View Full Version : Game Engine Flaws, A Community Answer?
Dr Strange
23-12-04, 07:01
Despite the fact we aren't sure if KK does or does not listen to polls or read the forums at all, this is a question I'm sure some would care to answer or discuss;
The current game engine for NC2 has two major flaws, those both welll known and very common; fatal run-time errors which cause the game to crash and a memory leak which can lead to the above and other problems.
Now, personally I'm pretty sure KK is aware of these, if not they are living under a rock and need to step out from time to time. But yet we only see the occasional server-side fix (was it patch 120 or 121 that mentioned this?) to help alleviate these two major flaws and yet they remain client side.
So, the community has little we can do. Sure we can voice our opinions over and over and scream and yell "OMG fIX iT pLz" all we want. Sure we can do as some other users suggest and go drop $300+ on a new video card and MORE ram (I know people using 1+ gigs of ram who run time just as often as others using less ram). But that's not a fix. While the game might run slower on less ram, it should not halt to the point of almost negative frames per second and to the point it just flat out crashes with the infamous run time error.
But, the community has something else it can do. I thought to myself after fataling for the millionth time by simply opening a trade screen or using a r.n. terminal, "ya know I'd pay just to get rid of this shit". Then later the thought occured to me why not? I mean, if I am willing to say, pay a few extra bucks a month to get rid of two VERY HUGE game engine flaws that are prohibiting players from normal play, then there's got to be others that are as fed up with it as me.
And I also thought, if people openly saying "hey i'll toss in a few more bucks to get this fixed finally months after the game has gone gold" then KK just might take notice. I mean one person, not worth it. A majority and those few extra bucks add up and it also sends the message of "hey you fucked up when people are willing to pay EXTRA money to get rid of flaws already in the game apon original purchase".
So that leads me to ask my question, would you pay an extra couple bucks, say $5 an account (and for those who have like 5 accounts per person you can even say "ok multiple account users can donate $2.50 per account" as a discount for the extra accounts), per month until this is fixed?
If not, stop for a second and think: Aren't you tired of fataling in the middle of pvp? Aren't you tired of rebooting, refreshing your ram and after 10 minutes of playing you are already using 95% of all your resources? Aren't you tired of even fataling for the simplest of things? (god I personally love synching into the game after starting it up, 30 seconds later fataling back to desktop!). If so wouldn't you be willing to send a strong message to the game's develop team by tossing a few bucks in each month? Sooner or later it's gotta get into their heads.
And am I am going to go out on a limb here and say; it's more important, these be fixed. Sure, Rigger's got their drone bugs fixed, and sure hackers are getting hacknet tweaked and added to as we speak. But wouldn't you agree two HUGE game engine flaws that affect EVERYONE be fixed as opposed to simply devoting more time to adding new content when the game itself is barely standing on it's own legs?
If 7 cents a day can feed some small child in a poor village in South America, a few bucks a month extra should eventually get through to KK, that their game engine needs addressing above all else as of current.
This month marks my 24th monthly subscription payment to KK. That being said, I've paid enough already, I expect this problem to be fixed without incurring any further charges. I paid for a product, now I want that product to perform as promised.
FTR: I JUST purchased and installed ANOTHER 512MB RAM to try and fix my FPS, FRE and Memory Leak problems. All this did was give the program more memory to eat and didn't fix a damn thing.
The ALT+F info also states that I only had 24MB/228MB Free Memory and I wasn't even running another program! Not even WinAmp.....
KK PLEASE FIX THE MEMORY LEAKS. PLEASE!!!!
_o/
memememememememem...
Codi needs help, poor guy gets flamed by the community when he is working his ass off (hopyfully). I'd pay some extra to give him help.
If I am doing something wrong, someone please let me know so I can fix this... Is there some setting I should be using to fix this or is it up to KK to fix?
TY
So that leads me to ask my question, would you pay an extra couple bucks, say $5 an account (and for those who have like 5 accounts per person you can even say "ok multiple account users can donate $2.50 per account" as a discount for the extra accounts), per month until this is fixed?
