Why all the nerd rage against Vanguard?

[Manticore]

the unit frames in that picture of the group/target, is that an ui mod? only played VG in beta and can't remember there being an option to turn it to look sleek and functional like that

[r.gun]

Originally Posted by Manticore

the unit frames in that picture of the group/target, is that an ui mod? only played VG in beta and can't remember there being an option to turn it to look sleek and functional like that

It's a custom UI. Drox UI to be specific.

[xregg]

Originally Posted by Lyenae

Xregg's ss suck though, no shadows wtf?

I still cringe when I think of what shadows did to my framerates in EQ2. Ive never really run Vanguard on full shadows just always figured I wouldnt get frame rates that would be playable.


Blacken {Talisman}
Flamehammer Server

[Kreugen]

Turn shadows on 1%. No fps hit that I ever saw, but you get blobs under your feet and (most importantly) some environment shadows, which combined with never resorting to using the simple terrain option make the game a hell of a lot better looking.

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by r.gun

FRAPS + DivX... I've been playing around with some VG vids. You can make a 5 minute clip that's decent size and quality if you have the encoder resize the width down to 480... then you can play it on dvd players too... hah

Would be awesome to see more player made fraps videos out there. You need a beefy machine because fraps takes away about 10fps, but you can make some pretty cool videos with it.

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by Drtyrm

That was pretty much my point. There is no possible way that Xregg's screenies prove anything about the mass appeal/success VG will experience. Only beacuse his performance is so far above average as to be statistically insignificant.

P.S. And obviously I wish I had $4600 to spend on new computer!

A machine as follows:

3.2ghz dual core or one of the core duos
2 gigs of ram
xfi card (gets you 5fps)
fast HD (raptor, etc)
ati x1950xt 512meg
dd2-800 RAM / fast FSB

isn't that expensive and does quite well. You could run 1920x1200 in balanced or better mode and get 30 fps in most place except for some cities or areas where there are lots of players. You don't have to have a quad core duo with 4 gigs of ram and an 8800. If you do the game will run even faster, but the above system runs the game great at high rez.

I run a machine about 8 months old:

2 3.8ghz xeons
8 gigs ram
xfi card
x1950xt
ddr2-400

The clock speed of the xeons doesn't help much -- a core duo with better cache and memory management is actually better -- we are not that cpu bound. The 8 gigs is a waste (I was hoping for a 64bit client sooner as opposed to later, but priorities changed -- so 4 gigs would be more than enough). And the ram is semi-slow but all I could get at the time with a xeon motherboard. I run an average of 30fps at 1920x1200.

I'm not saying performance isn't an issue, but I'm also saying you don't have to buy an uber machine to get good graphics and performance either.

I like GamePC - Custom Built Computers -- they have the hot hardware and do a good job on setup and have decent prices. The cheapest way to build a machine if you want to do the work is to buy all the components via egghead or something, but I prefer to spend a bit more and go through gamepc.com -- plus they burn in your machine. Most people I know who have bought all the components find that some component is bad and has to be replaced and I just don't have the patience for that.

Here's a system that would run VG *very* well (note I set it up with xp64 since that also gets you about a 5% increase in performance even though VG is a 32 bit app having everything else running 64bit seems to really help)
1 x Intel Pentium-D 915 (2.8 GHz) Dual Core Retail - $128.00
1 x Zalman CNPS8000 Cooler for Socket-775 / AM2 - $58.00
1 x Asus P5B Intel P965 Retail - $185.00
2 x Corsair XMS DDR2-800 1 GB TwinX Pack - $436.00
1 x Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10,000 RPM OEM - $338.00
1 x Mitsumi 7-in-1 Beige Memory Reader / Floppy Drive - $35.00
1 x Sony AW-Q170AB Black Dual Layer DVD ± RW / CD-RW OEM - $85.00
1 x Sapphire Radeon X1900 XT PCIe 256MB Retail - $298.00
1 x Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio OEM - $90.00
1 x Lian Li V1200B Plus II Black EATX Full-Tower - $298.00
1 x Silverstone ST75F 750W Power Supply - $198.00
1 x Microsoft Windows XP Professional (64-bit) OEM with Vista Upgrade - $198.00
1 x 1 Year Parts and Labor Standard Warranty Included Free - $0.00
1 x Full GamePC System Assembly (Single CPU System) - $225.00



Subtotal Price (Excludes Discounts, Taxes or Shipping) - $2,572.00

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by Nino

I wasn't here during the first year when that decision was made.

It was somewhat the same. Planning for the future to make sure the game would look good years from now, architecting it so we could easily integrate new graphics tech, the fact that we like games that use the latest tech personally, and we made a large world so we could have plenty of room to expand it with the live team and not just have to make new areas with expansions, and we also wanted plenty of room for player housing.

