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So does the horse and buggy. So lets make the international max speed limit anyplace 20MPH. We want to be fair
Absolutely.. We must think about our CC users.
+1, they finally deployed DSL out here about 2 years ago so we get 1.5 megabit now, but I was on dialup until then, the only other option before that was this local wireless "broadband" (was 256kup/down) that ran for $200 a month, and generally pinged around 600ms to anything. A lot more peple are still playing on dialup than you may think, because in a lot of areas (huge parts of so-cal particularly) verizon/at&t haven't deployed DSL yet and the existing broadband is expensive and slow, it's not like most of the people still on it WANT to be paying $50 a month for dialup.
56k still exists? What a relief! I was just going to throw all of these old modems at local hobo's. Now I can throw them at old hobo's and have them email me there experiences.
O
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I think about the CC users every time I log into any other game made in the last 5 years, and see the difference between the cartoon graphics we are stuck with because of the CC users and the graphics we could have in the Enhanced Client.
Well that is the horse UO beats... CHANGE ... it wont happen. And that is also the reason why UO still has a player base.. NO CHANGE, people who like 2D and its' game play style. There are a lot of indie style games being released all the time that have worse gfx than UO and are incredibly successful... (minecraft?)
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Haven't you seen the news? Even the Hobos have broadband. Someone is actually hiring the homeless to wear wired t-shirts that turn them into "Homeless Hotspots" (effectively, the wireless hotspot function of some cell phones, converted into a t-shirt based rig, without the phone functions). IIRC, they get paid for this (possibly based on the airtime used), plus it's supposed to bring awareness of the homeless (since you got to be within range of the bum)
Yes, I'm serious.
(I can see it now - someone yelling over vent "Hang on guys, gonna lose my connection for a couple minutes - my hotspot's going into the liquor store to buy another bottle of Mad Dog...")
Interesting to hear someone say that
- because, Deaol, I was starting to think about posting a thread about the player base .. that particular segment of customers that have continued to play and support this game since beta back in 1997.. and who played all the solo Ultima Games before it became an On Line Game. ... hmmm.. should post that topic so everyone understands why the player base exists for UO and not as well for other games, even though the other games and improvements can be so desireable and successful - - but then, the kids and many adults will never will understand us 'old foggies' who have paid for and continue to pay for this game for so long.
.. "I remember back in those days when I was 14 years younger and when my son gave me a slot on his UO Game after I paid for the dial up internet connection available in our area. T'was so slow I died every few minutes by the hands of PK and got robbed over and over ..... etc. etc." - - Oh woe is me but .. TRAMMEL saved my day .. and and and ...
Back on Topic: About that slow slow dial-up service, while others had and now have a fast T1 connection, I can honestly say I feel sorry for anyone stuck on a slow DSL internet connection these days. THAT BITES! It is a good thing UO has safe Haven and Trammel for players who can't cope not only with slow internet connections but for other reasons, like old age, illnesses, handicaps etc. The Game runs much better on HIGH SPEED INTERNET which is not possible to get in many areas of the world still. *sigh*
... must get outside for a very long walk on the beach in the fresh air and sunshine while the blue sky and sun is available!
Have a great day everyone!
Ooops .. Cedric GL posted before I could put in my last say here. So did SpecialShoes. Hmmm .. so again - -
- - regarding the old art work in UO .. One might also say, the graphics in Classic Client are desireable because they are very much like images you would see in the classic movies and cartoons from the past. CLASSIC means just that... old and tried and true images from the past.
hey, much of the art work and animation is creative work by inspired artists with tons of art created from hand drawn images such as those madeby artists for the old Walt Disney Cartoons, thus not computer generated images created from using real models and photographs. <<<something like that - - just saying (as someone else says in here) - -
Again .. enjoy! I am out of here.
-
- because, Deaol, I was starting to think about posting a thread about the player base .. that particular segment of customers that have continued to play and support this game since beta back in 1997.. and who played all the solo Ultima Games before it became an On Line Game. ... hmmm.. should post that topic so everyone understands why the player base exists for UO and not as well for other games, even though the other games and improvements can be so desireable and successful - - but then, the kids and many adults will never will understand us 'old foggies' who have paid for and continue to pay for this game for so long... "I remember back in those days when I was 14 years younger and when my son gave me a slot on his UO Game after I paid for the dial up internet connection available in our area. T'was so slow I died every few minutes by the hands of PK and got robbed over and over ..... etc. etc." - - Oh woe is me but .. TRAMMEL saved my day .. and and and ...
