3) You can also unlock a skin by salvaging an item (armor or weapon) for materials, assuming of course you are allowed to salvage that item. Usually if you can’t salvage an item but most times those items are account bound which are automatically unlocked anyways. Skins from Karma bought items are like this.
Ah no, tearing is when parts of two or more frames are sent the the monitor for display, which is what happens when VSync is off. When VSync is on with a game generating frames faster than refresh of the monitor, frames will be dropped and you may noticed jitter and lag.
Skip Broadwell for the PC and wait a few months for Skylake for the PC. Broadwell is the last Socket 1150 CPU, Skylake is the first Socket 1151 CPU which uses DDR4. It’s also Intel’s “Tick”, a new update to the CPU architecture.
The Broadwell desktop CPUs will actually be slower than the current top end Haswell CPUs due to their lower clockspeed. What they do have is a better integrated GPU which is 70%+ faster than the GPUs found in Haswell which makes a discrete GPU-less setup faster than AMD’s current A10-7870K, although AMD is still half the price.
There were a few threads long ago the discussed what seemed to be source images that the art team traced over. The one thread I quickly found was this one.
I believe it only adds variation to the personal story and only like the first third of the PS. The second third of the PS is based on which order you join. They all lead to the same place and none of the PS affects skills or abilities, just story flavor.
It hasn’t. On rares the average per was between 0.85 and 0.90. Last night on my tiny sample of 4 rares I got 6; 1, 2, 0, 3. Which is above average but the one verified time it went wonky we weren’t getting 2s or 3s at all.
Since the patch on Tuesday with the addition of the ecto gambler, which caused the rush on ectos, I’ve done 60-70 salvages in bulk and I got around the right number of ectos for the number of salvages.
Hate to use the old adage but RNG is RNG. There is roughly a 35-40% chance of getting no ectos each time. 1 ecto out of 7 rares is a 1-2% possibility.
Frame rate drops in boss battles have more to do with CPU performance than GPU.
Because of draw calls or all the damage calculations?
If I lower the graphic settings (for large scale battle), I can get smoother fps. That makes me think it to be more of a graphic problem. Of course the graphic can also be CPU-bound due to draw calls but I’m not very sure about it.
I use the same i5 3570k overclocked like yours. There isn’t many better ones up there. The haswell one is better but only so much…..
It will help some but not as much as you would expect when compared to other games. The GW2 game engine simply bogs down around loads of players. And you are talking about a Cadillac of graphic cards in the $600+ range. If you have the money fine but you may not need to buy bleeding edge, what video card do you currently have? We are just trying to temper expectations.
Haswell is roughly 10-15% faster per clock than Ivy Bridge. Running OC then it’s unlikely you can get that much better performance.
Assuming you have the game installed on a normal hard drive and not an SSD, the main data file is likely highly fragmented after a major patch, broken up and spread all around the drive. This causes extra movement of the disk drive read/write head which is slow relative to how fast data can be read which can significantly slow down read speeds from the hard drive.
Using a 3rd party free defragmenting tool like Auslogics DiskDefrag or Piriform’s Defraggler can significantly help improving read speeds. Also these tools allow you to defrag just a folder or a file as oppose to the entire drive.
Anyway, I’m not sure I want to see more silly costumes. I guess its content in the gemstore, but at some point its going to be kittened and start to distract from GW2 lore. Sure its not a hardcore realistic MMO, far from it, but its already walking a very thin line with stuff like unicorn bows, silly pets, costume transformations, wings, animal hats and the like… A majority of players still have “traditional” gear (ie heavy armor and a flaming greatsword on a Warrior instead of a swimsuit with bunny ears and a pink fluffy baton), which is great. I dont want to see GW2 become another silly Asian MMO where a battleground look like a My Little Pony episode.
Because playing a fantasy MMO is serious business. No, it’s happy, pretendy, fun time games.
I’m not against anything, BUT, a COMPANY should never make releases like this.
Yes, devs can have their own opinions on their personal Facebook page or Twitter, but not on the oficial company one. It’s just something you don’t do if you care about the image of your company.
What if someone is muslim? Their religion does not allow gay marriage and it’s a serious offense. You praise equality in your EULA and yet you kitten all over other religions or other cultures with this tweet.
