WHY THE HOLY HELL IS EVERYBODY SAYING ARCANUMS GRAPHICS ARE

Ok folks, WTF????

Honestly now

THE GAME LOOKS GORGEOUS.

Honestly now, it looks just as good as the Baulders Gate games and a signifigantly large amount better then the el-crappo diablo series, yeesh.

Ok ok, so diablo2 can do some darn nice screencaps if you get enough things going on, but come on people, computer generated 3d will NEVER be able to beat hand drawn! It is a simple fact, You only have a finite amount of polygons to use to draw whatever it is that you are drawing, whilst prerendered/Handdrawn stuff has the EXACT polygons drawn that the artist wants them too.

give it up for 2d

 

I fired up my Diablo a couple of days ago. It's the first time in about a month, since I got immersed in Arcanum, and I only did it 'cos I'm paranoid about my Realms characters timing out.

Anyway, after playing so much Arcanum, the Diablo graphics looked so bad that I actually wondered if my graphics card was acting up.

 

*Sarcasm on*
Everyone knows that you just can't beat the quality you get with 3D polygons. They make the 3D images look so real, because you know people are made of little geometric shapes.

*Sarcasm off*

Personally, I think people forget what the hell a game’s about. I would take an Arcanum with original Diablo’s graphics over a PoR2 with holographic or virtual reality graphics any day.

Damn, its been awhile since I made it to this place.

 

graphics vs performance

I agree that the 2D graphics in Arcanum look better than most 3D graphics (even Diablo). The most obvious difference to me is the colour palettes - they are much more varied, and this makes every scene look sharp and distinct (Diablo is all the same shade of puke grey).
However, there is a dreadful performance hit. Have you noticed how much the game slows down the moment you use an electric light? Or how much faster it is to use they waypoint option than to simply "click and scroll"?
This is because Arcanum has combined 2D graphics with animations. If you don't believe me, check out the performance difference between running around in town (where the townfolk NPS's are chewing up your processor power) and running around in the wilderness. Or the noticeable hit in performance when you enter the dragon lair (all those pretty torches SLOW YOU DOWN)

 

I've noticed those things, but don't know enough about graphics to know why it happens, so I'll assume you're correct.

I don't see how this proves that using 2D hand-drawn had a performance hit compared to a rendered system. Diablo grinds to halt on my system everytime someone casts a firewall spell.

I'm not saying you're wrong - I just don't see how your example proves you're right.

 

I like graphics in Arcanum, I also can play and enjoy an RPG with really dated graphics (like Bterayal in Krondor) if the game itself is interesting. But then again I will also say that the way Arcanum looks does not justify its terrible performance.

 

Sheriff Fatman, I'm not a programmer, so I don't really know what I'm talking about either. But I am a network engineer and a computer tech, and I can tell you that Firewall doesn't slow down a game on a 100Mbit network. Perhaps you are talking about an internet game of Diablo?
If so, there is a lot of information being passed between the server and the players, and this could result in the slowdown you are experiencing.

 

Exactly, Dragoon of Poland! But let's get more specific. When does your game slow down? Is it in town? Or around lots of animations (like those pretty torches)? Or does this happen in the wilderness?
I agree that a good game is based on the concepts. I still haul out Civ 1 on occasion because it beats most modern games hands down for game play, despite crappy graphics. The trouble is, Arcanum has all the elements of a great game, but at the moment it is more frustrating than enjoyable!

 

I am talking about a Realms game, yes, although my downstream is 512Mbps. I cant say what the BNet pipes are like, but I'd imagine pretty large, right?

I'm not a programmer, either. I'm a systems analyst and don't know how the resource loading compares for these sort of things, but my guess is that the 100Mbps connection was not the only difference when Firewall caused you no trouble. Maybe you had a better graphics card than me?

 

I get massive slowdowns in towns. Namely Tarant and Caladon. To be even more specific, The Sobbing Onion.

I'm no programmer either, and I don't understand the speed difference between Fallout I, Fallout II, and Arcanum. It seems like the graphics didn't get that much better, yet the speed fell drastically. Why is that? Arcanum does seem to have a little more eye candy than the Fallouts did, but it's a ton slower. For that matter, Fallout II seemed to have the exact same graphics as the first one, yet it was likewise alot slower.

 

Sheriff, as a systems analyst you would know that you're downstream doesn't mean jack if the server is overloaded! I'm talking about a LAN with a 100Mbit hub and Cat5 cables. My system is a crappy 350MHz AMD with 128MB RAM, and I'm usually the host for our games (up to 8 players). Yes, I'm playing on the PC that is the server, and we get negligible slowdown with firewall, though I have to admit, I'm getting a bit of a performance hit with the Diablo II expansion pack when another assassin uses Firetrap.
My graphics card is a Voodoo 3 2000 (only 16 MB).

