Still no strongbox freeze fix.... thanks

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MrSnowman wrote:

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Wispo wrote:

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MrSnowman wrote:

Having a game in 2015 that doesn't pre-load content it's meant to display is not OK, modern machines simply aren't made to fetch from harddrives on demand in this day and age. I understand that GGG's stance against cheating is rather extreme, but there's plenty of ways to alleviate this issue without making it so people can 100% know what rogue is going to spawn. All you have to do is load multiple exiles. Most people could easily load every exile before the box is open without issue. And it's pretty clear GGG doesn't cater to low end hardware considering how extremely choppy I imagine the game must get with any decent amount of spell effects going on.

As for dealing with these issues as they are "part of the game". I think if GGG wants something to be part of the game make it so explicitly not implicitly. Have an inherent freeze (petrification maybe, so it's not avoidable like freeze) on any rogue exile box for instance. I definitively don't think GGG thinks all their problems are an accepted part of the game which the player is intended to work around.

45 years of applauses for you!!!!!!

By the way... what is the relationship between don't pre load content and an eventual cheating? I really can't figure myself O.o

Well you have to think it in terms of what your machine knows. Anything GGG's servers tells you it knows. So a hacker could know it. To load the right exile your computer would have to know what exile is to be loaded. So the server has to tell you. So the hacker can know what exile is in the box and if he wishes to avoid it. A solution to this that I suggested would be for GGG's servers to tell "here's the exiles that could be in the box". Making it less useful for a hacker. Assuming there's only one particular exile the hacker wishes to avoid and GGG's server tells you half of them you're fairly likely to avoid most boxes. Still an advantage. But it wouldn't be all too difficult for peoples machines to load all of them. It would cause a bit of lag when you roll a box but not when it's opened (can't say PoE loads content on the same thread as they render but it sure feels that way). I think that's preferable. And that way the hacker knows as much as a normal player, it could be any exile.

This really goes for any information cheat. Like your frame time graph goes up (hopefully fixed in a4 patch) when you load a zone with a corrupted zone. A hacker would know through other means aswell I suspect but unless they silently generate that zone and let the player play (assuming it's the generation that increases the time it takes to load) you'd always know.

Overall I feel GGG over-prioritizes hacking prevention and doesn't cut corners where they should to improve player experience. I'm not saying they should just let players play, they need hacking prevention somehow. But there's plenty of things I feel (not knowing their codebase or anything about their system) they could do to fix certain things without giving massive advantages to hackers and greatly improving player experience. And that's the tradeoffs you should be taking I think.

This is certainly one of them. Any able player can lighting warp out of the way alt. lightning warp then smokemine out of the way for complete safety. Yet for anyone who have problems with this it feels incredibly unfair to be frozen like that. As OP clearly demonstrates.

Thanks for the clear explanation, very kind by you :)
Well it is stupid that for a ridicolous reason like this, many honest players must die :/ When a level/map loads, ALL the content of that level/map must preload in ram: not only the architecture of the zone, but even mosters, player's/monsters' skill graphical effects, even enemies in boxes and their effects. It is absurd lo load in real time from hard disk even the simple death animation of enemies -.-

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Wispo wrote:

Well it is stupid that for a ridicolous reason like this[...]

Well I'm not sure what reasons they may have. Perhaps it's some other issue entirely. But this is certainly the closest imaginable reason for things being like this. Just not having rogue exiles pre-load seems like a bit of a silly mistake. Especially considering we've gone through ambush so long ago. It's something that would have been remedied then. But I don't represent GGG in any way and I don't know what they're thinking. It's a guess.

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Wispo wrote:

It is absurd lo load in real time from hard disk even the simple death animation of enemies -.-

I don't have any experience with this but judging from the load/frameskip you get when characters join your map (regardless of class) it's more likely it's items that drop aren't loaded than the animations. Though that's not an issue I'd expect them to have fixed. It's a very small problem compared to rouges and boxes.

It the reason to not preload things are hackers, than i have to say that hackers dont care about it.

If the hacker can catch datas while opening stronboxes, he can also react on stronboxes. While opening a strongbox, the hacker goes to charackter selecion menu and then the hacker analyst the collected datas. So he know what is/was inside the Box and can fight them.

I think, to *try* to fight hackers while making the game almost unplayable for players is the wrong sollution, because hackers are allways the winners.

But i think hackers are not the reason for (not) preloading anything, even if i use molten shell and it explodes, the explode data dont got preloaded. So i think in this case, its just bad code.

I am as well concerned about these strongboxes, not so much because of the exploding ones, or desync, which is just a part of the game mechanics now, but bleeding....
Almost religiously when I open a strongbox, my health immediately starts bleeding out FAST, and although I do have a bleeding flask, it is still annoying as all to be forced to lose all of your health right before a big fight, especially a fight with a couple of exiles in it. :(

For the record, I have no clue how hackers operate on a video game truthfully, but would take issue with the preponderance of new ways to die, and lose XP in a game where XP is SOOOO slow to gain. However, if Grind Gear would just remove the death penalty, it would solve most all problems with the game, and I would say, GO GO GO GGG, Killemeall. Alas, GGG seems to be hard up to make the game as difficult as possible for whatever reason, and I doubt that will change. :P

So, I suppose that until Grind Gear gets a grip and starts being more realistic with their devices to kill you, I will stop opening lockboxes altogether. as if they are not even in the game....
What a SHAME really, but most of the newer additions to the game seem designed to guarantee death!!