Think about the consequences for once Anet…
Except major corporations already have for years when they started extending benefits without being required to. ANet is not being radical here, they are simply saying Grats to those who this issue was important. It’s been resolved unless an amendment to the Constitution is passed which is very doubtful. The last one was 23 years ago and it banned Congress from giving themselves raises that they would receive in the current term.
They couldn’t even get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Even when they gave states more time to ratify it in the 70s.
To those saying that marriage needs to be for biological purposes: considering the fact that each generation tends to be larger, it may not be a bad thing for some people to in fact not procreate.
And in my mind, if gays/lesbians/etc were accepted and not forced to pretend they are straight, then fewer will feel the need to get married to someone of the opposite sex and have kids only to realize a few years later that they can’t pretend anymore and divorce. And what does that teach the kid? That it’s ok to lie?
Why would someone choose to be gay or lesbian in a culture that would discriminate against them or even kill them? There are still places where it’s deadly be anything but straight.
I think you could take that a step farther. Do you need marriage to have kids? The answer is no. Do you need marriage to live together in the US? No you do not.
Marriage is a funny thing here. It is a public showing of commitment but it does not require that you love each other, have kids, be monogamous, or even live together. What gives marriage it’s value is how people view it. What funny is that over time less people are getting married and far less are doing it without divorce.
There is no strong argument in favor or marriage as a general concept besides creating family units (insurance, inheritance, health issues ie hospital visits, laws preventing testimony). Anything other than that is just individuals placing their own importance on it. And for long time now the importance of marriage at least in this country has been dwindling.
Lets be honest here. This is not the 70s or 60s or even the terrible 80s. Some people do still pretend to get straight to be accepted by society but that like a black person painting their skin white for privilege (ie passing). I think we forget how fearless some people were especially in the mid to late 80s and 90s where there was a terrible stigma against the gay community. The kids are probably happy to exist but with the risk of getting hated here isn’t the message of not being who you are in the face of danger more detrimental than lying might get by.
I think the message I got when I was younger form the openly gay people around me is is be brave in the face of hate vs blame society for not accepting you. Hiding is hiding.
The point is all the legal rights codified by the term marriage in case law in relation to one’s spouse and children, from hospital visitation, to what this case was about, survivor benefits. The case in front of SCOTUS was about how one state wouldn’t issue survivor benefits because they didn’t recognize a legal marriage from another state.
That is one of the reasons behind the 14th Amendment, that all citizens will be granted the same rights across all the states. And while it was ambiguous before, once states started to legalize a ban against same-sex marriage, they hoisted themselves by their own petard by squarely going against the 14th Amendment. It was only a matter of time.
Okay this thread is derailing from a discussion about whether if it’s okay for ANet to tweet about controversial current events to a debate about the concept of marriage altogether.
So lets bring the focus back to the original issue and please don’t pick on the OP.
I noticed, since Friday night is when I refresh all my MMOs looking for patches, that Champions Online is giving everyone who logs in this weekend can get Rainbow Flight, an ability where you fly around on a cloud that is shooting out a rainbow, a 525 Zen (their proxy currency) item for free.
Actually lots of MMOs embed a 3rd party browser. I still have several that use Awesomium which this game also used until they switched to Coherent UI. Why reinvent a browser backend?
And I don’t think anyone is talking about mutex-locking hardware, the OS does that for us but objects/data structures. Dx9 library is certainly not thread safe and Dx11 is mostly thread safe except in very limited cases. Umbra is thread safe as it only generates a list of potential visible objects, there is no modification of that data set.
The issue is the main line thread can’t generate the data to the GPU fast enough and the shaders on the GPU aren’t complex enough to make the GPU the significant limiting factor. It’s the code. All Dx11 or 12 would do is allow the GPU to process that data faster.
And I hardly consider one tweet being overly political. Now if everyone got free rainbow finishers for a day and it was the default and you couldn’t change it, then it might be going too far. Otherwise, dead whoop.
I don’t care how many people agree or disagree with the court’s decision but I do find it annoying when a company takes a position on political issues.
There are a bunch of reasons why and I’d rather not get too deep into it. To keep it simple; just do your job ANet, which is making Guild Wars.
They’re already taken a position with Jory and Kas for years and recently added a transgender NPC.
It’s not politics it’s simply establishing equal rights across state lines, just like interracial marriage ruling the court made nearly 50 years ago in Loving v. Virginia. It’s a 14th Amendment issue.