Back on Topic: About that slow slow dial-up service, while others had and now have a fast T1 connection, I can honestly say I feel sorry for anyone stuck on a slow DSL internet connection these days. THAT BITES! It is a good thing UO has safe Haven and Trammel for players who can't cope not only with slow internet connections but for other reasons, like old age, illnesses, handicaps etc. The Game runs much better on HIGH SPEED INTERNET which is not possible to get in many areas of the world still. *sigh*
... must get outside for a very long walk on the beach in the fresh air and sunshine while the blue sky and sun is available!
Have a great day everyone!
Ooops .. Cedric GL posted before I could put in my last say here. So did SpecialShoes. Hmmm .. so
again - - - - regarding the old art work in UO .. One might also say, the graphics in Classic Client are desireable because they are very much like images you would see in the classic movies and cartoons from the past. CLASSIC means just that... old and tried and true images from the past.
hey, much of the art work and animation is creative work by inspired artists with tons of art created from hand drawn images such as those madeby artists for the old Walt Disney Cartoons, thus not computer generated images created from using real models and photographs. <<<something like that - - just saying (as someone else says in here) - -
Again .. enjoy! I am out of here.
If uo looked like skyrim it'd be amazing. But uo will never have the non-overhead shot, true 3d environment. It would require the game to be completely remade (every other direction/dimension would need art). If it was created, it would need to be Ultima 2.
So suck on that CC haters.
So suck on that CC haters.
Local Hobo's is the keyword. Out here in Montana we don't do that new fangled voodoo.
I apologize for my remark.. I see now it could be taken as very anti-CC.
I believe everyone that plays UO is a UO player. EC or CC we all play.
I used to envision the amazing theoretical future of UO to be a fully-3d environment, a la Skyrim. And I still think seeing Britannia like that would be awesome, but now only as one-shot renders of the environment.
I have come to believe that UO wouldn't be UO without a locked isometric camera view. However, as games like Titan Quest and Diablo 3 show us, such a thing can still look pretty damn good.
I have come to believe that UO wouldn't be UO without a locked isometric camera view. However, as games like Titan Quest and Diablo 3 show us, such a thing can still look pretty damn good.
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The fact that this last patch is not dail-up friendly. From my end, it looks like they turned off resume on the files and any interruption causes a file to have to start over. I can get the smaller files, but I can't get the bigger ones in one take.
WildStar
thats interesting.
UO is still playable by people with computers that are 10 years old, yet they are making it harder for people with dial up to get the patches.
like me they probably just thought that no one still uses dial up.
hell, im sitting in a igloo in right next to Santa Clause and i have DSL, haha
UO is still playable by people with computers that are 10 years old, yet they are making it harder for people with dial up to get the patches.
like me they probably just thought that no one still uses dial up.
hell, im sitting in a igloo in right next to Santa Clause and i have DSL, haha
Right now I am in a city staying for a bit but my actual home is on a 800 acre farm where all I have is dial up which I have been playing on since 98. For big patches and such I just brought my computer to a friends house and download them there. But ya there was a system that let you patch little bits at a time and continue later hope it is still around for when I have to play from home again.
It's funny I always make fun of my better half because she complains that it takes 8 minutes to download a movie. I remember going to the kitchen, making a sandwich and coming back all for a single webpage to load (half the time it still wasn't loaded.). I couldn't imagine ever going back to that.
HAHAHA .. sitting in an igloo right next to Sandta Clause with DSL! That seriously targets the point of this thread!
Nor can I imagine going back to that. The LAG is bad enough on High Velosity Connection at Prime Time.
Actually, this is incorrect.
The EC client is a 3D client. It was stated that the hi-res building/environment art they are working on would be polygonal, not sprites. They could then easily make the camera rotatable (maintaining the current angle a la Diablo) with minimal effort once the art was completely done. For the EC. The CC would still be stuck in 1996.
