My two cents

I haven't played this game since middle of R26, only logged in r27 to get my lot. Thought I'd log back in and give it a another try. Well was at my lot, couldn't see where I was for it was too darn dark, checked my video settings and my brightness slider was already all the way to the right. So I struggled thru the dark, with my torch lit, which did not help much, and lagged my way toward the banker merchants, and said, dang that took too dang long just to get there due to stumbling in the dark and the lag, so I logged back out. I can't believe all this time the game still lags, I mean I played so many games and they have more going for them then this, and NO LAG what so ever .... Think I'll wait till they fix the lag, cause for me, it is a game breaker. JIMHO

 

Did you try fiddling with the saturation thingy? It was kind of darkish for me too until I moved some sliders there too.

 

Interesting. I've only heard complaints that night was too bright now.

 

Haven't tried the saturation, got fed up with the lag ...

 

Where were you? Maybe one of the larger towns? I haven't been experiencing much lag lately. Better performance actually for my crappy laptop. Is it possible that was coming from your end? Maybe someone streaming Netflix or something?

 

My performance is also better, but I had to fiddle with my graphic card to overclock it, which will make it die sooner but at least I can run the game with more than 20 fps in bigger towns.

Even in the wilderness I rarely get over 28 fps which is kinda low but its understandable since the view distance is so high. Port is going to make passes at spriting the contents to make this smoother I'm sure.

One thing I noticed lags me alot is the freakin grass swaying all at the same time... is there any way to turn this off especially ? It really looks bad anyways I prefer to have sprite grass and faster performance, all the rest is turned off shadows etc... to my great sadness cause I think the graphics are good as I've seen on ppl with high end graphic cards. Mine is not supposed to be bad @1gb... my heavy benchmarks hit 35 fps easily... so I dunno how to explain it other than the 20 thousand polygons needed to make the grass sway...

If I could cut or burn it like in legend of zelda I would

Me ? I'm just a lawnmower you can tell me by the way I walk

 

Sorry not much FB here, since you have not posted it with ANY information on connection, computer, what program are running . . . . Just complaining.

Try doing a proper bug report and sending some data to Port to see if it is a problem on their end they can fix or something on your end. Most likely your end is 75% or more of the problem.

Ty for trygin, try again when you are prepared to provide some input so either players or the dev team can try and help.

 

@Chatele you can use /debug (use it again to turn it off) to see what your frame rate is, when you're experiencing this 'lag'. If you can check, what is it? And what zone/scene was this happening in?
If debug is showing it's below 10 FPS, there is likely some serious problem with hard disk thrashing, software/CPU rendering (instead of Hardware/GPU) or some other massive throttling/bottleneck going on, on your PC.

To put things into perspective, I can play Shroud on a Geforce 210 with a Core 2 Duo CPU, and it plays around 15 FPS in open world resource scenes. Yes, it's slow, but it's playable, barely. If you have a system that greatly exceeds that, resource-wise, and are still having problems, it may be unrelated to the performance of the game client.

 

Night has improved for me on a GeForce 980. Not sure what changed. But I used to feel it was "awfully dark". Now I feel it is "suitably dark" for use with torches and spells, enough to create an 'edge of seat' gaming effect. Running around one zone that I did not know so well last night, I actually regretted sticking around til dark, as I became concerned I didn't know the way out and didn't want to run into the mobs. But I could still reasonably see to get around if I had to. To me that was a good sign of improving balance.

On the performance end, I have been pushing it on fantastic graphics settings and not getting too may problems, except in Soltown and Ardoris lately which are choppy. The patch notes do indicate that performance spikes to be a known issue in towns though.

 

Dude, I get you're grumpy, but c'mon...

 

@Solstar It's like you knew what was in my head... I LOL'd, seriously!

 

Nope I have no mercy for someone who comes here in a feedback forum and does nothing but complains and does not provide anything for anyone to give any intelligent replies to.

All we can do is ask more questions, a waste of time IMO if the player des not want to really give anything but complaints.

Sorry, if some think that is cold, perhaps it is, but if you want help provide, something to work off of not just . . . . .

I am more than willing to help but will not try and feel out what is actually going on when it would have been easy to file a real bug report, and actually provide something to go off of. . . .

It is to easy to give information about setup, setting, connection, . . . . and then something could actually be done.

4 questions have already been asked and . . . .

 

My reply wasn't intelligent ?

