Sal's Countdown to Logging In 2010 (2011? 2012??)

[Salamander]

Video card came in today.  I'll be getting together for the weekend of assembly and gaming this Friday.  If all goes well, I'll be making my reappearance on Monday the 12th.

[smoke]

Many years ago I followed news about Project Entropia. It was "comming soon" at the time. When it finally arrived, I couldn't play. My computer couldn't handle it. I think I actually had Win98 at the time. It was quite a while ago.

When I finally had a computer that could download and log in, it was crappy, becuase my computer was crappy. Then I upgraded and they upgraded, and I did and they did. It seemed like the system requirements seemed to stay just ahead of me. Sometimes I would meet the minimum requirements, but that wasn't really enough, so the quality was crappy. This went on for many years, so for anyone who has dealt or is dealing with that, I feel your pain.

Around 2008, I finally surpassed the system requirements by far and EU ran smoothly, so that's really when I started playing. I played for a few months and life got in the way until this past Jan. Now the graphics are even better and the physics effects from the *new* CryEngine offer a lot of realism. But now after beating the minimum requirements by a longshot back then, I can't even run the game at maximum quality. At medium quality I sometimes have to wait a while for everything to load. Sometimes I drop the quality settings to Low if I'm doing something important just so it runs more smoothly. (*new*: It's new to me.)

ANYWAYS...

I wanted to say, I feel your pain, and also just list my system characterists here for comparison and with little bits of advice. (Not to brag, cause my system is not really bragable.)

This system will play EU, but not very well at maximum quality settings:
WinXP, or course. Home edition.
AMD Sempron Proc 3400 at 1.8Ghz
2Gig ram (I think I need more)
500 Gig hard drive. Size doesn't mater(lol) But the connection of the HD to the MB is not the old cabling. I THINK it's SATA, but regardless. SATA is better than ATA(PATA), and I think that's important.
Speed of the hard drive and speed of the Hd conection is important, but even more important... the video card.

I have ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT AGP (I don't remember the video ram but having more makes a big difference.) This video card made it so I could finally play, but this is BARELY enough. Surpassing this would be good.
For a long time any AGP was way better than any PCI, but the important thing is just the data throughput. Whatever motherboard you have, take advantage of the fastest place to put the video card(which should by AGP, but I don't know that for sure.) A board that doesn't have AGP, but has the newer faster PCI bus and a video card that matches that would be better than a older board with AGP, but the OLDER AGP. So consider the data rate of the connection when looking at video cards for YOUR MB and also in your CHOISE of MBs if your buying one.

When it comes to the Network I think 100x is fine.(No need for 1000x) The router probably connects to the WAN at 10x(be it ISDN or Cable modem).

Ok, so, I am Tim.
In EU I am William Smoke Meilliur, or just Smoke.

[ram]

A funny thing happened in EU yesterday.

There I was, in my lonely MM existence, when all of a sudden there came up little pink messages presaging the imminent return of chatter to the society channel.

I couldn't believe it!

You think I'm going to say that Sala came on. Well, it was Byte. Fantastic - a soc friend at last!

Then, something even more amazing happened!
Sala DID come on!
WOW - 2 whole people other than me to talk to. 

So all that equipment finally came together, all the min specs fulfilled.
Good to see you Sala. Welcome back to EU!

[Salamander]

Good to be back.  Now I'll just have to see how dead it is.  Besides seeing  you and Byte that first day, I really haven't seen any sign of anyone yet.

[kedarwarriner]

The cadets are alive and kicking! Come join us 

[admin]

I was on last night and no fellow MM's were on   

I did, however, get a chance to chat with Chrome for awhile. 

[ram]

Good to be back.  Now I'll just have to see how dead it is.  Besides seeing  you and Byte that first day, I really haven't seen any sign of anyone yet.

Yea well I'm in assignment and mid-term exam mode. Sorry. Then I'm in "do 6 years of tax paperwork in a real hurry or get put in the slammer" mode. So much for my mid-term break.

[kedarwarriner]

Since there was some discussion about what hardware people use to run EU, I thought I'd throw my 2 PEC in.

My personal opinion is that you should never buy computer hardware new since it instantly becomes obsolete.

My motherboard is an Asrock with a 3 GHz processor and 2 GB of DDR.  The mobo actually supports both DDR and DDR2 so when I scrape some extra cash together, I may trade in my 2 sticks of DDR for some DDR2.
I have a Radeon x1300 video card with 256 MB of onboard memory.
I don't have anything to say about audio since I always play with the sound off (SACRILEGE, I know, I know)
The grand total for all this was $110 for the mobo and case, $25 for the video card and about $80 for the memory, so a little over $200.  I won't count my screen since I've had it for the past 6 years or so. 19"LCD.  nothing special, but it does the job.
Oh yeah, and I had to install another fan to keep the graphics card cool since it doesn't have an onboard fan.  That was another $2.

This astounding array of hardware lets me play with a combination of low and medium settings which is good enough for me.  When I'm doing a long crafting run, I turn everything down to safe mode to give the hardware a break :-)