Rather than waste time doing 3d for 3d's sake, I'd like to just see them do what they did with the origional 2d client, except with the tools available in 2012. High res, raytraced sprites with baked normal maps for lighting you can have infinitely more detail than trying to render 3d models in realtime, and have the added bonus of not worrying about AA artifacts and being able to be touched up manually by the artist before release. It all gets projected to a 2d screen in the end anyways so the only difference between properly made 2d sprites and 3d rendered models is when they were rendered, were they given hours on the render farm to be rendered at 100% quality or were they sloppily done quickly by your computers video card in under 10ms, which purposefully degrades quality for the purposes of speed.
Is it more work than just tossing in some 3d models? Yes, but the payoff is graphics that look a good 5 years ahead of current 3d games but don't require any appreciable graphics acceleration on the client. (this is nothing new, games have used this for a long time....actually many games people "assume" are full 3d use prerendered billboards and sprites for a lot, a good example is N64 games, particularly mario cart and a lot of the nintendo titles, only the levels were 3d in those games, everything else was pre-rendered sprites, that's how they got so much detail on a console that could not handle it).
Granted this only works for objects where you can limit your perspective of them, since you don't want to make a render of every possible rotation of a free moving object, but for isometric games like UO it's ideal and will give the best results. And yes, you can easily have full rotatable camera with 2d sprite art, the high res model is the hard part as rendering engines like POVRay are simple to script generating a set of angles to view. Many other games actually do that. (pretty much any SRPG or strategy game does it like that)
This is all a fart in the wind until they optimize the EC properly. I'd switch tomorrow but the EC chugs on my computer, which runs much more demanding software without a hitch.
it does, because up until a little while ago i was sitting here on dial up and air cards.
but now way up north in the middle of no where we actually have decent internet. so it surprises me that people down in the normal civilized parts of north america are still on dial up. i just assumed i was the last person to go over to DSL.
and it DOES suprise me that they would make it so people who use dial up have a tuff time getting the patches when the game can be run on a computer that is 10+ years old.
how is that not on topic?
maybe im missing something.
The funny thing about people in areas with crappy internet is you tend to not hear them on internet game forums that require gigabytes of downloads too often, it's a natural filter that only the biggest gamers pull through, which i think leads people to think that "everyone's got great internet these days"
truth is if you actually look at broadband deployments in areas like southern california, it's **** poor, centers of cities and larger residential areas are generally fine, but even in there there's things like the last block on the outside of a residential area not being serviced due to being "out of service range" and not worth the investment to just server an additional block. (last house I lived in two houses down from us couldn't get DSL, i boosted my wireless xmit on my router with my omni, set some QOS rules and just let them use mine, here I had the same issue though this time I was on the side of the line that couldn't get DSL, so I was using sprint aircards until they implemented the dumb 5 gig cap, and dialup for gaming as it had better ping (the aircard averaged 300ms, dialup about 150ms)...so yeah I was paying a good $150 a month for ****ty internet. Pisses me off a lot here though too because while we just barely got dsl, 3 blocks down they have a FIOS deployment, lol. This is what happens when you grant local monopolies and the companies don't have to worry about competition moving in....(in cali, ISP's are generally granted exclusive rights to service areas, so they only service the high profit parts and leave the rest for possible future expansion, leaving that area with no DSL/cable)
I believe last poll of broadband availability in california (counting broadband as anything 256k and up, barely above ISDN speed) we were sitting around 40% of houses having such speeds available, with only around 10% having > 1 megabit and something like 1% having > 10 megabit (basicly FIOS/time warner fiber customers)
Edit: I was a little off, I just checked the FCC reports and it's sitting at 53% broadband penetration now!! yay!! half of the US officially can get more than 200 kilobit connections now! If you don't know the whole thing about this btw it's an interesting read, i'm too lazy to look up exact links myself but there was a HUGE fiasco a year or two back when they actually revised the way they calculate this. Before they were leaving the ISP's themselves to report penetration in their areas and they were reporting around 95% broadband penetration in the US....well, turned out by the old rules "broadband" was only counted as ISDN speed (128k) or higher so areas that could get the slow & expensive (but quite long range) ISDN were being counted, and by the old rules (though it was kinda pushing it) it only took "significant presence" of broadband connections within a zip code as a sample to count the entire area as being available. FCC caught on and passed new rules doing away with that 2010+ and it painted a pretty grim picutre of how brodband access was REALLY doing in the US, and a few of the ISPs who were contractually required to have over 80% deployment have since been given a bit more reason to actually give their customers the service they're paying for.