No way... I should not have to PAY EXTRA MONEY TO FIX TWO BUGS THAT HAVE PLAGUED THIS GAME SINCE BETA!
This stuff should have been fixed two years ago. Sooner than that. I absolutely refuse to pay extra for laziness. And no one else should be willing to do it either. We pay for this game as a product. When a company sells a product with a large flaw and continues to sell it when they know of the obvious flaw, they shouldn't be rewarded with more money.
Everyone can tell me all they want about how "there's millions of lines of code", but there is absolutely NO excuse for them not creating a 3rd-party tool within these two years to help track down the error and send them the logs (like most MMOs do) so they can diagnose and fix the problem.
Most other MMO games don't suffer from these issues - we shouldn't either.
Ya and what would that extra money do? nc2 is already an expensive mmorpg. Besides throwing more money at the problem wont fix it. It is so deeply rooted in neocron that kk hasent been able to completely for years, and they have been trying. I remember seeing somthing on how many pages of code neocron has that would all have to be examined to fix this. Anyone remember that number?
[QUOTE]
FTR: I JUST purchased and installed ANOTHER 512MB RAM to try and fix my FPS, FRE and Memory Leak problems. All this did was give the program more memory to eat and didn't fix a damn thing.
The ALT+F info also states that I only had 24MB/228MB Free Memory and I wasn't even running another program! Not even WinAmp.....
LOL.... :lol: :lol:
I did the same thing upped my ram from 512MB to 1.5 gigs and now without any other programs running in the background i have 30MB/1500MB free
with 512MB i had 90MB/512MB free.......go figure that one out.....
REMEMBER THEY RAISED THE MONTHY FEE OF NEOCRON 2
lololool
AND APPARENTLY IT DID NOT MAKE A MAJOR DIFFERENCE ACCEPT WE GET C2P NOW THATS THE ONLY DIFFERENCE I SEE FOR 5 MORE DOLLARS A MONTH
no we got way better servers. but if i had the choice it would be nc2 on the old servers with the old monthly price. becouse i mean comeon the reason they are better is to support more nonexistent players.
I'm not paying for something that is not my problem, however we should all save money to go to KK in germany and beat them all up, crap job they have done for 2 years+... (aways Nidhoggs backing up statement of KK or removal or this post ... sigh ... )
[QUOTE]
FTR: I JUST purchased and installed ANOTHER 512MB RAM to try and fix my FPS, FRE and Memory Leak problems. All this did was give the program more memory to eat and didn't fix a damn thing.
The ALT+F info also states that I only had 24MB/228MB Free Memory and I wasn't even running another program! Not even WinAmp.....
LOL.... :lol: :lol:
I did the same thing upped my ram from 512MB to 1.5 gigs and now without any other programs running in the background i have 30MB/1500MB free
with 512MB i had 90MB/512MB free.......go figure that one out.....
Because Neocron, like most modern games, uses up way more memory than that. However, lots of the data is generally kept on the hard drive in what's called a swap file (or partition under many OS's). However, proper memory is way faster than the swapfile, so the game is going to put as much as it can in memory and only keep what it has to in the swap file (and it's also generally stuff that's not needed as much that's kept in the swapfile).
If you run a memory monitor while running any modern game, you'll see it eat up all available RAM.
This doesn't mean that more memory doesn't help. Particularly if you have less than 768MB of RAM, most games, particularly MMORPGs will have less "lag" and problems in general if you install some more memory.
As for the poll, I abstain because I know that there's no magic fix for many of the engine flaws. You're all acting like KK don't ever fix FRE's and memory leaks, yet most patch notes generally contain something along the lines of "fixed more memory leaks", "fixed FRE that occurs when...".
Patch 125 (http://forum.neocron.com/showthread.php?t=120612), the last patch, was purely for this purpose.