The ruling only affects the secular legal definition in terms of essentially contract law and not any religious connotation associated with it.
You can still be as personally biased against same sex marriage, it’s just saying that state governments can’t be.
I still will have Jory out as my mini for my Thief.
The problem is apparently not something that can be solved by APIs, but by the lower-level code itself. It was not programmed to work in parallel, so even if you make it multithreaded, those different threads all try to access the same data at once, and have to wait their turn.
One thing that stood out to me though, was that the developer said the main stack is the bottleneck. This doesn’t line up with the story about the different threads having to queue for memory access. I am wondering if, despite this developer’s claims, DX12 would relieve the main stack bottleneck by reducing the impact of the rendering stack/draw calls. But I am not a programmer, I am just speculating there.
The problems he mentioned I’ve mentioned over the last two plus years as why it’s difficult to scale across cores.
First is making data “thread safe” which means allowing only one thread at a time to modify or read memory. But doing this short of the TSX hardware solution can significantly slow things down. And since TSX is not universal yet across the CPUs that the game supports, it’s a problem.
As for memory heap fragmentation, that’s an effect which “swiss cheeses” the memory heap into lots of small, but unusable fragments of available memory. You may have 100s of megabytes free but only a few megabytes that have chunks big enough to be useful. C and C++ don’t use double indirection to allocated memory segments which could allow memory compaction thread. Other common solutions is using separate heaps for each or similar size data types to reduce the chance of fragmentation. But none of these are standard to the memory allocation portions of those language’s standard library. You either home brew one or use a third party package which would cost ANet money. As he points out the solution is a much larger memory heap like what’s available with a 64-bit build. And he’s right about the code not being faster.
Defrag is only useful for load times, won’t have any performance gains at runtime.
The game is constantly loading data and really doesn’t use much more than 1 GB of video memory. If you use a tool like Process Explorer, you will see the game loading data all the time while wandering around a map, especially a map full of other players. And there are areas in LA that the simple act of turning will hit the HD hard.
And I’m also uses Auslogics DiskDefrag, and Defraggler also has this feature, the ability to defrag just a folder or an individual file. Perfect after a major patch.
You also have to remember that the game also uses 3rd party libraries, it’s possible that some of the ones they use don’t have a 64-bit available or would require a higher licensing fee from ArenaNet to use.
You need to look at the process tab, sort on cpu and see if it truly is the game or something else chewing up cpu time. Also are you waiting for the full patch to be applied or are you starting the game while the patch is still installing? Is your anti-virus kicking or if you are still using a normal HDD, the extremely large patch could have fragmented up the games files considerably.
Personally I haven’t seen an increase in CPU usage but the HD is being hit hard while wandering around LA and that may end up impacting performance, besides the fact LA is fairly full now.
It takes money to add a render path, rewrite to scale across cores, etc. Would you rather have your money going to new content or an overhaul of the game engine? And don’t give me, “two guys on a Red Bull fueled weekend could do this” BS. Dx9 to Dx10 is major, much more than going from Dx10 to 11 to 12.
And it’s likely not the renderer that’s the problem, it’s handling other players being around you.
The thing is, if my math is right, you would have broken even or even profit if you didn’t try the big one. You loss 200 of the 203 ectos with that one roll and loss 7500 silver of the 7310 silver you loss, which means you would only be down 3 ectos but up 190 silver.
But the profit margin is so slim relative to the investment it’s not worth the risk.
More available RAM for the game should mean more graphic assets that aren’t in the card’s memory can be cached in system memory rather than needing to be fetched off the disk. Also if you haven’t noticed, the number of players around you raises the amount of memory being used.
kitten JP Karka. I couldn’t properly type after trying to get that one for 2 hours. Finally a nice mesmer took pity on me and portaled me to the spot to shoot it.
Do people read the blogpost at all? ( english is my second language to )
Not all of it. If the “This is not from ArenaNet” message isn’t being noticed in all the scam in-game e-mails why would you think they would read the whole blog post rather than jump on the forum before seeing if their question is answered in the next sentence or paragraph?
That assumes they even bother to check the blog post and simply reply to the information being tossed about the forum.
Do you walk into a store and shout you want to return an item or do you go to the customer service desk? Here we have something called Support and you submit a ticket to them.
Click on Support, there are three links to it on every page, in in the upper right is a link called Submit a Ticket.
