WTH Has happened to this game???

[Solarayne Starfyre]

Been away for a few months, since around late spring or so. Decided to come back and check things out, since I saw they FINALLY got the Lair's in-game.

However, now when trying to play, it only takes a few minutes before the game constantly becomes horrendously lagged all to hell, worse than it EVER was since it'sinitial release. Even tried reducing setting to minimum, which really had almost no effect towards improvementwhatsoever. At least back in the spring, even on Medium settings on this same PC (P4 2.2Ghz, Geforce 6600 256DDR, 1GB Ram, Cable modem), everything ran fairly smoothly (Except in player towns with a LOT of buildings), and even after 4-6 hours straight there was little slowdown, usually requiring a restart after around 7-8 hours, mostly due to the "usual" build up of "Porting" lag.

Compared to other games, this one was always a BIT slower like this before in comparison, but now it seems to have gotten exponentially worse, yet there seems to be little visually different than from how the variousgraphics were before, even though the huge 100+ MB patch looked like it replaced almost every file the first time I went to log in a couple days ago. After having been away for several months, I expected there to be a large patch to do, sure. But I certainly didn't expect that the result of it would be that now the game would be all but unplayable (Unless you like trying to play one of these games in a 0.5 FPS SLIDE-SHOW).

Anyone found ANYTHING that can be done about this, or am I going to have to write this game off for another 1/2 year or more again???

[Cobal]

If you were away for a long time then it may be best to dump your world cache and clientprefs_main.def.

[Solarayne Starfyre]

Not sure what it is either, but ya, those are the first things I'm starting with. Made ahalf dozen or somanual adjustments to some of the Client + GraphicPref Files so far, and have been able to get it "running" a lot better, but at a noticible cost to graphical quality, except at very close range. Now I think it's just a matter of fishing out each adjustment, one at a time, until I can "hopefully" find which specific ones are (and were) having the most impact.

Just wasn't necessary before, everything had been pretty good without having to go into those files like that.

[AA0]

There have been major changes to the graphics prefs... but yes, the newest client absolutely sucks for performance degradation.

[Solarayne Starfyre]

Yeah, I hope they do some work on improving the client regarding these things. To me, there was very little noticible visual change from the old version, but yet with the same settings, the performance went straight into the crapper. Had to really kill the heck out of the visual quality just to get it to run about as well as it used to, before. Definitly not something I would call an "Improved" Client at the moment....

[Goriax]

Tuesday's patch hurt me too. Even so it's way better then it was the first few months after release so I don't know what's up with that. I can still play, but my fps isn't consistently over 30 like it was before the patch.

I assume one of their optimizations for this patch wasn't so optimal for some setups. Hopefully they'll get it straightened out in the next few days.

[Talitha]

I noticed the difference. I really don't get lagged until about three or four ports, but then..... @_@ Yow.

Boom, and relog. Ouch. I used to get a good ten ports in before it got this bad. I don't know what on earth they changed.

[Solarayne Starfyre]

No idea what they changed, either. I just hope they know enough about all this, and can/are do something about it to get it better. I too, can only goa handful of ports, before it really starts getting much worse. And, I too, used to be able to go many more ports than just those few (say 10-20 or so), before it would start getting really bad.

I noticed in the latest patch notes that they saidthey put a new client on Blight. Hoping maybe it will be something coming to the regular servers that helps with all this. One can always hope, anyways...

[Raeshlavik]

I've noted two things:

1) I have the map pack installed (absolutely fabulous by the way) and it alone adds this 5-10 second freeze when going from a city map to a world map... I can deal with that now thatI know it happens.

2) Horizons uses 36%-38% of available ram (I have a gig) until I port. At that point it jumps to 85%-87%, then for the next few hours it keeps climbing untilI get around 100% utilization, which is 2.06 gigs of ram in use, and it turns into a huge swap fest requiring a forced shutdown and restart of the game.

My roommate's machine has 2 gigs of ram and he has successfully ported about 30 times without much changing... I guess we just need more ram. [:D]