 

If I can play every other game out there with NO LAG issues at all, then why Is it I only lag here?
OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Manufacturer Hewlett-Packard
System Model 810-145qe
System Type x64-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz, 3601 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date AMI 80.21, 5/29/2014
SMBIOS Version 2.7
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 24.0 GB
Total Physical Memory 16.0 GB
Available Physical Memory 13.7 GB
Total Virtual Memory 32.0 GB
Available Virtual Memory 29.5 GB
Page File Space 16.0 GB
OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
Other OS Description Not Available
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name HOME-HP
System Manufacturer Hewlett-Packard
System Model 810-145qe
System Type x64-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz, 3601 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date AMI 80.21, 5/29/2014
SMBIOS Version 2.7
Windows Directory C:\Windows
System Directory C:\Windows\system32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "6.1.7601.17514"
User Name home-HP\home
Time Zone Eastern Standard Time
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 24.0 GB
Total Physical Memory 16.0 GB
Available Physical Memory 13.7 GB
Total Virtual Memory 32.0 GB
Available Virtual Memory 29.5 GB
Page File Space 16.0 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 745
I lag in towns, out of towns, in altwater, game play is choppy .... will check frame rate tomorrow .... And I wasn't complaining just stating my experience, and I sure heck am entitled ...

 

I'm first putting some quick hw related observations inside a spoiler as they are not likely that much relevant to the issues -the hw is (in principle) sufficient to play the game smoothly at FHD resolutions.

Spoiler: Just some observations, mostly irrelevant to the problem at hand

These are just balance related observations that do likely not have much to do with your issues. The hardware is sufficiently powerful to play the game smoothly at FHD resolutions. So this is mostly to point out "sweet spots" if you'd ever be considering performance related upgrades.

• 
  
• the Windows version (7 home premium) does not permit using all the installed memory (24GB but that windows version has a physical limit of 16GB). Upgrading to Win10 (free upgrade for now) would address this
• this appears to be more like setup optimized for a business use (and some occasional gaming), a very powerful cpu and lots of installed memory compared to more modest gpu (GTX 745) specs
• no info about hard disk but if it's not already pure SSD based then the system would likely benefit most from it

This might or might not be true, depending on the game. Other games might give out the impression of having more going on without lag, but there is actually quite a lot going on in SotA that is perhaps rarely considered. For example the constantly changing time of day related changes to illumination, weather, and astronomy may make it difficult if not impossible to make use of certain optimizations that are available to other games.

Yes there is some choppiness and lag, but it has been constantly improving. For example Ardoris is has improved enough so that I do not really think about it any more (a few releases back it was a constant source of annoyance) and my own gpu specs are somewhat similar to yours, so I'd suspect there are at least some client side issues. The good news is that they're often fixable, once figured out what they are exactly. I'd start with running some benchmarks (to rule out some performance degrading issues) and testing the network performance (network throughput and latency). As others have similarly stated, I too would be glad to help out to fix whatever it is that is causing the issue.

 

The servers are most def at Portalarium Austin, period. That would be one main reason why. How far are you from Austin? Have you pinged their servers? Alpha/Beta tests usually take place on local servers. Now I don't know the future of SotA's server situation, but with UO, the entire pre-alpha, alpha, phase 1 & 2 tests took place virtually on Austin servers, except the last very few days of phase 2 beta where they briefly stress tested 3 servers in 3 different locations. East Coast, Central, West Coast. After release of course they branched out based on the popularity of the game. If the game happens to be very popular in X country I'm sure they will consider getting a server there, we'll see. Luckily I'm close enough to Texas to not notice much lag at all, but I do admit I have to put it to minimal settings to enjoy minimal lag, but then again I'm playing off of wifi, if I played directly connected I'd probably have zero lag on the higher settings.

 

Just to rule out the issue, have you tried playing with the lowest setting? If you don't get any more lag, just gradually bump it up until you do. Then play with other settings until you can pin down the issue.

Also see if you run the game in admin mode and disable dpi adjusting and windows aero. Make sure your anti virus is not actively scan the game folder.

 

Ty for the good info.... will try some of the suggestions, I hate turning game down cause it makes the game look crappy. I am more of a visual gamer But will lower it, then slowly up it to see how far i need to turn things down to make it at least not so choppy.

 

One thing that's been mentioned but that is a possible culprit/suspect: hard disk thrashing. Default builds from vendors like HP, Toshiba, Dell, Lenovo, Sony and more often have so many active processes (well over 100, you can check in task manager) and so much bloatware, indexing, searching, updaters, product experience collectors, anti-virus, anti-malware, and so on active that the hard drive is never idle. If your hard drive light never shuts off, especially while in-game? Bad things are happening, and performance will suffer.

Obviously, an Intel SSD will improve things, but I would be cautious about throwing money and hardware at the problem given this is the only game giving you trouble. Often, that's an indicator it's the game, not your hardware, that is at fault. Your video card is perfectly fine to run Shroud, one of my testing PC's uses a card with half the performance of yours, and the only time I see low frame rates is in Ardoris, but I play with very low settings, because Shroud has... issues.

On the gaming systems I build for myself, friends, and family, with Windows 7, my goal is always under 30 processes after login. Also, a DPC latency of under 100μs is a strong indicator everything is running well. Over 100μs and there's something hinky in the works. Just a few things to check.

 

Yea I disabled anything that I consider not important Through task manager services, and I also run Norton to turn off unnecessary processes ... my HD light hardly Flashes ....