Shades of Twilight

Hands up those of you who have had their Hellgate London bog down in seemingly open areas with very little activity? How many times have your fps (frames per second) gone from high 30’s to 0.3 (ie 1 frame every 3 seconds)?

Yeah I’ve had it happening to me too, and I had been scratching my head wondering why. If I could handle 30fps most of the time, even in heavy firefight with lots of explosions I can accept a slowdown to about 15 fps (ie half). To have my framerates drop so drastically from 30 odd to 0.3, that’s too much.

So I began to fiddle around a little, and concentrated on the graphics section. In the end, after much fiddling, I remembered reading about this small tweak from another game – if you have shadows on LOW, set it back to at least medium or HIGH. If you have Pixel Shaders on LOW, do the same, bring it back up.

Rationale – on LOW, these settings aren’t accelerated by the hardware, and thus handed over to the software part to render. Thus, your framerates will drop like crazy if you do not have an optimum-spec system to play the game, and think that lowering these settings will help.

So I set shaders and shadows back to medium, and viola! The framerates don’t drop that much anymore. Yes, during intense battles they still drop but not 1 frame every 3 seconds this time… this time, I could actually MOVE and aim and shoot…

Yeah I guess I didn’t do what I promised myself – to complete Call Of Duty 4 first before touching Hellgate London.

Well, a friend of mine bought it, and asked me some stuff about it. After answering him, I just thought I might as well create a character and start on it, but I thought I’d just play a little and then get back to COD4.

As expected, I got sucked into the whole story thing, as I knew I would with RPGs. The tiny little level 1 character I created yesterday is now level 15. Talk about levelling fast! In an MMO, such as Everquest, to get from 1 to 15 in 2 days means you have no life – ie you play the game the whole day and stop only to eat.

Well I didn’t do that, I’m sick. I’m still knocked out by the meds, so I only play in between unconscious states 🙂 Still, I somehow managed to get from 1 to 15 in 2 days, and I clocked an amazing 11 hours on Xfire… wow! Just take a look at my Xfire banner on the right side of this page.

I even tried out Multiplayer today. It’s exactly like Single Player mode, and you need to create a new character to play online. I did, and joined the “alliance” server. I started back in the same place in Single Player – the tutorial area where you meet Murmur. I tried to talk, nobody there.

However I can see people actually online and chatting in the chatbox. So I tried chatting there, and somehow managed to get invited to a group. It was another level 1 player, brand new character. We did the usual beginning quests and I happen to mention that he zones really fast, and he says “Singnet’. Ah, what are the chances of meeting another Singaporean on multiplayer?! Rather amazing actually. It’s actually refreshing to be reminded how playing online feels like again, with a real live human being watching your back and not a pack of computer-AI controlled drones or pets.

Bad news coming for Hellgate players though – The devs are going to patch the game this coming Monday, and it necessitates a character wipe on the online servers. Good thing I’m a low level 🙂 Getting a level 4 guy wiped out (yeah we reached level 4 together and I had to go off take my meds and sleep more) doesn’t hurt as much as getting a level 30+ wiped out 🙂 Yeah I saw a couple of “high levels” hanging around Holborn Station, the beginning area.

So, that’s my quickie update today on Hellgate London. Now you know why I haven’t been playing Call of Duty 4 eh?