Was that the right call? Time will tell. There are certainly drawbacks and negatives too it. And we'd hoped that machines that would run the game well would be cheaper and hoped we'd release a little later too. But what's done is done.

We made the same gamble with EQ 1 being a hardware only (voodoo 1) game and it paid off, but these are different times.

I think we will catch up and tech will catch up too, but it is hurting us in the short term.

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by Drtyrm

Those environment textures drive me nuts. I can't get my head around the multiple hard edges between objects wrapped in various stone.

Does VG still screenshot without some of the graphical effects being applied?

What you are seeing is static meshes (the rocks) penetrating height field terrain. Making a world as big as we did using a height field terrain (like EQ 2 did) would have made the install like 50gb not 17gb. In the future though as hardware becomes cheaper and more powerful, I think you will see large, seamless worlds where the terrain is not a height field and are polygons just like the objects in the world.

edit: to be clear, EQ 2 uses static meshes for their terrain and not a height field. There are plusses and minuses to this -- a height field allows you to create a larger and seamless world because less data is needed; a static mesh terraiin means other static meshes like rocks, buildings, etc. are easy to mesh (pardon the pun) with the terrain, but the tech likely isn't there yet to make a large and seamless world like Vanguard's without using a height field.

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by Aradune Mithara

Here's a system that would run VG *very* well


Subtotal Price (Excludes Discounts, Taxes or Shipping) - $2,572.00

Or I could just keep my current machine which runs every other title on the market *very* well for free.

I think you are honestly being way too flippant about people just going out and upgrading. That may have worked when things came along every 6 months that made the computing world rethink the future - especially when compatibility wasn't always the highest priority, but these days things are different.

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by woqqqa

Or even if Sigil had managed to implement the AES (Automatic (?) Encounter System) they hyped so much prior to release. Instead, it's EQ camping time! Yeah, this game's going to last....

AES is in and used a bit, but not nearly enough. Turned out to take a LOT more time than expected to implement it, and with the rush to get the game out, there isn't much. All I can do is apologize. I do believe it will be tweaked and optimized and used more in the future with higher level content, and I still very much believe it the design -- it's the tedious nature of the implementation that hurt us

[xregg]

Id love to make some videos only thing is where do you host something like that for free to link off of ? It would be a rather large file at high settings right?
Brad when is an ingame aa setting going to be coming ?

[Rayne]

Originally Posted by Twobit Whore

Or I could just keep my current machine which runs every other title on the market *very* well for free.

And thats really the cruxt of what every gamer that looks at Vanguard needs to consider. Its not that unreasonable for developers to expect that gamers may need to upgrade some. As technology advances forward, requirements escalate. And I think most gamers expect and accept that. But when you need to basically revamp or replace an entire rig thats playing every other current game without any or much issue, you're simply asking for far too much.

A stick of memory here, a video card there, perhaps the occasional hard drive, or even a mobo upgrade now and then, thats a reasonable expectation. All of the above, for a single game, is not. Its just a more financially feasible solution to give Vanguard a pass.

[Lyenae]

Originally Posted by Aradune Mithara

1 x Intel Pentium-D 915 (2.8 GHz) Dual Core Retail - $128.00
1 x Zalman CNPS8000 Cooler for Socket-775 / AM2 - $58.00
1 x Asus P5B Intel P965 Retail - $185.00
2 x Corsair XMS DDR2-800 1 GB TwinX Pack - $436.00
1 x Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10,000 RPM OEM - $338.00
1 x Mitsumi 7-in-1 Beige Memory Reader / Floppy Drive - $35.00
1 x Sony AW-Q170AB Black Dual Layer DVD ± RW / CD-RW OEM - $85.00
1 x Sapphire Radeon X1900 XT PCIe 256MB Retail - $298.00
1 x Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio OEM - $90.00
1 x Lian Li V1200B Plus II Black EATX Full-Tower - $298.00
1 x Silverstone ST75F 750W Power Supply - $198.00
1 x Microsoft Windows XP Professional (64-bit) OEM with Vista Upgrade - $198.00
1 x 1 Year Parts and Labor Standard Warranty Included Free - $0.00
1 x Full GamePC System Assembly (Single CPU System) - $225.00

Subtotal Price (Excludes Discounts, Taxes or Shipping) - $2,572.00

750w powersupply to power an old intel and 1 ATI gpu?
$300 dollar case?
$400 for 2gig Ram paired with a 2.8ghz dual core?

what the hell?

[Miele]

I don't know in the US, but in the EU you can't just say to people "spend 2.5k on a new rig", it's a sick price, really really high for our standards (we're cheap bastards after all) and in all honesty, given that I build pc since like 7 years for myself and friends, it's quite a waste of money to spend those extra 1300-1400ish over a rig that would run VG as good as that.