Athon Solo
Would you pay a few bucks extra each month to convince KK to fix engine flaws?
No. I already have. :wtf:
The only way I could chip in some extra cash is if they wanted to buy a new
engine, cause any way you turn it, the current one sucks. And I could also
only consider it if it was a one time fee...
As hegemonic said; I've paid enough.
It's not the number that matters to me, £10 , £12, £15 .. i'd pay to be with friends and have fun, but i am not paying any more for something that A) Should be fixed already and B) Is something you think would come as standard with the game itself.
This games playability is pretty good, it's addictive.. not addictive like "God i need a smoke" .. "God i need to play neocron" just does'nt have any ring to it ;)
What pisses me off about this game is that it's not a finished game, Neocron 1 was'nt finished when it was released, Neocron 2 is'nt finished and thats been released, and they use the excuse that "oh, patches will be frequent to fix these problems". I'm sure we can all list bugs and flaws in Neocron 1 that ran from the first beta to the day they updated to NC2. The money we fork out each month should'nt be paid to make the game playable in a technical way as much as it should be to make the game more fun with more content.
wow this really is a nutcase proposition O_o
why the hell would we want to pay more a month to fix problems that shouldn't have been there in the first place? the way I hear it, these hings already existed in NC1 so they already have those few bucks a month extra when they marketed this game as NC2 :o
EDIt: didn't read above posts, sorry for repeating :angel:
Miss Naughty
23-12-04, 13:34
I'm not paying any more money, but I don think the community can help. We need to treat new players in a way that will make them want to stay. We need to support KK where possible and generally don't be abusive to them or the gms and mods.
I remember when Eve online had some nasty crash bugs. The devs created a little debug tool that you could start up before running the game. This helped get them the info they needed to fix the crashes. I'm not sure how useful Neocrons debug logs are, maybe KK could do something similar. That way the community could help sort some of these problems.
Jesterthegreat
23-12-04, 14:36
more important question...
if we did pay them more would it make a difference or would they say "we're working on it"?
We are paying more.
This is what we have gotten so far.
erm ? are you nuts ?
were already paying more for almost the same things .....
Now we should pay more ?
Get that in what we paid for first"!
Jesterthegreat
23-12-04, 22:10
We are paying more.
This is what we have gotten so far.
well said.
i havent seen an improved service for my higher service charge yet.
patches slow as they were in NC1 (start of retail patches were good... maybe they lowered the frequency to spread out the rollbacks? :p), item tracking (the main improvement IMO) is non existant, its still not released anywhere but Germany...
isnt this currently the most expensive MMORPG on the market? thats what i heard (havent checked it tbh) and i know in my 2 years of DAoC i never once crashed or had items disappear, in AO i crashed a little but never had things vanish,in UO i never had a problem, in PS the only problem was lag, in EQ i never had any problems...
unless i saw real improvement theres no way i would support improved subscription fees
[ edited - I'll do it for you then ]
[Edit: I should probably edit that so it's less offensive, I'm not going to however as It's a gut reaction to the question.]
What KK should do is put everything else on hold until these bugs are fixed, screw theme weeks I dont want to FRE while zoning and relog with 50 health beside a warbot anymore.
Dribble Joy
23-12-04, 23:45
:rolleyes:
How many times has this come up?
The engine is old and extensively modified.
KK know the cause of most of the FREs, but without an extensive re-write of the engine from the ground up, they cannot do anything to realistically remove them.
KK have three choices;
1. Continue to try to fix the current engine with patching. Still able to maintain the game's other aspects. Will take forever (if at all).
2. Take the current engine and take it apart, re-writing it from scratch. Will have to abandon everything in order to sort it and might not work at all.
3. Get a new engine. Expensive, the coders will have learn a new engine and everything will have to be converted. Could cause more problems in the long run.
A thought. KK has all their rights to do what they want. You are NOT paying them to make the game better. You're just paying them for access to the NC2 world. I for one hope CoDi comes here and posts and flames you all for bugging the :mad: out of "old engine this and old engine that". Also, that $5 upgrade to subscription fees? That's for better servers, waaay better servers, a warehouse full.
