2008-11-26, 08:43 PM
OK, some interesting ideas are presented here, and some silly ones. 
However, I know enough to tell which ones are bollocks.
Regarding rebooting/restarting, it obviously helps something, because I've experienced a very specific problem known as "Second APQ Disconnect," which many of you will likely understand. I don't know if this affects Zakum, but I've also experienced a problem of being disconnected a few seconds after I return to El Nath, which isn't really a big deal because, obviously, if I'm back in town I'm not still fighting.
Somebody said lag is usually caused by Internet connection; well, this is true for a certain kind of lag, such as the delay between when you do something and when you see the result. The other type of lag, which is what I care about here, is caused by the delay between the game needing to display something and when it is actually able to display it.
An example of the worst sort of this: I was training at Birks, and I had been there for an hour, with nobody else entering my map. Suddenly I saw a red dot at the top and my screen froze for 10 seconds; when it thawed, I died. Why did this happen? Well, it's because my lame computer has a hard drive that powers down when it hasn't been used in a while, despite my efforts to tell Windows otherwise. For an hour, the only sprites it had needed were the sheep, the map, me, and our little attacks. When the other player came in, it needed to load all the sprites for that character's appearance, and it had to wait several seconds for the hard drive to spin up before it could load those from disk. Time did not stand still while this was happening, so the mob I had been fighting was able to get to me while I was waiting.
Harrison, I like your idea of having different start times for different people. I understand the reasoning behind it and I will suggest it. I think a combination is good there: A few seconds for all the bits of Zakum to load, then a delay so everyone won't have to load every single attack animation at once. Also the bit about changing qualities is good; that helped me to survive long enough to get my helm, on a Vista machine.
As for killing explorer.exe... if I do that, it automatically restarts. I think rebooting the computer accomplishes the same thing there.
I will try these ideas this weekend, assuming the group I've been going with has their normal runs, and see if it changes my experience. (Note to self: Figure out how not to die on first body next time, for testing purposes.)
Also, the idea about "have your Bishops take out the element-resistant summons" is good... except that we don't have any. Still, I understand what you mean.
However, I know enough to tell which ones are bollocks.Regarding rebooting/restarting, it obviously helps something, because I've experienced a very specific problem known as "Second APQ Disconnect," which many of you will likely understand. I don't know if this affects Zakum, but I've also experienced a problem of being disconnected a few seconds after I return to El Nath, which isn't really a big deal because, obviously, if I'm back in town I'm not still fighting.
Somebody said lag is usually caused by Internet connection; well, this is true for a certain kind of lag, such as the delay between when you do something and when you see the result. The other type of lag, which is what I care about here, is caused by the delay between the game needing to display something and when it is actually able to display it.
An example of the worst sort of this: I was training at Birks, and I had been there for an hour, with nobody else entering my map. Suddenly I saw a red dot at the top and my screen froze for 10 seconds; when it thawed, I died. Why did this happen? Well, it's because my lame computer has a hard drive that powers down when it hasn't been used in a while, despite my efforts to tell Windows otherwise. For an hour, the only sprites it had needed were the sheep, the map, me, and our little attacks. When the other player came in, it needed to load all the sprites for that character's appearance, and it had to wait several seconds for the hard drive to spin up before it could load those from disk. Time did not stand still while this was happening, so the mob I had been fighting was able to get to me while I was waiting.
Harrison, I like your idea of having different start times for different people. I understand the reasoning behind it and I will suggest it. I think a combination is good there: A few seconds for all the bits of Zakum to load, then a delay so everyone won't have to load every single attack animation at once. Also the bit about changing qualities is good; that helped me to survive long enough to get my helm, on a Vista machine.
As for killing explorer.exe... if I do that, it automatically restarts. I think rebooting the computer accomplishes the same thing there.
I will try these ideas this weekend, assuming the group I've been going with has their normal runs, and see if it changes my experience. (Note to self: Figure out how not to die on first body next time, for testing purposes.)
Also, the idea about "have your Bishops take out the element-resistant summons" is good... except that we don't have any. Still, I understand what you mean.