It would also need to be in the future. No mmo will have skyrim graphics for years and years. The best modern ones are only a few ticks above Morrowind...
Well I mean, come on man. I feel for you, but what do you expect? You are using very old technology. I have to imagine its because of necessity not choice (if its by choice you have brain problems) that you use 56k, but you can't expect a game pretending to be a modern game to even think about the concept of not putting out large patches because 56k users would be in a bad spot.
They cant factor in such an antiquated level of net access when cable or better is very near ubiquitous. Nor should they.
Again, I do feel for your crappy situation, but lets be realistic.
That said, they should have a resume function. No real reason not to.
Not you. I am missing something. I don't understand.
I had DSL when it first came to our area years ago but I still couldn't play the game without lag and lost connetions so I assumed you meant you were having problems with DSL.
Our service was switched to High Velosity which can be extremely slow during business hours due to high usage. At grocery stores the cashier's are often stuck with slow internet connections, causing long waits for Credit Card Purchases to be approved.
I play UO when there is little or no lag and sympathize with anyone on dial up.
downoad resume is a fairly standard feature and not only helpful for dialup, i quite often get my connection interrupted when grabbing EA's 400 megabyte patches but the old system was able to resume where it left off, if the new system doesn't support that it means whenever i get interrupted, even as a DSL user, it'll take me ANOTHER hour to get patched up, assuming i can complete it that time, which of course since i'm doing this over and over increases strain and bandwidth costs for both myself and EA. No, removing download resume is not a "feature" and moving forward to the future.... it's a regression, going back to how downloads were before web servers supported resume. Since it being off will probably increase their operating costs pretty dramatically i'd assume it's probably in error though.
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There's a few things that some do not understand:
1. The US doesn't have subsidized broadband in most locations, so nations that have it will have a lot better availability, from tax money being rolled into paying for infrastructure that in the US requires user-derived revenue to pay for. Edit: Ironically, some of the highest-tech areas are the ones where draconian broadband monopolies were put in place by politicians more interested in money from the providers than service for the people.
2. Many Europeans and East Asians, for example, don't have a real concept of just how BIG the US really is. Just compare the populations of various European nations (or individual Japanese home islands), to equivalent-sized states in the US (especially ones between the Appalachians and the Rockies). I've heard plenty of horror stories about tourists thinking that it was possible to drive to Chicago from NYC, Orlando, or even LA or SF in less than a day (and when I say day, I mean between sunrise & sunset). Truthfully, many urban coastal Americans really don't, either. Those in agricultural states find it easier to grasp just how empty areas are outside the suburbs, than northeasterners (living in cities more populous than many midwestern states) or west coasters (many of whom are conditioned to think, from being surrounded by desert, badlands, or the Cascades, that once you get out of the burbs, there's just empty wasteland or wilderness).
3. As an example, the three towns hit by Tornadoes in Kentucky on March 4, with the most damage/casualties, included two county seats with tiny populations (3300 for West Liberty, less than 2k for Salyersville) even if you count those living just outside the "city" lines with the town's zip code, and whose total county populations were between 13-14k each. The population density of those two counties is between 35 & 45 people per SQUARE MILE. That's less than most suburban (let alone city) blocks on the coasts, and most European & Asian countries' rural areas. Yet, there's actually few areas where someone isn't living within a few hundred meters. The third community with heavy damage (East Bernstadt, Laurel County) is about the same size, but in a county with 3-4 times the population density as the others, and was originally a colony of Swiss would-be vinters from the 1860s whose community faltered with the vines and the county seat encroaching on it. Even so, a third of that county (MY county, BTW) is national forest land bordering Lake Cumberland and two other man-made lakes.
