who need the fastest gear they can get at whatever price are different - but that's not who this card is aimed at...
Pretty sure the 3com 3c905s have been doing ip/tcp-offload stuff since at least 1999.
On a bit of a tangent - a really useful source of info on NICs is the Linux or BSD driver source. Read up in particular on the driver for the Realtek 8029... realtek in general really aren't a good example of a network card to look at when comparing performance...:)
I think you'll find that when the CPU in your PC is working *hard* (for example, running a game) your ping times may well blow out a bit (depending on how much CPU your NIC driver requires - some cards are comparatively shocking for CPU usage compared to others).
Running "ping -t host" from a command shell on an idle box isn't really representative of what we're dealing with here.
However, that said my personal feelings are that 10-20ms reduction in ping times is a "meh" improvement and that the claims of smoother gameplay are more of a placebo effect than anything else. Take the $250 and invest it in some other hardware.
What'cha mean "go back," boy? Some of us saw XP's "activation" for what it was in the beginning, and never left Win2k at all!*
Here, here... the additional factor in my case is of course that Windows 2k (also, freebsd, linux, etc) would install on my system in the first place, and Windows XP won't possibly due to SATA driver issues. I didn't try too hard to solve it, because Win2k is better anyway...
Last I checked, you didn't pay several hundred dollars for the services offered by Myspace of Flickr. Rightly or wrongly, people perceive software as a once-off purchase. You pay for the development costs + profit, and thats it.
Once I "buy" something, I should be entitled to use it as I see fit, without being at the whim of whoever I purchased it from. The "licensing" and possible de-activation (by no longer providing activation) of software is a crock. It's akin to buying a new car from Ford, and then after 3 years being told that you're no longer allowed to put fuel in it or drive it, even though it does everything you want it to do.
Which is good enough. If Joe 6pack has to jump through hoops to pirate, he might just buy the product
On the contrary, if "joe sixpack" has to jump through hoops to run his legitimately purchased product, perhaps he won't bother.
I'm fully prepared to pay for an O/S (have purchased several variants of Linux, previous microsoft O/S, etc) however i'm not willing deal with an O/S that constantly phones home to verify that I am allowed to run it.
Paying for a product is supposed to be less painful than simply running the pirate version, not the reverse...
I'll bet you ran and stuck your head in the sand when it came time to learn protected mode x86, too.
If your PS2 port breaks, you're fucked (no keyboard). If your USB port breaks, you've got another one.
The cpu usage is a non-issue. It may be "wasteful" but seriously, there's far more serious problems to solve than cutting down your keyboard's utilisation down from 0.01% of a single cpu - you can cut that time down by 99% and its still no real gain.
Microsoft: Those PCs are all just repositories for stolen software and you all know it, it's time to get paid...
Does anyone else perhaps think microsoft may well have known they were going to establish a precedent which they could then turn around and attempt to impose on PC hardware vendors?
Depending on what you believe, one could argue that 9/11 was the organised murder of several thousand US citizens for "the greater good"; to provide an excuse for the patriot act, invading iraq, etc.
I'm not saying I necessarily believe that myself just yet, but there's several suspicious aspects to the whole 9/11 situation that have not been sufficiently explained.
There isn't much difference except that Putin is a dictator (some people may call Bush a dictator, but those people are stupid),
Questionable US elections? Putin was elected himself, unless I'm mistaken? If you want to claim Russian elections are a crock, lets have a good hard look at the US too...
ruthlessly suppresses dissent in his country using murder and torture (or sometimes just sends dissenters to jail in Siberia and takes their property).
Guantanmo Bay? Hell, Iraq, Afghanistan?
Oh, there is a difference:) Bush+CIA isn't limited to his own country/citizens...:)
By the way, you also don't "know" whether anything other than your direct, personal experience, is true or not. Anything other than that is a belief. Your father told you you're his son? You don't "know" it to be true, you believe it. Wanna be sure and purchase a DNA test? You don't "know" it to be true, the researcher might be lying to you. Actually, all researchers might be lying to you. Don't think so? You not thinking so is a belief. How about learning how to do a DNA test by yourself then? Well, which proof you have the equipment offer accurate results? Actually, which proof you have that an image passing through a lens (such as a microscope) is accurately showing you things you can't check by yourself? You don't have it: you simply believe it.
