A Land Far Away

Please do not complain about lag if you are playing on stolen wifi connections, laptops, old laptops, old box computers with crappy video cards etc...

Turn your graphics down or pop 80 bucks for a new video card.

You are guaranteed to experience game play issues, and we are not going to redesign ALFA to dumb down the content and make everyone else miserable.

I aprreciate that people may have financial issues with buying the stuff needed for higher end graphics, just please understand that the mods were built for people with higher end gaming rigs in mind.

Tips:

TURN THE GRAPHICS DOWN.

If you do experience lag on a decent setup we DO want to know about it. Please tell us and we can run diagnostics and other nifty stuff to get it fixed.

For some people running in "windowed" mode helps too.

Perhaps you can give us a general outline of your definitions for "crap video cards" and "medium to high end gaming rigs".

laptop = crap rig.

any video card older than 3 yrs = crap rig.

Perhaps the more techncially minded can chime in.

Generally if you cannot run newer games your machine is old, which is fine, just expect that "your gameplay experience may differ" as they say

Other "tricks" to make your slowpoke box supahfast again:

• Pause your torrents.
• Tone down your "on access" or "heuristic" virus-scanning.
• Defrag your hard drive, at least once a year.
• Shut down all those resident programs you're not using.
• Run a program like HijackThis and check out just how many programs run automaticly when you boot the machine - do you really need all of them?

laptop = crap rig.

I reject this theory, based on my current laptop being able to maintain good fps (30+) while playing games such as crysis on maximum settings

on the other hand, NWN2 is a pile of garbage and has a massively **** graphics engine, so yes what come as standard with little performance hit in most other games costs a lot in NWN2, so turning settings off/down is likely good advise for anyone/everyone.

I have a 1 Gb Nvidia 9800, an AMD quadcore and 8 gigs of ram. I have a 20mbps dl speed, around 3mbps ul. There are much better PCs out there, but I can run new games at max settings most of the time. And I lag like CRAZY....on ALFA servers. Not on other nwn2 servers.

If I can run Bad Company 2 multiplayer without significant lag, but connecting to ALFA gives me problems, something's going on there. Putting it on people's PC's/connection isn't the whole story.

yeah most of the 'lag', I suspect, is due to a host machine cpu that's having difficulty with keeping up

tsm seems fine, though on longer uptimes it's more evident on bg and ms

I run off a laptop and have no problems. However it's a laptop built for running way more graphics-intense games than NWN, so.. *shrug*

For what it's worth here's what I did on my old rig (2.4GHz single core w/ 8800GT) to strike a balance between frame rate and appearance (in order of frame rate gain, and to echo some points Holly mentioned):-
* Turn off all unnecessary TSRs/Services/what-have-you, run CCleaner (or the equiv.), keep your page file drive defragged, etc. General good practice, system upkeep stuff.
* Turn all Shadows down to Low (or Off in extreme cases).
* Disable v-sync.
* Run in Windowed mode.
- In nwn2.ini edit the 'Height=<value>' tag to be 30 points less and the 'Width=<value>' tag to be 10 points less. This enables you to centre the window neatly.
* Set MSAA to '0x'.
* Anisotropic filtering to lowest.
* Disable all water-related effects.
* Turn down Point Source Lighting (if the builder has been click-happy with the shadow-casting omni lights).

Clearly none of the above will affect network latency lag issues.

"Newer" games is often a poor benchmark...so many are multi-platform and the need to run on consoles means less-than-demanding graphics. The ability to run a multi-platform game, such as Bad Company 2, is irrelevant for determining adequacy at nwn2. Performance on other nwn2 mods is a valid comparison.

Shadows and water make the biggest demands in nwn2 and should be the first settings turned down. Vid card reviews should benchmark with nwn2...the graphics are coded so poorly that even uber cards are tested. For the purposes of nwn2, nVidia 9800 is a weak card.

My experience: Caer Callidyr is more graphically demanding than other locales I've been to in ALFA.

I have one of these on a duo core processor and 4G of Ram.

ATI Radeon™ HD 5770


http://www.amd.com/us/products/notebook ... specs.aspx

I sitll have to run on medium or it can't handle combat FPS. Its a messy sloppy bit of graphics programming from a time when, well other companies (Blizzard) solved that issues amply in regards to server based persistent world and graphics interterfacing from remote servers.

Last time I logged int Caer Callidyr I got a DRAMATIC reduction in FPS unlike I have ever experienced before.

I asked other players, and they ALL shared the same experience.

So I am thinking this is due to some server side setting change or a worldwide upgrade in Windows or our drivers that suddenly has made the seven year old program less wieldy.

Blizzard has pro modelers and huge server farms, WoW also costs money.
NWN2 has placeable objects, which by definition, are not optimized, especially when the area builders gets very creative and layers them on each other.
So even with a GF4xx or ATI 6xxx there will be low frame rates in battles and certain areas.

Something that a lot of builders forget which affects players is to set the "object cast shadows" /"Object recieves shadows" setting on all objects to false. Caer Callidyr may not have this done. It makes a huge difference to what PC's have to process. I did it with the new silvrymoon surrounds, and you can run through there smoothly even during combat.

Good tip on the shadows ElCadaver