It took the population density of Laurel County to make DSL & Cable internet viable for most of the population (from two different phone companies, and two cable companies, even, until Time-Warner bought the KY holdings of the other), and even so, the edges of the broadband areas stop 1-3 miles short of the county line to the East, SE, and North (and even more to the West, where the national forest is). I know from being on the edge of the service range, and about had to beg to be connected, knowing that I'd only get about 60-90% of the speed I pay for.
Those other two counties were probably lucky to have broadband to the city limits - hell, if what I heard was true, there was only ONE cell tower in the entire county for one of the other two ravaged towns (maybe both only had 1 each), and it was in town or next to it (and of course taken out by the tornadoes). Most of the 120 counties in KY are much more like Morgan & Menifee counties, not Laurel, with much of the population concentration in the three large cities (that combined would be a fraction of that of a single county in NYC or LA), and the counties opposite Cincinnati, OH & Evansville, IN.
Once you get into the Midwest states, the counties get bigger, and the population densities even lower. The populations get concentrated more and more in the cities. Texas is probably the most extreme example of this, with over twice as many counties as KY or Georgia, with each county averaging THREE TIMES the size of those other states' counties, but once you get out of the cities, you start running into counties with population densities in the single digits (and, in a few cases, less than 1 per square mile!). Many of those counties only have PHONES for dialup because of state & federal efforts to connect most homes with power and phone service in the middle of last century.
4. This isn't actually a new misconception. I was a member of a mailing list back around 1997-1998, and we had someone who was kicked very shortly, because he kept sending 200-500k attachments. His argument, being from the NC "tech triangle" area, was that "ANYONE could just walk or drive down to an internet cafe and read their mail on a fast connection for free..." - WTF??? At that time, the closest public computers that weren't dialups at public libraries were in a Kinkos (the copy/printing company later bought by FedEx) 50 miles from me, that charged $24/hour for what amounted to ISDN. Frankly, I think the only thing that eventually sped the availability of broadband here was that several local data entry companies expanded from using satellite uplinks to wired connection into the internet, after being bought by larger international operations.
1. The US doesn't have subsidized broadband in most locations, so nations that have it will have a lot better availability, from tax money being rolled into paying for infrastructure that in the US requires user-derived revenue to pay for. Edit: Ironically, some of the highest-tech areas are the ones where draconian broadband monopolies were put in place by politicians more interested in money from the providers than service for the people.
2. Many Europeans and East Asians, for example, don't have a real concept of just how BIG the US really is. Just compare the populations of various European nations (or individual Japanese home islands), to equivalent-sized states in the US (especially ones between the Appalachians and the Rockies). I've heard plenty of horror stories about tourists thinking that it was possible to drive to Chicago from NYC, Orlando, or even LA or SF in less than a day (and when I say day, I mean between sunrise & sunset). Truthfully, many urban coastal Americans really don't, either. Those in agricultural states find it easier to grasp just how empty areas are outside the suburbs, than northeasterners (living in cities more populous than many midwestern states) or west coasters (many of whom are conditioned to think, from being surrounded by desert, badlands, or the Cascades, that once you get out of the burbs, there's just empty wasteland or wilderness).
3. As an example, the three towns hit by Tornadoes in Kentucky on March 4, with the most damage/casualties, included two county seats with tiny populations (3300 for West Liberty, less than 2k for Salyersville) even if you count those living just outside the "city" lines with the town's zip code, and whose total county populations were between 13-14k each. The population density of those two counties is between 35 & 45 people per SQUARE MILE. That's less than most suburban (let alone city) blocks on the coasts, and most European & Asian countries' rural areas. Yet, there's actually few areas where someone isn't living within a few hundred meters. The third community with heavy damage (East Bernstadt, Laurel County) is about the same size, but in a county with 3-4 times the population density as the others, and was originally a colony of Swiss would-be vinters from the 1860s whose community faltered with the vines and the county seat encroaching on it. Even so, a third of that county (MY county, BTW) is national forest land bordering Lake Cumberland and two other man-made lakes.
It took the population density of Laurel County to make DSL & Cable internet viable for most of the population (from two different phone companies, and two cable companies, even, until Time-Warner bought the KY holdings of the other), and even so, the edges of the broadband areas stop 1-3 miles short of the county line to the East, SE, and North (and even more to the West, where the national forest is). I know from being on the edge of the service range, and about had to beg to be connected, knowing that I'd only get about 60-90% of the speed I pay for.