Your point is? I agree, much of what I understand from science is a set of beliefs, unless I actually perform the experiments myself. However, I have the option to do so, and can measure/observe the results.
I *know* certain things from direct personal experience, yes. I *know* things from science that I can directly test for and measure. Other things in science are called "theories". I am however free to prove/disprove the theory myself, and should I come up with irrefutable evidence that the theory does not work, then it is discarded or adjusted as required.
This is in direct contrast to religion which, when faced with evidence that it is a crock, comes up with shit like "god put those bones in the ground to fool us!", or such.
However, as I said, literal interpretation of religious texts is retarded and defeats the intended purpose in my opinion. Whether or not "god put the bones there" or some aspects of the bible (for example) are bullshit is besides the point. It's the morals contained within that are the point - many of the "facts" are merely window dressing to make an interesting story. Rmember the little stories with morals you were taught when you were about 6-8 years old? Same idea...
Actually, I think you may be onto something here. This is probably exactly why they made it illegal; to hurt the MacOS market for Windows virtualisation.
Performance problems won't be an issue for too much longer. Hardware virtualisation support and better video drivers for use with VMs will make the problem "go away", so long as you're willing to purchase enough RAM, and RAM is "cheap" now.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear there's a fixed AMD executable somewhere though - hopefully the rest is fixed with a patch.
I agree with the AI comments - I try not to rely on the AI though and just treat it as if i'm wandering around with a bunch of retards :D There's apparently an unofficial AI patch here: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=211156&c id=17198490 .
But yeah, to anyone reading this, just wanted to provide some balance - so I guess... if you're playing as a male on an intel system... its not all bad :D
Bah, back in the day we had (amongst others):
Note that in all of those cases there was a jump to *different hardware architecture* (in some cases, huge differences, such as from PC to amiga - different endian-ness, custom chips, different memory model, etc) and most of the games would have been written in assembly.
Don't give me that "can't be ported" bullshit :D Not economically viable, or maybe not "worth the risk" or maybe the company is too lazy, but "can't" is bullshit :)
Point remains though - there's been plenty of other D&D worlds featured in games other than Faerun...
Multiplayer problems? I've played multiplayer exclusively (local LAN only, admittedly) since release and had zero problems. It actually surprised me how stable MP was, considering to the other issues the game has/had out of the box...
Both of these machines were purchased 6 months ago for around $1200AU, they didn't exactly break the bank and are by no means "high end"...
NWN1 was a bit sluggish on common machines when it was released, too. I must admit i haven't messed with the toolset yet, so on that I can't comment.
Something wrong with your box, perhaps? Driver peculiarity somewhere?
They're (Dragonlance games) both in Krynn, a completely different game world. Temple of Elemental Evil was also in another world (Greyhawk) and the Dark Sun games are set in well... teh Dark Sun world :D
However, the first couple of patches have made some worthwhile fixes, and the more you play, the "less bad" it becomes. I'm actually enjoying it, and have put more time into this game than anything else other than Falcon4: Allied force, and the original NWN in the past 12 months.
The biggest disappointments in my opinion are 1) the manual and 2) the ditching of the radial menus and changing how the quickbar works. However, give it a few hours to get used to, and figure out a few of the quirks that you may miss from a skim of the manual (such as the requirement to HOLD DOWN right-mouse to get the menu up, rather than just click) and the quirks become less of an issue. They're more of a "but NWN1 did it differently" issue than anything else.
The graphics are much improved over NWN - the second patch contains a few speed-ups that make a noticable difference to frame-rate. The campaign is a million times better than the original (think: baldurs gate in NWN+ engine). The toolset is still there. The game definately feels slightly rushed (perhaps to get it out before christmas) but its good to see that at least the patches are regular and beneficial - and I haven't had it crash yet, at least.
What I'm saying is that if you're a D&D fan, give it a shot, and keep in mind that it may take a couple of hours of fumbling around lost (if you played NWN) to get "into" it.