There is a fix high end computer with good SSD on high speed bus. I have 160 pings and strongbox is not one of my problems

Another reason why strongbox contents CAN'T be preloaded(especially not when the level they are in is first loaded) is that you can reroll the boxes. Until the second you open it, the server doesn't KNOW what mods it will actually have.

Do you guys honestly think it's reasonable to demand expensive high-end hardware - for a free-to-play game with rather crappy graphics? Isn't that kind of counterproductive? I'd find it hard to argue that the problems are anything but the result of poor coding/design decisions.

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Zed_ wrote:

Do you guys honestly think it's reasonable to demand expensive high-end hardware - for a free-to-play game with rather crappy graphics? Isn't that kind of counterproductive? I'd find it hard to argue that the problems are anything but the result of poor coding/design decisions.

I don't think the graphics are bad at all, have you played at max settings? Sure nothing like crysis 3 or another graphics equivalent game but it's up there. And I do think it's reasonable, the keyword being "gaming" computer, this is a game...games of a decent caliber in this day and age are never meant to be played on local store bought cheap-o pc's, old-timer rig, etc...gamer's get a rig to suite what they would like to play, not the other way around! That's just silly! And when I can play on max settings on a rig I built in late 2011, that say's a lot about the rig he is attempting to use and having troubles with, 10fps and ultra low settings says it all!

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Fumina wrote:

It the reason to not preload things are hackers, than i have to say that hackers dont care about it.

If the hacker can catch datas while opening stronboxes, he can also react on stronboxes. While opening a strongbox, the hacker goes to charackter selecion menu and then the hacker analyst the collected datas. So he know what is/was inside the Box and can fight them.

I think, to *try* to fight hackers while making the game almost unplayable for players is the wrong sollution, because hackers are allways the winners.

But i think hackers are not the reason for (not) preloading anything, even if i use molten shell and it explodes, the explode data dont got preloaded. So i think in this case, its just bad code.

Lol what is this mess I just read. I feel English isn't your main language but at the same time you're way off base.

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Hodari wrote:

Another reason why strongbox contents CAN'T be preloaded(especially not when the level they are in is first loaded) is that you can reroll the boxes. Until the second you open it, the server doesn't KNOW what mods it will actually have.

There's nothing that says you can't load the new exile(s) when they're rolled. There's nothing about the actual box opening that's tied to the loading. Other than the performance hit being there right now and that's when you have to have loaded the exile. And really the hitch should never have been there either way. I don't see any sensible reason for having your rendering thread hang waiting for resources instead of streaming in the content. Considering the current state is having the entire screen freeze until the loading is done I don't think there's any doubt having an untextured exile (you could even make it see-through if you like, it'd just pop in a few frames later visually) is preferable.


https://youtu.be/0E_caQDnFOU?t=522
Here's something I'm concerned about, (slightly OT but has relevance). They have discovered this sort of bug. That's fine, that sort of bug can happen and there's nothing wrong with that. But they're quite far along right? And I've never had the game perform well with regards to particle effects since open (I got closed beta but didn't notice ._.). If they've actually put some effort on making the particle system behave then that's fine, they don't _have_ to give us a slider if there's no issues. But there can be issues. It's not like people haven't complained or asked for particle effect sliders or anything. It's been a problem, but the response hasn't really been there. So not introducing a player-side solution like a particle slider seems like a bit of a bad move considering how things have been. Now I'm hoping nobody with a machine that you could hold reasonable expectations of running this game well will have problems.

I can't tell if it's the damage effects or stuff like the nature of the arctic breath effect that's causing me the most concern (because I haven't thought much about it really, I've come to accept the problems) but I really think Chris is in the wrong here. Even in the cases where there's no bug (say mjölner discharge of different varieties) the excessive amount of particle effects may be impressive but you may also find that it's far less impressive when the games framerate is beaten by modern printers. You'd want to turn down the amount of effects then. And preferably you'd do this on a machine to machine basis rather than setting some arbitrary "no more than 1024 discharges in one frame" limit. So be that a variable set by the devs based on graphics cards/CPU or by the player (at risk of player overdoing it) it's certainly a plus.

And I know GGG cares a lot about their userbase so they probably look over your shoulder from time to time to make sure you don't have issues. This type of slider might prevent people from filing complaints about the particles and that'd be bad for newer players trying to adopt the game (since they're facing unfixed issues). I think that's solvable by tracking the particle effect setting and simply asking a player who recently messed with the slider what issues they were having.

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justinmm1988 wrote:

I don't think the graphics are bad at all [...] gamer's get a rig to suite what they would like to play, not the other way around! [...]

I know you're not speaking from the perspective of someone who has tried to run this game on a lower-end machine. I've used a machine I built in 2008 for what was ~500$ and the game ran mostly fine. I had a ~80$ graphics card upgrade since i built it and that's approximately when I started playing PoE.

I really don't think most of the complaints are about the general performance of the game but rather that it runs fine and then just turns into a choppy mess. Which is just what I experienced when joining parties (most parties with semi-rapid spell effects, not just the CoC people and dischargers) or the dominus fight (for some reason).

Also you don't seem to understand (or like to care about) the idea that there's a quality measure to all of this. What you're saying is that regardless of picture quality a gamer should be required to purchase a sufficient machine for any game this person wishes to play. There's no reason to complain ever. If I were to write the most inefficient renderer on the planet which couldn't replicate flappybird without Titans in SLI or whatever you'd still be in the wrong to complain? Sure, here GGG doesn't have any real obligation to the player other than their massive good will but you can't simply take away our right to complain like that without reason.