Win XP feedback as requested by Higby

Higby asked for feedback by Win XP users on OMGF, so here i go.

First things first: I know there are some vultures that jump on every occasion to bash win XP and Win XP users. If you are one of them, **** off. This is not the place for it, and it is not my job to explain why some people, including myself, are still stuck on it.


With that out of the way, my feedback:

First, FPS have been notable better on OMGF/PTS throughout all the last patches and nightly playtests. On that front, you are winning hands down.


Stability and the Bug situation did not look that good on the other hand. Until the patch that you did put up today. It has brought massive improvements. ( And i guess that is no conincidence seeing as you ask for Win XP feedback today. )


Before ( Up to / Including last night's playtest on PTS ) :

Both on life and PTS/OMFG i had 2 very, very annoying problems that got introduced with some patches in April and have been in the game ever since:

- 1. If i did NOT run the ingame recording tool, my FPS at warpgate were at 11-15. Super choppy game. WITH the recording tool running they were at smooth 30+ FPS. This forced me to permanently run the recording and delete the videos all the time.

- 2. I had constant crashing. Every 10 - 20 minutes. Worse in/near big fights, better when there was noone around. It was always happening if i flew around/moved large distances, it was also always happening when i kept respawning in different locations than the one i last spawned in. And it would inevitably crash in or near big fights after some time. I think that was simply a question of how much the game had to load, and it would eventually run out of RAM.

With Today's Patch:

- Bug 1 is gone. Its dead. No sign of it left. Amazingly high and smooth framerates without running the recording tool.

- The crashing situation seems to have been improved massively. I say seems because PTS is empty around this daytime, so i will have to wait and see how the situation is in tonight's playtest in a really big fight.

My findings so far: I still crash after flying very long distances. But it took MUCH longer for it to happen than usual.
I did respawn in different locations multiple times in a row, did not crash at all.
As for big fights, we will see.


New issue:

Today, i got some slight framerate jumps that manifested themselves as small, but noteable stuttering. Mostly when flying, but i also saw enemies move somewhat jumpy / jittery. The best way to see it was circling around a bio lab in a Mozzie in 3rd person view. Turning smoothing on seems to mostly fix it, but not entirely. Maybe lag is a factor, i do not know.

Overall, this is a very minor issue compared to the stuff i had to deal with before. This latest patch is a HUGE step into the right direction for me. If those fixes / gains prove to hold up in large fights and work on life, where there is all sorts of stuff happening even the best PTS stresstest can not catch, i will be super happy. Those are precisely the bugfixes i have been waiting for, for the last 6 month.

Hm for some reason i can not edit the post.

Anyway, update after tonight's Playtest:

I still crashed multiple times. But it seemed to me as if there was more time between crashes than usual.

And the game ran smooth as silk for me during the entire battle. No hitches, no stuttering.

Thanks for the feedback. We are pretty confident that we found a major XP issue today that's haunted us forever. Literally...since childhood... like, my first words were "WTF XP!?"

Anyway, in all seriousness we really cannot wait to get back some of our lost XP users with this patch. The fix also helps performance on non-XP systems as well, but XP was just getting HAMMERED by this.

That may have been what was causing my problems in win 7. The .exe I downloaded earlier today really killed me with tons of hitches but now that latest .exe one from a few mins ago works perfectly like it did yesterday. I feel way more confident now in the patch.

Now that that is done, release pls?

If not, I report u huehuehuehuehue

Yay! Congratulations!! Exactly what was it(the technical version), if I may ask?
Like the OP said I used to have no stuttering and could run with settings turned up a lot. Most XP players have spent a lot of time trying to make PS2 go faster since the game update that broke PS2 on XP (and despite having a good CPU in my case). The difference is immense!. I was actually wondering if OMFG missed something major, like multi-threading some important part lol.

(This is not to say are other bugs on Test, but they're mostly not XP specific I think)

Confirmed. Happens when walking as well.

This is a separate issue I think. Animations jump, skip, flicker, change directions without transition etc. Enemies (and friendlies) are really hard to track which makes aiming and figuring out their immediate intentions difficult.

This game gets optimized for a OS that's going to be abandoned in 4 month?

What I say everytime I get a kill.

Kudos to you for testing WinXP. Such a large number of players and potential-players still use it.

XP is a small, and getting smaller, segment of the population. However, just like laptop users and dual-core users, they are users who deserve at least an appropriate level of support. Personally, I want to make as many people's experiences better as possible, given time and resource constraints. We prioritize optimizations around spending the bulk of the time on the bulk of the players, but at least some time on everyone.

Make sense?

And you are doing a fantastic job. Keep it up.

Codeforge,

What's it look like for NVSurround and Eyefinity support? The Prez said it'd be supported. This seems like a good time to look at it...

It is a high priority, but performance is higher. We have nothing against multihead, and we all want to support it. It's just that we have a big list of things for the UI guys to work on. =)

Multihead or multithread? I thought this was already multithreaded?

Multihead as support for multi display tech like Eyefinity.

"Head" term is back from the days when Matrox was famous for their multi display graphic cards like Millenium DualHead and etc...

ok

Most users who can run PS2 aren't on XP because their machines can't run vista/7 or because Vista/7 wasn't the path of least resistance from Microsoft, i.e. they are there for various reasons which are outside the scope of this thread, as the OP said. Microsoft has been trying to get people to leave XP for years and failing. Despite several years warning about ending support apparently XP is on 31% of computers globally as of October.

SOE is trying to get back lost PS2 users and new XP users, not users who abandoned XP. It's a commercial decision as to whether the cost of supporting the most understood OS with over a decade of fixes is worth it, given PS2 is a DX 9 game.

Nope, this is a PC game. DX11 and 64bit should have been standard 3 years ago.

I was still crashing multiple times in tonight's big stresstest fight at The Crown. Not more or less than yesterday i would say. The game stayed smooth and very playable between crashes. ( I will not post new updates unless something changes significantly for better or worse. )

It's even weirder when you think that PS4 supports OpenGL 4.3 (DirectX 11 hardware). They could be seeing massive performance improvements by targeting larger issues (modern shadow algorithms and modern deferred rendering approaches for more equalized settings being the glaring issues) yet someone is probably forcing them not to. That must be frustrating knowing the ROI for optimizing DX9 and XP is almost none yet having to to do it. Essentially their own IE6 development hell.

Please use this at the very least. That is it's closer to 7% of all Steam gamers (dropping 0.56% per month). The fraction of steam gamers who play FPS games also have better hardware. Even using the unofficial survey (while biased by forum and reddit users) from 2 months ago indicated there was less than 1% XP users (0.45%) and dropping.

If I had to guess their continued support of old hardware is hurting them and losing them way more customers than they would ever gain from XP users. Anecdotally I've introduced two people so far that played on ultra settings who complained about performance on fairly new hardware which I'm fairly certain is due to a reliance on dated DX9 methods.

I wish codeForge could talk candidly about this. There has to be some discussion about switching it all to DX11 by this point simply for the abundance of faster algorithms with compute shaders. (So many Sigraph and GDC papers, not to mention moving away from cascaded shadow maps as RTW has existed for a while).