Those other two counties were probably lucky to have broadband to the city limits - hell, if what I heard was true, there was only ONE cell tower in the entire county for one of the other two ravaged towns (maybe both only had 1 each), and it was in town or next to it (and of course taken out by the tornadoes). Most of the 120 counties in KY are much more like Morgan & Menifee counties, not Laurel, with much of the population concentration in the three large cities (that combined would be a fraction of that of a single county in NYC or LA), and the counties opposite Cincinnati, OH & Evansville, IN.
Once you get into the Midwest states, the counties get bigger, and the population densities even lower. The populations get concentrated more and more in the cities. Texas is probably the most extreme example of this, with over twice as many counties as KY or Georgia, with each county averaging THREE TIMES the size of those other states' counties, but once you get out of the cities, you start running into counties with population densities in the single digits (and, in a few cases, less than 1 per square mile!). Many of those counties only have PHONES for dialup because of state & federal efforts to connect most homes with power and phone service in the middle of last century.
4. This isn't actually a new misconception. I was a member of a mailing list back around 1997-1998, and we had someone who was kicked very shortly, because he kept sending 200-500k attachments. His argument, being from the NC "tech triangle" area, was that "ANYONE could just walk or drive down to an internet cafe and read their mail on a fast connection for free..." - WTF??? At that time, the closest public computers that weren't dialups at public libraries were in a Kinkos (the copy/printing company later bought by FedEx) 50 miles from me, that charged $24/hour for what amounted to ISDN. Frankly, I think the only thing that eventually sped the availability of broadband here was that several local data entry companies expanded from using satellite uplinks to wired connection into the internet, after being bought by larger international operations.
It's not long since I was playing UO on 28k, and that was our max lol. So I feel your pain. UO used to be ok for resuming downloads, and it's always a handy feature even if you're on broadband. It saves folk with a download cap from having to re-download and it just saves time if someone does drop offline. Faster connections can still be lost, even if the router just blips for a second. So I hope this new patcher hasn't lost such a feature.
Sadly while dialup is old tech, if you've ever lived in a house which is too far from the exchange and the company concerned has no interest in running those extra metres of cable, you may as well be living in the stone age compared to everyone else I remember it being horrid 5 years ago, the world is even more internet/fast connection driven nowadays. My family only got beyond the 28k mark because there was some government support to help them get a good satellite fitted and get it that way. And it's a nice dish, they're really happy with it. But it took us years to get to that point.
Put it this way, the next house I buy, the first question will be can we get broadband or cable here
Wenchy
Sadly while dialup is old tech, if you've ever lived in a house which is too far from the exchange and the company concerned has no interest in running those extra metres of cable, you may as well be living in the stone age compared to everyone else
I remember it being horrid 5 years ago, the world is even more internet/fast connection driven nowadays. My family only got beyond the 28k mark because there was some government support to help them get a good satellite fitted and get it that way. And it's a nice dish, they're really happy with it. But it took us years to get to that point. Put it this way, the next house I buy, the first question will be can we get broadband or cable here
Wenchy
I do not like the 1st person look, period.
It is not about 3d, graphics or what not, I just simply do not like to walk around just being able to only look ahead of me, not being in control of all my surrounding area which the bird-eye perspective gives to me.
I just hate to always have to turn my head 360 degrees all the time to watch out for dangers or to look somewhere to find items. It is extremely annoying to me.
The bird's-eye perspective I find it eay, but WAY much better and enjoyable to play.
If they have turned off the resume patchings like before ie. where they possibly got disconnected,
they may lose even more EA UO customers !!
I have 2 computers, each with it's own speed of connectivity. One is Win7 on some speedie newfangled whatevers, and the other computer is my old WinXP on a slow dial up.
The mega patching we got the other day, I went thru hours of downloading !! Then, Igot disconnected at 89% of it all having patched. With the older set up, np I/ UO would resume patching WHERE IT ALL LEFT OFF, and not have to go thru hell of downloading everything that HAD downloaded all over, again.