 

You may well be right. I've never run a bandwidth test against my Bnet connection, and the catch up after a slow down does kind of look like a load of packets arriving at once.

What I was really trying to get to, though, is that bottle-necks are hard to pinpoint without being able to examine both scenario's closely.

For instance, my initial guess on experiencing slowdown in Arcanum was that it was probably a badly designed memory model.

If they're tracking a lot of events and objects, a lot of them will be created and cached or created and held in memory, making it necessary to cahce other things. Either way, things slow down if they try to do too many.

It might explain why the game slows down when your in an areas with a lot of NPC's, even if you can't see the NPC's. If the game is creating them as potential points of interaction (i.e. keeping it's eye on whether you take any actions that would alter the way they feel about you), then it may be doing it inefficiently and causing a slowdown.

Like I said, this was just my initial thought on it. I fully expect that I am wrong.

 

Not at all…it's a damn good theorem. But why does Arcanum slow down when you've killed all the NPC's and monsters, and you're just trying to run past a bunch of torches (like at the end of the dragon cave quest)?

 

My own experience is that the game slows down progressively as time goes by, whatever actions I take. It's more noticeable in towns, especially when I run near a group of NPC's, but it affects all areas of the game.

You can run through the same place when you first load at a faster pace than when you have ben playing a while. This could be something to do with untidy memory use, so lots of objects fail to get cleaned up and are hanging around on the heap making it necessary to do more caching of other objects.

Another explanation I read somewhere said it was something to do with 32Mb+ graphics cards and the way Arcanum (mis)uses them, but if you're on a 16Mb Voodoo, that wouldn't explain it.

 

This used to be a double post. Damn fingers.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Sheriff Fatman on 2001-10-19 23:16 ]</font>

 

I'm with you Lord Milo! I can't see the benefits, but I can see the progressive performance reductions! It can't be the AI, 'cause that hasn't changed from Fallout 1 to Arcanum. It's not the "eye candy" 'cause that hasn't improved noticeably either. I can only surmise that by increasing the "game area" they've increased our lag. That is the only difference I can see from game to game. Why oh why couldn't they have gone back to the drawing board, and redesigned the engine. There are so many more efficient engines they could have leased that would have improved this game for us all!!

My guess is they have a vested interest in keeping the game running on their original Fallout 1 engine (ie. Royalties) and they expect us to upgrade our computers to keep up! I'll bet they test their new products on Spark or Alpha systems, and expect that by the time they release Intel will have a P7 on the market.

 

Sheriff, that is exactly what I complained about in a previous post - check out "can't find the pillar of truth".
I agree about the slowdown but I think it has nothing to do with video card memory. Have you heard about the Microsoft Windows 98 memory drain? I'm guessing you're running on Win98.
It seems Win98 has a memory bug…it asks for RAM but it doesn't give it back after the task is completed. So over time your resources run out. As a network engineer I can't tell you the number of times I have received a call from a client saying "the network seems really slow" or "I can't print" and the solution seems to be - reboot the server!
I'll bet you've noticed that restarting the game doesn't fix this problem, but restarting your computers does…I'll also bet that you've noticed your computer doesn't shut down after playing Arcanum, and you have to hit the reset button…am I right?

 

I'm on Win 2000.

D'ya know if they've done anything to NTFS or the way the IDE controllers work for 2000? I know at least 3 people, myself included, who had HDD failures shortly after beginning to use it.

 

Mmm, goody! Something to talk about on the next radio show! So were you running on NT4 before the change-over or Win98? If you were running Win98 I'm not sure the FAT conversion would have been clean (kinda like the FAT change-over from Win95 (16 bit) to Win98 (32 bit) was a problem for SO many people.
If you were running Win98, did you repartition the HDD or just use the Win 2000 tools and hope for the best?
I'm guessing you've re-installed everything by now (but 2000 has some handy features…not re-booting when you change network addresses is my favourite!)
If this was the cause of the HDD failure I'm not surprised!
If you were using NTFS beforehand I am surprised! Should have been trouble free.

 

I could write my own answer but it'll be just the same as Milo's so I'll just quote it: "I get massive slowdowns in towns. Namely Tarant and Caladon. To be even more specific, The Sobbing Onion."

Since I have a rather slow system (Celeron 400) I also get slowdown in Blackroot and Ahbury (but it's not half as bad as the one in Tarant and Caladon).

I also noticed, what a few people already mentioned, that it's NPC related. I got no slowdown when there were just a lot of animals around (like animal farm in Caladon) - it only happens when there are lots of NPCs around, esp. inns, town centres and such.

I get no slowdown near torches (at least I might've not noticed it as there are also NPCs around and I don't know which might be the cause). It's rather NPCs' fault though as I got not slowdown in the cave with Dragon's remains.