As I said elsewhere, our beloved € currency should be an advantage when buying in dollars right now as 1€=1,3$ approximately, but it's not. Importers take all the advantages and then some, so while they bath in gold the consumers are screwed. Before you ask, newegg and other american stores don't sell on this side of the pond.

To add an insult to the injury, some european companies now refuse to mail stuff to my country which is a prominent member of the EU and in the G8, but it's full of fucking thieves and scammers so stuff gets stolen right after it passes the border (true story). You win a toaster if you guess the country.

Anyway, the change rate goes usually (and it varies from country to country) from 1$=1€ to 1$=1,3€ (depending on how bastard are the resellers) and this if you are smart and buy online.
So if you're basically asking to spend 3k€+ to play VG to the average EU gamer, the best answer you can hope for is "are you fucking crazy?".

The enthusiast gamer here spends 1,5k€ to 2,5k€ if he's rich, 1k if he has a well payed job, but the vast majority sets on 700ish€ PCs that suck but can run older games flawlessly and resort on buying the GPU as a future upgrade, which doesn't always work as planned in their minds.

Anyway you can get a good rig for about 1k, core duo with a 8800 gts (I still prefer ATI so a I'd take x1950xtx for about the same money) and 2gb ram, don't buy a raptor (imo an unjustified rape for wallets), get a good HDD and a xi-fi with the money you save by not buying the raptor, add a good case and very good psu and you're set. It will run every game on the market very well and VG pretty decently (30 fps granted, tested on my friend rig, he uses Nvidia tho...). Total price 1100ish€. GG Alolienware.

[Aradune Mithara]

Originally Posted by kohl

Did Brad say that he was looking for minimum 300k subs? I'm sorry but I have a hard time believing that any dev with some pride wouldn't be shooting for "as many subs as my game's success allows".

Did you read Brad's wall of text? He laments on and on about how people are pigeonholing his game as 'hardcore' or 'tedious' but that in reality, VG is really about everyone. It's meant to appeal to hardcore, core and casual. If that is the case, and its a solid quality game, and MOST importantly - its FUN - why could it *not* garner 1 million subs? Any please don't use the tired bullshit excuse of Sigil not having a big name, because positive word of mouth in the gaming community, quite frankly, does wonders.

I believe I said it needed 200k-300k to be successful, and that I hoped to see 500k after the game was out 1 year, which would make it very profitable. So far we are in the mid 150s which is less than I would have hoped, but still good and still growing.

I have said we released 2-3 months early and that releasing near BC was a mistake, but there was nothing we could do about it. That doesn't mean we were perfect in our development -- we made mistakes -- I talked about in the NYT about how hard it was to manage and organize a team of 100 people when we were used to to EQ 1 (which had about 25 people). So yes, it was harder to schedule and remain as focused and efficient. We also had the switch from MSFT to SOE which slowed us down and caused us to start beta too early.

We also made the mistake of releasing a little early in terms of tech, e.g. we had hoped that computers would be cheaper that could run Vanguard by the time we launched. Time will fix this, but it is hurting us short term. In 20/20 hindsight we probably should have gone a bit lower tech and made a smaller world. But we really felt strongly from the very beginning that part of immersiveness in next gen MMOG was being seamless where you could travel wherever you wanted to, fly anywhere, be able to load any object in the world anywhere in the world, etc. Again, I think longer term as tech is increasing so rapidly, a lot of these problems will go away and having a seamless world with no instancing, ships and flying mounts, etc. will pay off.

I will apolgize for all of the above and the buck stops here. I won't, however, apologize for the team: they worked their asses off and continue to and truly believe in the game (as do I). That said, while I apologize for the mistakes, some of which we made and some of which were out of our hands, we also got the opportunity to make a very ambitious game, the game of our dreams, and were a start-up company that got a 30M+ budget, which is basically unheard of. So while VG does indeed have some issues, I know a lot of people are having fun with it, and a lot more will have fun with it in the future and call it a home. I am also proud to have been part of such an awesome team and to have been able to launch a second MMOG (not something a lot of people can say they have done). So, again, I do apologize for the shortcomings, but am also proud of the game and its potential, and am confident that while it is a successful game now (certainly not a WoW, but not a D&D online either) it will gain momentum as tech catches up, people tire of BC, etc. And also as we through both expansions and the live team add more really cool features to the game over the next year.

Also things like teleporters, experience rates, better LFG tools, etc. are all being looked at and you will see changes soon. I don't have the details yet, but we are listening and the game will get better and the areas where we messed up (large world, but too hard to find a group, etc.) will be addressed.