I opted to forget it all, get some sleep and haven't even tried on my WinXP slower connection, to be foreced to download it all over, again again yet, so far.
They really need to re install re instate,
if their patches of patching via any connections, gets interrupted, let it continue where it got interrupted, not forcing any of us to have to start all over again from square one, 0 patched, cuz eventually this will become extremely annoying, for us all, sometimes their own patches just don't work and they have to repatch a fixer, so no matter what forms of connections any of us have, be lots better if *resume* patching, where patching got disconnected, is better for them and all of us !]
Nor have I dwld'd it on my Win7 yet.
I live on a border, of two states. Any number of various connections 'are somewhat available' for us all here. Problem here is, even with our telephones, and cellphones, we about have to LIE to any provider, to get some connections that are WHERE WE ARE, on a borderline between 2 states.
Thus even our cellphones other stuffs, may possess a 662 or 901 area code/zip codes/location etc. !!
It goes even worse for internet connections for us here,
sitting on a borderline between Mississippi and Tennessee,
or ie Memphis/Shelby county and DeSoto County Miss.
and it's two northern most Miss. cities ON the border, with Memphis, Tenn.
Be it ATT, Verizon, this or that internet provider, whomevers,
you can get some one tryin to connect us here, thru Jackson Ms. or Biloxi *miles away*
instead of Memphis 2 miles up the road or so on so forth, and the prices get ridiculously high
no matter what ya get here, just cuz we are just weirdly *confusing* to internet providers, telephone companies or even tv services, etc and/or whatevers !
Would just be more USEFUL if they resumed patchings that patched where connections of any kinds for any of us, RESUMED PATCHING WHERE PATCHINGS maybe got interupted, heck even a storm or solar flare storm might fubar some of us losing connections while we are patching patches somewhere ! Ya never know.
FYI, skyrim is both first and 3rd person. But i was only saying this based on its graphical content.
There are two problems with this approach.
Firstly, having all the graphics pre-rendered really does run counter to the theme of this thread. To add any little thing, hundreds of frames of animation have to be pushed to the user in a patch. Which has been stated previously as being one of the main reasons we don't get a whole lot of new art.
Secondly, pushing everything through as textures is just really poor use of any video card made in the last forever, where the bulk of the hardware is dedicated to the 3D processing.
any reasonably high-res model will have nearly as much texture data as it would have sprite data in the end anyways. There's a great way to push these out for low bandwidth users that EA used to use all the time and it was called a "CD", put the latest client, perhaps a few token codes in box, and sell another set like the 10th aniv that's essentially a patch in a box. And poor use of video hardware? Technically yes...but the point is to NOT use the video hardware and even allow software fallback that's useable, I'd much rather have super detailed graphics than run at 100fps on my netbook than, to even achieve a decent level of framerate, most likely having to turn graphics all the way down for a smooth 30 fps.
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Remember, the x/390 is just a count of checksums to see which files to download, it's NOT A DOWNLOAD itself. The new patcher downloads only each segment needed, then installs it immediately, before switching to downloading the next file - unlike the old patcher, which downloaded everything all at once, then installed the parts one at a time.
Picture the two as if getting new tires. The old system removes all 4 wheels at once, then switches each tire, then remounts each wheel; if other things need fixed, you have to come back for another visit.
The new system takes off one wheel at a time, taking the time to also check your alignment, shocks, brakes, rims, and wheel bearings to see if they need replaced (and replacing the ones needing work), replaces that tire, and remounts it, before moving to the next. The latter takes a little longer, but makes sure all the parts are in working order (not just the tires), and is actually MORE resume-capable than the other way (let's see how far one gets putting the car back on the ground with only 1 wheel done and the other 3 off, while changing one at a time allows you to stop after the 1 wheel, roll the car off the rack, and do other stuff (i.e. outside the game) before coming back to resume)
The big difference is that the new installer does a checksum on the existing files before downloading to look for which files need updated, while the old one did individual checksums of the old files AS THEY WERE REPLACED (after download) to see if they needed changed by each successive patch as the patcher got to the ones in each patch. This is why, for example, if you changed your music files, a patch would crash and burn if the file affected the music files - your altered music was not giving the proper checksum.
