Warhammer Online Producer on Expansions
by Blake Ellison, Sep 25, 2008 2:27pm PDTWarhammer Online has only been online for a week, but the team at Mythic Entertainment is already looking past post-launch bug fixes and is planning future expansions for the game.
"We've been looking at an expansion for two months now," said executive producer Jeff Hickman in a Joystiq interview. "I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea when I say that--we got four people out of 250 who have been doing pre-production on an expansion."
Hickman was quick to elaborate on the smallness of the current expansion project for the PC MMO. "It is going to be months, months, before that team expands beyond those four or five people and we actually start going 'balls to the walls' working on an expansion," he explained. The remaining 245 staffers are "mostly dedicated to improving the quality of the game as it stands now," promised the producer.
While Hickman wasn't willing to give dates for the delivery of content, he was able to give an optimistic timeline for the production of that content. "Hopefully within the next month or two, we're going to start ... work[ing] on forward-thinking, cool, content system patches that will give free stuff to the players that they'll love."
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Comments
The game "jerks" a little sometimes. When you run a scenario you stand there and fight with a player. Then the game freezes for 0.1-0.2 seconds and the player warps away. Very annoying for me as a Ironbreaker as my job is to be in the face of the other player and shield casters etc. Also the loot seams a little jerky sometimes also. Kill a mob - Press loot - Press loot - press loot - press loot - Loot opens.
That and some other little things (Link loot in chat, WTF!!).
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But, since there's a monthly fee attached, nothing you're doing is really "for free".
Unless he's saying this is a strictly DLC expansion, and not a retail box. I guess I can see that; still false, but I can see someone saying it.
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There is actually a potential fix for the scenario/RvR lag / stuttering issue many have mentioned, and it worked for me at least. First, let me explain, so the solution doesn't sound as strange as it might:
Typically when you are doing Scenarios/RvR, you are in a group, and have group frames visible. In the group frames you can see what buffs and debuffs each group member have. These buffs and debuffs are, as it stands, being updated at least 10 times per second, maybe even more, hard to tell. The constant updating of dozens of effects causes client lag, perhaps best described as "stuttering". I was suffering from this even though I have a very up-to-date system. (C2D 3ghz, 4 gigs, 8800GT)
Luckily, some research into this yielded results:
http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/13745/
What we have there is an UI addon that simply limits the amount of times the effects are updated per second. The default value is twice per second, and with that value, it all but completely eliminated the stuttering for me. Scenarios are now very smooth. I recommend anyone else suffering from this problem gives it a shot.
There is also a second bug in the engine causing bad fps, that is not related to the same problem. It has to do with the game "over-utilizing" your CPU for some odd reason, leading to bad FPS. The fix for (at least some) Nvidia cards is at least as strange as the previous one: Try forcing FSAA and AF _ON_ from your Nvidia control panel. My CPU loads went from 95-100% to 50-70% when I did this, and my fps got much better all-around. If you are an ATI user, I'm afraid I have no solution to offer.
Lots of other possible fixes can be found at http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=74 - these two alone however turned by WAR from a frustrating collection of bad fps and stuttering into a smooth experience.
Good luck.
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