So I took out my ancient Dell Inspiron 8000 Laptop, it was pretty much top of the line back then, today of course its crap.
After having to **** the password on it (I forgot the old masterpassword I used to use back then when I retired it), I finally got in, it came with Windows2000, but I had installed XP and it had a ton of updates it needed to do.
Then I noticed a Lineage 2 icon and remembered I actually used to play L2 on it back in the days when out and about, I fired it up...Chronicle 3 start up screen...lol.
The machine is vastly below minimum specs for Lineage 2...but I decided "what the heck, just for fun, lets try it", so I set it to update (Man, updating from C3 to Hellbound takes a LOOOOOONG time, but I wanted to just try and let it do that for the heck of it)
I didn't update the graphics drivers, used the old ones (not sure how to see a version comparable to todays nvidia versioning) which was 6.14.10.4482. Was still on the old nVidia utils that runs in the regular properties screen.
So I started up the game, fully expecting it to completely crap out and go "omg n00b, your computer sucks, ****".
But no, after quite a bit of loading, the Hellbound intro screen came up and I was like "wow, this looks really nice on this" and I checked the settings, they were all on HIGH/Very Wide at 1280x1024x16...****!
But of course the screen was not responding too quickly, so I reduced everything to Low settings and 1024x768...I logged in...it let me...I selected my character...no errors...I selected ok...it loaded...
And viola, I was in the game, running around in Giran...wasn't the most fluent of experiences, but it ran and it was usable.
I guess the moral of this is that the min specs aren't really increased after all except for the new effects (The new lightings and the Hellbound effects), so you can go out and use an old crap machine to set up store in (unless you're being illegit, shame on you) or maybe just for some basic fighting and moving around.
Just thought it was funny and thought I'd share. :)
The game is designed with unreal 2.0 Engine (2002)
While minimum requirements aside, your got bloody lucky there lord..
As a considerable number of machiens i've worked on that match the "min" requirements are unable to actually play the game without major issues.... while it may not crash, the game is sevearly unplayable, multi minute load times, multi minute delays, multiple black screening and so forth...
Could someone clarify what exactly were the recently added effects? Because I get very poor performance on a machine that is substantially above recommended specs.
By poor, I mean frequently waiting 1 to 20 seconds for new textures to load. Once they have loaded, framerates are subpar but acceptible. I'd like to figure out which effect was so ineffciently coded as to do this. =P
My specs:
AMD 64 x2 4200
nVidia 8800GT
2 gigs Corsair XMS RAM (matched pair)
Western Digital 7200 rpm SATA drive
I can run much more demanding games than L2 and get great performance. My CPU is a little weak but should not prevent me from getting a good experience in L2.
/edit - I should add that I played the game on a much slower system back at release, and while I always though the Unreal engine was a TERRIBLE choice for an mmo, I got better performance back then on an inferior machine. Granted, I am trying to use higher settings now, but it really seems to me that they took an inefficient engine and made it downright doggish.
Ghostwhisper, I have an almost identical machine to yourself (with an 8800GTX). No problems here that I can detect.
As for the specs, I am using my old X800XTPE card and an Athlon 3000+ for my buffer account and its very happy to be on high settings with FSAA enabled :) It's pretty light on PC's L2...
Rosa - thanks for the info. It's very frustrating to me.. I do not understand why the client is so slow to load textures on my system, especially if we have the same box (different video card would not effect this problem much). This is my number-one gripe with the game atm.
How do you measure fps in game? IIRC Fraps does it, but I don't want to buy that just to measure fps.
download the free version of fraps..
it allows you to display fps and take screenshots.. the only thing the free version doesn't allow is record high resolution video OR allow you to record any video longer then 20-30 seconds.....
For me the issue is not overall FPS - I think that ought to be better too, but once resources are loaded, I'm ok with it the way it performs. It's the loading of those resources.. something as simple as one player approaching me while I'm out hunting will cause the client to lock up for 1-5 seconds.