More often than not, the old patcher would fail on hitting a partially downloaded file or changed/corrupted installed file, and rather than resume, it would crash, sometimes fatally disrupting the target file, and requiring that file being patched to be replaced (otherwise it's time to reinstall). The new patcher just sees "this file's not right" before beginning the download, and downloads the full version of the file to fix the situation for you.
In the old patcher, as often as not, if a download failed, it would restart from scratch (and often had to go into the game folder and delete the old patch files to get the patch to restart!). When it did "resume" a download, if it didn't start re-downloading the partial file in the patch from scratch, you were likely to get a file that wouldn't patch properly. All the new patcher does that's different is that it rechecks everything from scratch, and only does the parts you need (including ones that aren't in the latest update, that somehow got corrupted since your last start).
The WHOLE POINT of the new patcher is to get rid of broken patch instances that require you to either reinstall, or back up each install before patching to make sure that if a critical file gets corrupted (so you can replace it to make sure the patch resumes properly). I've not had to resume a new patcher download yet, but since it seems to be the same software as the EC patcher, I do know that I've resumed EC patches where it resumed with the file that was interrupted. Resumption was never guaranteed, in the old patcher, either.
Picture the two as if getting new tires. The old system removes all 4 wheels at once, then switches each tire, then remounts each wheel; if other things need fixed, you have to come back for another visit.
The new system takes off one wheel at a time, taking the time to also check your alignment, shocks, brakes, rims, and wheel bearings to see if they need replaced (and replacing the ones needing work), replaces that tire, and remounts it, before moving to the next. The latter takes a little longer, but makes sure all the parts are in working order (not just the tires), and is actually MORE resume-capable than the other way (let's see how far one gets putting the car back on the ground with only 1 wheel done and the other 3 off, while changing one at a time allows you to stop after the 1 wheel, roll the car off the rack, and do other stuff (i.e. outside the game) before coming back to resume)
The big difference is that the new installer does a checksum on the existing files before downloading to look for which files need updated, while the old one did individual checksums of the old files AS THEY WERE REPLACED (after download) to see if they needed changed by each successive patch as the patcher got to the ones in each patch. This is why, for example, if you changed your music files, a patch would crash and burn if the file affected the music files - your altered music was not giving the proper checksum.
More often than not, the old patcher would fail on hitting a partially downloaded file or changed/corrupted installed file, and rather than resume, it would crash, sometimes fatally disrupting the target file, and requiring that file being patched to be replaced (otherwise it's time to reinstall). The new patcher just sees "this file's not right" before beginning the download, and downloads the full version of the file to fix the situation for you.
In the old patcher, as often as not, if a download failed, it would restart from scratch (and often had to go into the game folder and delete the old patch files to get the patch to restart!). When it did "resume" a download, if it didn't start re-downloading the partial file in the patch from scratch, you were likely to get a file that wouldn't patch properly. All the new patcher does that's different is that it rechecks everything from scratch, and only does the parts you need (including ones that aren't in the latest update, that somehow got corrupted since your last start).
The WHOLE POINT of the new patcher is to get rid of broken patch instances that require you to either reinstall, or back up each install before patching to make sure that if a critical file gets corrupted (so you can replace it to make sure the patch resumes properly). I've not had to resume a new patcher download yet, but since it seems to be the same software as the EC patcher, I do know that I've resumed EC patches where it resumed with the file that was interrupted. Resumption was never guaranteed, in the old patcher, either.
THis Thread is so full of informative posts I have to say thanks to everyone.
When I read the posts, I feel like a freshman taking a first year computer course - or is this all something you learn about in grade school now'a'days?
Special thanks to Basara for writing all his posts in such a clear way that even I am able to understand! - -
When I read the posts, I feel like a freshman taking a first year computer course - or is this all something you learn about in grade school now'a'days?
Special thanks to Basara for writing all his posts in such a clear way that even I am able to understand! - -
Much of this doesn't seem terribly realistic
Not to say it wouldn't be nice if it were at all possible, it just seems that the "CD" part of it is the only part that would really work as you intend (and even that is saying that dial-up users should get their patches through microtransactions, which is all manner of wrong).