I agree, its a bit of a stretch - however I *have* seen ping times on a machine go to shit when the cpu was hung up on something else. Admittedly, this was several years ago on Pentium 1 class hardware with a crappy realtek card. :D
But yes, I agree with you that it's fairly pointless. Take the $250 and buy a quicker cpu, next model up video card, etc... if there's no faster hardware for you to purchase (for gaming), well... you already wasted your money IMHO. Obviously business users who need the fastest gear they can get at whatever price are different - but that's not who this card is aimed at...
Assholes...
On a bit of a tangent - a really useful source of info on NICs is the Linux or BSD driver source. Read up in particular on the driver for the Realtek 8029... realtek in general really aren't a good example of a network card to look at when comparing performance... :)
Running "ping -t host" from a command shell on an idle box isn't really representative of what we're dealing with here.
However, that said my personal feelings are that 10-20ms reduction in ping times is a "meh" improvement and that the claims of smoother gameplay are more of a placebo effect than anything else. Take the $250 and invest it in some other hardware.
Once I "buy" something, I should be entitled to use it as I see fit, without being at the whim of whoever I purchased it from. The "licensing" and possible de-activation (by no longer providing activation) of software is a crock. It's akin to buying a new car from Ford, and then after 3 years being told that you're no longer allowed to put fuel in it or drive it, even though it does everything you want it to do.
On the contrary, if "joe sixpack" has to jump through hoops to run his legitimately purchased product, perhaps he won't bother.
I'm fully prepared to pay for an O/S (have purchased several variants of Linux, previous microsoft O/S, etc) however i'm not willing deal with an O/S that constantly phones home to verify that I am allowed to run it.
Paying for a product is supposed to be less painful than simply running the pirate version, not the reverse...
If your PS2 port breaks, you're fucked (no keyboard). If your USB port breaks, you've got another one.
The cpu usage is a non-issue. It may be "wasteful" but seriously, there's far more serious problems to solve than cutting down your keyboard's utilisation down from 0.01% of a single cpu - you can cut that time down by 99% and its still no real gain.
I'm all for optimisation, but seriously...
Does anyone else perhaps think microsoft may well have known they were going to establish a precedent which they could then turn around and attempt to impose on PC hardware vendors?
Mod parent up... about the most insightful comment i've seen on the whole iraq thing in a while...
Or who even care/remember such things :D
Game ratings are generally bullshit anyway, i've got no idea how many games rated "80%" that i've played for 5 minutes and thought "this is crap"...
I'm not saying I necessarily believe that myself just yet, but there's several suspicious aspects to the whole 9/11 situation that have not been sufficiently explained.
Actually wasabi isn't THAT far removed from english mustard.
Oh, there is a difference :) Bush+CIA isn't limited to his own country/citizens... :)
Maybe dying of radiation sickness/poisoning is a real painful way to go?
Your point is? I agree, much of what I understand from science is a set of beliefs, unless I actually perform the experiments myself. However, I have the option to do so, and can measure/observe the results.
I *know* certain things from direct personal experience, yes. I *know* things from science that I can directly test for and measure. Other things in science are called "theories". I am however free to prove/disprove the theory myself, and should I come up with irrefutable evidence that the theory does not work, then it is discarded or adjusted as required.
This is in direct contrast to religion which, when faced with evidence that it is a crock, comes up with shit like "god put those bones in the ground to fool us!", or such.
However, as I said, literal interpretation of religious texts is retarded and defeats the intended purpose in my opinion. Whether or not "god put the bones there" or some aspects of the bible (for example) are bullshit is besides the point. It's the morals contained within that are the point - many of the "facts" are merely window dressing to make an interesting story. Rmember the little stories with morals you were taught when you were about 6-8 years old? Same idea...
Actually, I think you may be onto something here. This is probably exactly why they made it illegal; to hurt the MacOS market for Windows virtualisation.
Performance problems won't be an issue for too much longer. Hardware virtualisation support and better video drivers for use with VMs will make the problem "go away", so long as you're willing to purchase enough RAM, and RAM is "cheap" now.