Power-posting while I have my train of thought. Another thing, all you people screaming about NC2 being this and NC2 being that. You guys have NO idea how much it takes to run NC2's servers. Have you seen the server WAREHOUSE they have? Yes, thats right, warehouse. Don't forget the 72-processor SUN servers they are running if my memory suits me correct, about $1.5 million a piece, and they have a ware-house full of them on lease money.
I'm not paying for something that is not my problem, however we should all save money to go to KK in germany and beat them all up, crap job they have done for 2 years+... (aways Nidhoggs backing up statement of KK or removal or this post ... sigh ... )
If they are doing a crap job, stop paying for their product and go play WoW. Same goes to the rest of all you goddamned naggers.
[EDIT] Lock this thread before I have to flame more to these naggers.
You know despite all the bugs i still like neocron more then any other rpg. Let me list the rpg's i tried.
ff11
wow
eq
planetside
swg
And i like neocron MUCH more then lal of them. The only exeption was battletech 3025, but it was cancelled becouse mw4 was comming out. A real shame realy becouse it was the only mmorpg/fps i liked as much, if not more then, neocron.
RogerRamjet
24-12-04, 01:39
To be fair, id rather play Neocron than any other MMO out, so im not to bothered with the odd FRE or synch bug.
Power-posting while I have my train of thought. Another thing, all you people screaming about NC2 being this and NC2 being that. You guys have NO idea how much it takes to run NC2's servers. Have you seen the server WAREHOUSE they have? Yes, thats right, warehouse. Don't forget the 72-processor SUN servers they are running if my memory suits me correct, about $1.5 million a piece, and they have a ware-house full of them on lease money.
I dont think they are running sun servers. Haven't got the forums references but I'm sure it's a rack of P4's or something simular.
And if they did have 1.5 million to spend on 72-processor SUN servers, how about spending another 1.5 million on updating the engine to Source. (The engine used by HL2)
Sorry but arnt servers just big rectangular boxes with these little pizza box shaped shelves that plug into it? If so the price is probably around what... 4.5kUSD per shelf? Now lets say there are 60 shelfs.
Thats a total of 270 000 per server. Unless i am completely wrong.
(duel xeon 3.06 with 4 gigs of ram and 250gig hard drive each. so thats 120 proccors total. holy shit thats alot of power.)
ok sorry looks like i was way off from my pricing. but since i dont have anything else to say i wont bother deleting it. the mobo's for those things cost like 100x what i thought they would.
Power-posting while I have my train of thought. Another thing, all you people screaming about NC2 being this and NC2 being that. You guys have NO idea how much it takes to run NC2's servers. Have you seen the server WAREHOUSE they have? Yes, thats right, warehouse. Don't forget the 72-processor SUN servers they are running if my memory suits me correct, about $1.5 million a piece, and they have a ware-house full of them on lease money.
Got pics or a link to that stuff?
Pay more?
HELL NO.........
What am I paying for atm?
NC2 is almost $15USD, atm...
I'm already paying more than it's worth....
*EDIT*
Also, I hate to break it to you, but, if it was possible to fix NC's engine it would have been done years ago.....
Pay more?
HELL NO.........
What am I paying for atm?
NC2 is almost $15USD, atm...
I'm already paying more than it's worth....
*EDIT*
Also, I hate to break it to you, but, if it was possible to fix NC's engine it would have been done years ago.....
Yeah the engine is what we are stuck with, but I don't see that as a problem.
The engine is ok(ish), it's the decisions being made that are taking the fun out of the game.
KK workers (god bless them) are busting ass, but are being told what to do by higher ups.
They have to do their jobs.
What the "higher ups" don't realize is that they're destroying a potential master piece and the reason(s) is beyond all logic we currently know.
