November Madness

Depending on who's online, we'll play whatever game.

MESSAGE TO ADMINISTRATORS & MEMBERS
We are drawing ever closer to December and we have not set a concrete date for the team meetup. Can we get a feel of who has yet to complete their exams? I believe Justin and Mut haven't finished. As for the location, we should have too much trouble booking the e2max place - although pricey, I rather pay that lil' bit extra than have "book com doesn't mean confirm get." For lunch/dinner what you guys think about Fish & Co.? Reason being we can easily travel from e2max at the new Cathay Cineplex across the street to Fish & Co. Please post comments!

Admins, please view the draft outing entry under "draft posts" and help update with details as we get things organised (Where the hell is Individual when you need him).

Source Engine Issues

Hey guys,

Over the weekend I've been wrestling with my com and Orange Box installation. I decided to do a short summary on how to resolve some of these issues - namely those that involve graphic/video card crashes.

From what I've dug up from the net, there are 2 main errors thus far:
1. failed to lock vertex buffer CMeshDX8::LockVertexBuffer
and
2. Page Pool Too Low

1. "Failure to lock vertex buffer" is apparently an issue concerning the video card and the its drivers, along with DirectX. Anyway, the info resources on forums online are found here and here. The simplest resolve I found though was to install the latest DirectX version (currently 9.0c I think). However, the conflict might have to do with your video card driver, in which case, an appropriate driver update might do the trick. In my case, I opted to use a thirdparty driver because it also solved another issue, more info on that below.

2. "Page Pool Memory Too Low" simply put, is caused by insufficient memory. A deficiency in RAM is currently known to be the most widespread cause. However, an inferior graphics card memory is also known to trigger this error. Anyways, the advice I garnered from tech help forums is to tweak registry settings - stuff available here. Most advice on forums will advise you to manually tweak your registry settings to increase the paging memory allocated to Steam. I did notice that I managed to stay in-game longer after the tweak, although it's prolly psychological.

However, what did improve the performance of the game DRAMATICALLY was lowering the resolution of the source game itself (Portal, TF2 and HL:Ep.2). More importantly, I also installed a thirdparty graphics driver from Omegadrivers. Please note that you have to uninstall your existing nvidia/ATI drivers. Abit more on thirdparty drivers here.

And that's all I have for you guys! I ran a full server map rotation on TF2 last night with no issue. Medic is the sex imho.

Also, I'd like to welcome back an oldskool TFCer "Suicidalwolf", now known as "stupendous.", or as the Barker guys know him as, Zhiyong!

Hellgate: London

Interesting story (so far) but like most MMOs, grinding is unavoidable; almost like a Korean MMO, making the gameplay somewhat monotonous. Side quests lack coherence; have almost nothing to do with main quest (aren't side quests supposed to also complete the story as a whole instead of just +XP/Palladium?). Quests usually have the same objective; kill x amount of monsters, pass x to person, defeat the boss monster, but gets slightly better as the game progresses.

For multi-player, what I really like is that you could open a portal to be with your party if you die, so there's no need to travel back all the way to your party. Currently the max level is at Level 22 (for free multi-player). Not too sure about the subscribers though (if anyone is willing to subscribe in the first place).

There are no clear combinations between factions/classes yet. The only class which can directly heal someone is the Guardian, which is pretty weird because Templars are meant to be tanks and tanks aren't really supposed to heal themselves (???).

Graphics are top-notch, need killer machine obviously. Animations are... not that smooth and usually the same. Evoker for example, always has the same pose, be it summoning Fire Embers, portals, activating curses, or even the little Mantawraith pet (which is actually quite funny because it's damn dramatic). Sound effects are not satisfying, limited dialogue. Music enhances the mood greatly, but at this day and age, a more interactive/dynamic soundtrack is expected.

My main gripes are the bugs, unsolved problems and glitches. While playing multi-player, I get thrown back to the desktop/hang around 3-6 times a day (and it's definitely not my machine; friends get it too). There are so many places to get stuck at in the map, or even out of the map. Everyone's waiting for a patch impatiently but it never comes.

My guess is that Flagship Studios were lazy with playtesting despite the beta release. Blizzard took 6 months to playtest WoW before its late release, ending up with a nice, polished game. Hellgate: London imho was quite a rush job (despite the graphics and not bad storyline) and is *slightly* overrated if it weren't for its graphics.

Maybe it's because of the over-hype that makes people expect so much, but still, play for story and possibly nice shiny items (in the future). Fullstop.

You MUST eat it

TF2

Went for the Orange box party.


Interestingly, TF2 has wait for re-spawn. Like in DOD.

I hate that.

Otherwise, the game is an excellent new version of Team Fortress. It is NOT TFC2. So the game play is substantially different in terms of objectives and pace.

I think snipers are fine, soldiers are overpowered and HW is still the easier class to begin with.
There is now an even greater learning curve, as weapon handling is totally different and fov changes are not allowed.

The points system is kinda weird, but basically, more points if you cap and help to cap, more points if u defend and assist in defence.

Off Topic