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Blackbird

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  1. This crash is reproducible on my system using NV 430.50 WHQL drivers. Create a new character. Any origin, Corruptor, select Ice / Cold Domination. Go through costume creation. Go to Power Customization. Under Ice Blast, Select "Custom Ice Cast" Select any power and make any change. Color or animation, doesn't matter. Now click on "Custom Ice Cast" at the top and select either 'Original' or 'Color Tintable.' The client will immediately crash hard and cause a full GPU reset. System level error messages accompanying this client crash:
  2. Archery is VERY badly broken currently. Archery is VERY closely coupled to animations and extremely fragile, so ANY change to any base value requires complete rebuild of the animations and extensive additional testing. (I used to be the designated Archery guinea pig on live.) These bugs are all new as of latest or immediately previous. Blazing Arrow: using incorrect animation and double-triggering the incorrect animation intermittently. Double-triggering has always consistently indicated a broken base value or broken trigger going back to I6. Usually one that has exploit potential. Ranged Shot: ranged shot in long-cast mode is intermittently NOT being interrupted by damage. That ain't right. Explosive Arrow: animates less than 10% of the time, if even that much. Radius is also broken - KB was observed on an enemy at over 20m. Rain of Arrows: casting cannot be cancelled using Z key (default settings.) This is not the correct behavior since RoA was changed to a non-interrupt. Fistful of Arrows: frequently does not fully animate. Sometimes it's first frame only, sometimes it's zero frames. Looks to be both trigger and animation error. Aimed Shot: does not appear to be correctly animating; appears to be using snap shot animation. Aimed shot animation has multiple dropped frames visible due to a cast time adjustment. Also intermittently fails to animate at all. Snap Shot: frequently fails to trigger even first frame of animation. Often fails to cast when animation doesn't trigger. Aim/Build Up (Secondary): typical cast pattern is BU->AIM. When cast as AIM->BU, BU appears to trail past the animation causing subsequent cast to error or delay. ALL powers: bow draw animation is completely broken and does not render. This is EXTREMELY undesirable because it removes a limiter and can create exploit paths. Changes to archery need to be reverted to I24 using I24 animations, and any support either explicit or implied for non-default animations needs to be removed. In fact, just do not touch Archery. At all. Seriously. One, it's a very fragile power set because of what was going around the time of it's original implementation. Two, the reason it got so few balance passes is because any alteration to base values that affects timing requires a complete rebuild of all animations. (Which is why we had to wait for BAB for the big balance pass post-I8.) Even a single frame disconnect between the animation and actual cast time at base values (as in non-enhanced) breaks the entire set. Every time. Unlike other sets, Archery is MUCH more tightly linked to the animation. Believe me, animation changes have been tried before and they have never worked. Several attempts were abandoned before seeing the official test shard. The only rational thing to do is to revert and put a large sign on Archery that says "DO NOT TOUCH."
  3. So let me drop some facts on you all, to give you an idea of just how far what we have here actually is from production, and just how CoX's backend went together. The Closed Beta shard ran on one or two desktops that sat on someone's desk. I used to actually have a picture of them. And these were not some sort of high end machine; they had at most, probably 16GB of RAM. We're not talking instance (AP1 is an instance; AP2 is another instance.) I mean the whole shard. And they could load up a few hundred players on there. And these were not multi-core processor machines. For most of it's life, CoX's infrastructure ran on systems with a single socket and at most two cores around 3.4GHz. Certain elements were strictly limited to 2GB because the systems were 32-bit. Certain elements were absolutely dependent on very specific hardware because they'd been written to work around Intel's NetBurst architecture. These were NOT powerful systems by ANY measure. Here's how the processor stacks up against a last-gen low-end Xeon. Because of the way CoX and MMOs in general are developed, they tend to be optimized and written to VERY specific hardware, because that is something they can control. (WoW for example, was heavily optimized for single socket, dual core, 16GB HP blades.) Reducing the server-side hardware variation reduces development effort and costs, allowing more time and effort to be spent on the more complicated and difficult client. They also are less worried about memleaks because they can take maintenance when they please, and automation reduces the maintenance need. Instances could be spawned and restarted on an as-needed basis. As to what it requires these days: again, we're miles and miles and miles from the actual production code. CoX's infrastructure dates to single core processors and wasn't designed with things like significant multi-threading in mind, and certain code paths were optimized for CPU behavior that no longer exists. They also had a large number of physical hosts and heavily leveraged the semi-modular nature of things. (e.g. Dedicated DB servers, dedicated login servers, etc.) Some of those splits were collapsed into combined elements to reduce costs. The net result here is that the requirements just get downright weird. Which, I will note, is not all bad news. Again: it's a very old code base and a lot of it was originally designed around hardware people these days would (justifiably) insist is antique. I think that realistically, one could run as-designed fully segmented setup using VMware ESXi on a single socket EPYC with 64-128GB of RAM. Afraid I can't offer any insight as to the bandwidth though, other than the download servers would eat every single bit of it they could get their hands on and then some.
  4. Hahahahah. My memory is utter bollocks. I cannot remember. I will give you one. @TheNotQuiteRelationshipRedHadWithFleaWTFMakeUpYourMindYouTwo Clearly I must have been @Indecisive - wait. No. That actually was someone else. Damnit brain, why can't you remember the important things? WAIT. VIRTUEVERSE IS BACK UP!? Problem solved! Let's try this again. @M I M here! Yes, there are spaces! Heroside: Redwinged, Seventh Line, Snowmeow, Fraction, Internet Prawn (still the absolute worst) Villains: Tundra, Pridemaker, Feral Storm, Lady Claret, and a couple secret ones.
  5. Khelds were dropped to one character at level 20 in I17. Required some pretty big back-end changes to do it, as I recall.
  6. That's the problem. I have a ... very good memory when it comes to certain parts of CoX. Anything that is on a post-I17 based client engine will never work with Intel integrated graphics. Even at original release, they were never officially supported.
  7. Shamefully, I can't remember my global. I really can't. FLEA! REMIND ME WHAT MY GLOBAL WAS! Your memory is better than mine. Hero side: Redwinged, Seventh Line, Internet Prawn (Worst. Kheld. Ever,) and honestly I can't even remember the rest. Villain side: Tundra, Pridemaker, couple others I can't remember. And yes, I remember... at least 10 of you so far.
  8. I'm all for this. I lost my logs many years ago now, but I can probably help reconstruct some of them from memory. His writing style stuck with me pretty well. In exchange for a box of Ascendant-O's of course.
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