Dr Strange
24-12-04, 06:37
If it is "higher ups" making the call, what will get the message(s) to them? I mean the already low server populations should be a big clue as to "hey theres some problems with the game that need priority addressing"
Has it occurred to you that they do know and have known since they first released nc2? They know their population numbers and they are trying to fix it. They have alot more riding on nc2 then me or you. If anyone knows there is a problem, its them.
BTW not trying to come off as rude. :D
If it is "higher ups" making the call, what will get the message(s) to them? I mean the already low server populations should be a big clue as to "hey theres some problems with the game that need priority addressing"
Gotta love people who talk about server populations when no one outside KK has a clue what they actually are.
If we go by most peoples assumption that 100% is still 1000 runners, then the 2 largest servers are packing ~1000 players concurrently at peak times as it is (they peak at above 50% and 45% each).
Athon Solo
No to the poll,
why?
I've not had 1 single fatal yet in NC2. Not one at all in 3 weeks of playing. Quite often the game is running 6-8 constantly and I see no real problems. (Apart from occasional long syncs)
They already bumped up the price 'because we got something new'
Reakktor and fix dont go in the same sentance, without a hint of irony creeping in.. so nope, my cash stays in my pocket.. shit I have a hole :(
No to the poll,
why?
I've not had 1 single fatal yet in NC2. Not one at all in 3 weeks of playing. Quite often the game is running 6-8 constantly and I see no real problems. (Apart from occasional long syncs)
Dude you got a Dell? :p
Dude you got a Dell? :p
Lol nope, home built - just posted the specs in the other thread :D
Lol nope, home built - just posted the specs in the other thread :D
Naw Im kidding, just referencing back when MJS said he Never fataled.. ironically he had a 'Dell' :p
anyone else remember that? :p
Jesterthegreat
24-12-04, 14:18
Gotta love people who talk about server populations when no one outside KK has a clue what they actually are.
If we go by most peoples assumption that 100% is still 1000 runners, then the 2 largest servers are packing ~1000 players concurrently at peak times as it is (they peak at above 50% and 45% each).
Athon Solo
1000 people... over 2 servers... with what, 70 wasteland sectors, 10 NC sectors (plus HQ's, sewers, subway and all of the OZ), 10 DoY sectors, 3 MB secotrs (plus sewers)... plus 3 TH sectors (plus sewers), plus apts...
plus any dungeons in the waselands...
thats good for an MMORPG?
read thorugh - got the gist.
Pay them more to convince them to fix an engine that isn't flawed by programming faults? No. It's the way in which everything works together that causes the problems, it's hard to account for things like that, I've said it before and lo and behold Mr CEO MJS agreed. It's all about the mechanics...
Lemme get my quote out - it'll make more sense...
*wanders off to look for the quote*
Originally Posted by Spermy
I don't think it has anything to do with code - I think it's the dynamic. In my opinion - it's an inherrent problem with the uniqeness of neocron. I dunno if processes that neocron uses are really supposed to be used in tandem with each other to the extent that neocron uses them.
1000 people... over 2 servers... with what, 70 wasteland sectors, 10 NC sectors (plus HQ's, sewers, subway and all of the OZ), 10 DoY sectors, 3 MB secotrs (plus sewers)... plus 3 TH sectors (plus sewers), plus apts...
plus any dungeons in the waselands...
thats good for an MMORPG?
That's not what I was saying. According to the assumption that 1000 players = 100%, NC2 is running at the same number of subscribers online at peak times as NC1 - maybe not NC1's all time high, but certainly average for what I saw of NC1.
Athon Solo
Jesterthegreat
25-12-04, 23:19
That's not what I was saying. According to the assumption that 1000 players = 100%, NC2 is running at the same number of subscribers online at peak times as NC1 - maybe not NC1's all time high, but certainly average for what I saw of NC1.
Athon Solo
...
you kidding?
if 100% = 1000 players Terra has aboutthe pop of Saturn... thats 2 servers worth missing...
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.3 Copyright © 2024 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.