Assassin’s Creed Maps To Templars And Flags

Posted on 21 April 2008 by FoxTwo

Ok some might call me a perfectionist, but I truly am not. I just thought that I should go around killing all the Templars and collect all the flags that I can find since I’m out there doing stuff anyway.

Running around Damascus or Jerusalem blindly hoping to run into flags or a Templar is a time-consuming process. Thus, I broke out my trusty Firefox browser and went Googling for Assassin’s Creed Maps.

While I came across many forum posts, where the poster did his own map, nobody ever did a complete map of the entire game till I came across this site here. It’s a goldmine, I tell you! When the site says the maps are interactive, they really mean it! When you mouse over a pin, a Web 2.0 popup box will show you a picture of the location plus a description of how to find that particular flag or Templar.

So, I printed off a map of the Kingdom (since I spend hardly any time there) and went Templar-hunting. I must say the map is pretty spot on.

For now, I’m just running around killing Templars. Why? Because I hate ’em. I hate them with every fibre of my digital being. Templars are so irritating, that when I just ran PAST them in the cities, they’ll aggro on sight, and come after me. It’s especially bad when a group of guards just walked past, and then I round a corner, and come right smack face to face with a Templar! He’ll aggro on me, we’ll fight, and the 5 guards that walked past would have already joined in the fight.

And, Templars fight differently from typical guards, which make matters worse. Very rarely can I do an “assassinate” on the Templar when he’s down (ok maybe I suck, but it’s difficult ok?).

Hence my seething hatred for them. And that’s why I’m out hunting them now.

Thanks to the maps 🙂

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You Know You Play Too Much Assassin’s Creed….

Posted on 18 April 2008 by FoxTwo

…. when you see something like this in real life…..

…. and then you find yourself thinking how to climb it 🙂

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Assassin’s Creed On Old PC, Part 2

Posted on 15 April 2008 by FoxTwo

After I had written up my previous entry, I decided to bump the graphics up. After all, since I’m already getting near-zero framerates, might as well have it look pretty right?

In my previous post, I had set EVERYTHING to the lowest possible.

So, now I decided to set the graphics quality to 3/4 (considered “high” I guess), while I left the detail level at 1/4 (“low”). I’m guessing “detail level” has to do with texture memory rather than polygon counts. To my surprise, Assassin’s Creed actually became FASTER.

My jaw dropped as the realisation dawned on me. I must be getting old, because I keep forgetting what I learnt a long time ago when Direct3D first came out. When you set graphics options too low, the graphics card (or GPU, the graphics processor) no longer handles the graphics, and your main CPU, the one on the motherboard, is saddled with all the workload. That explained why my CPU was beeping about heat overload! That was also why I was getting like 0.2 to 0.5 frames in the city!

Now with graphics bumped up slightly, the CPU no longer beeps about excessive heat. I still do get slowdowns, but my framerates are much better now – averaging about 10 frames per second compared to 3 to 5 previously on LOW settings! The only time now I ever get zero-framerates are during intense fights (lots of action) and when too many people are on screen (anything over 15 people in city streets). That means if I were to be walking around in the streets in a city, it’ll slow to a crawl. Hence, now I travel almost exclusively via rooftops, where framerates are faster.

I even tried turning on shadows. It looks great, and doesn’t seem to drop the framerates much. I guess I’ll leave shadows on now then.

Check the video out. You can see, when compared to my previous video, that framerates are indeed much better now. Yeah it’s still nowhere near to what you can see on Youtube where guys run this under newer graphics cards like the 8600GTs and higher. Naturally, framerates are high on those cards.

So, lesson learnt – don’t drop everything down to LOW.

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