Not to mention that most background programs have increased in memory footprint a lot over the recent years, not to mention Vista uses a lot, so does XP to some degree as well these days.
So what seemed to be a lot of memory not long ago, is just not anything special anymore at all.
Heck, just right now not even doing anything special or gaming I am already using 35% of my 8 Gb of memory. (ok, I am a bit at the extreme end, but still)
Yeah but regardless of whether 2 GIGs is a lot, just average, or what not, when I first load the client, I am already getting these huge delay spikes due to texture loading - the client hasn't even begun to use the pagefile at that point - its all highspeed RAM.
You don't really know if it is or isn't...windows starts to use the page file before the physical memory is spent, the more the closer you get to having it exhausted.
But it certainly sounds like you have some sort of I/O bottleneck somewhere.
What chipset/motherboard are you using (and do you have the latest drivers for it)?
And benchmark your harddrive then tell us the results it comes up with for both the quick and slow one. If you are using Vista you can use the program by setting it to Windows XP SP2 compatibility and running it as administrator.
I used to get around 20 fps in wow. I was used to it i never got any higher for any other game. Then i read a video card review and the variable they used to add more strain was the resolution. Turned wow down from 1200 to 800 and i got about 3x the fps.
So if you want better fps lowering resolution might help.
Honestly I would love to run games in 1024x768. But one thing I really do not like about LCD monitors is that they only look sharp in ONE resolution (at least mine is this way). So I pretty much have to run in 1280x1024, but that still isn't too high.
Well that is good to know, although it still showed above the "standard" benchmark for a SATA drive. Do you think it indicates an actual problem, or just less-than-stellar performance?
remember.. burst speeds are basically useless... they just give you an indication if your drive is actually showing relatively decent rated throughput of the sata system or not.
It's the sustained read/writes that are of concern...
your systems performance is roughly in the lowest of hardrive performance numbers..
considering that my system is performing nearly 15 times faster in hardrive speeds alone
Actually the 7200.11 Starts around 105 and drops to about 52 MB/s Still about the fastest drive on the market at most things, and a well rounded drive. Maybe you can get the figures you mentioned with your 4X Striped array, but not a single drive.
actually those results were affecting models with faulty firmware.... not only where those drives showing poor performance due to 32mb cache not being utilized properly.. but the read/write speeds were horrible...
I've got several seagate 7200.11's running in both single/dual/triple/quad/ raid configurations..
i guarantee you ... a single 7200.11 without the issues presented on some of the first drives, perform as i stated....
just don't use an nforce or ati chipset ..... intel's ich9r will prove to be the best
Anyway I do not think in my case this is bad enough to explain why loading one character's worth of textures would cause a 2-5 second pause - unless you think one character's textures adds up to 150-200 MB when textures are set to low..
no it's usually related to the effieiceny of the machine your using and how well organized the file system is along with how many programs you've got running in the background..
hardrive speed has improved things considerably for alot of people.... while in some peoples cases.. not at all...
As i don't have you machine here so that i can see it and check it out.. it's very very very hard to figure out what would be a good solution
I've seen few computer to the style of "can be something cheraper and slower, just for son to play some games". :) Then you wonder why so-called gaming computer sold by computer shops has 1 GB of RAM. At the times of IDE the harddrive and CD/DVD drive is on one cable. You wonder why game is so slow, look into system a bit closer - and there you go, ACPI turned off if it can be on and is supported, all devices packed on one IRQ, AGP set to 4x and processor's L2 cache tuned off.
Even older piece can show it's strenghts if maintained properly. You had luck if your old laptop is running fine this game. On the other hand ... one part is good setup, other one is if this game really uses new modern technologies to support performance. In other words: "I just got top-of-the-line Alienware overclocked watercooled fancy gaming rig and game lags the same in Giran as my 3 years old Pentium IV with ATI 9800Pro ...
Lots of settings can be optimized, but heck if the average user can figure those out.
Too bad there aren't any technical wiki's or something out there...info is often incredibly sparse on settings and end up relying on others experiences which vary greatly.