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What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Release Notes 1/31/2019
kaiserin
Posts: 3,196 Cryptic Developer
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Cosmic
- Added the contents of the Buccaneer Box to the Collector store.
Performance
- Increased game stability for systems with large amounts of ram. Players with modern configurations should see a significant improvement.
Cosmic
- Updated Cosmic rewards to drop a Cosmic Equipment Kit similar to the Equipment Kits on live. This is replacing the default cosmic rewards (stars, catalysts). These kits can drop stars, catalysts, consumables and generic gear.
- Mod drops, SCR, GCR, Questionite and rare drops are unchanged.
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..d
do you know what kind of gear most people going to cosmics are wearing?
The term Generic Gear could mean one of two things. There's the realistic version, and the hopeful version
How out of touch is Cryptic with the playerbase when they say "Cosmic fighters' inventories are cluttered all the time, they keep complaining during the Winter and Halloween events. Let's remake Cosmic content so that Stars no longer drop, and then limit the stack size so that they don't build up again! Nevermind the fact we just arbitrarily redefined the maximum size of a stack to 2% of it's original size and the ramifications that could have if that messes up in any way. Ok, what next? Oh, let's change the size of a Cosmic reward pool's item drops from 2 items to 4 items
If you wanted to make the act of fighting Cosmics more rewarding, here's a neat concept that might be of some value: giving us some resource drops.
100% Agreed
+ adding more gcr and scr dropped from the cosmic bosses or augment the daily cap maybe ?
It's not like doing 3 cosmics per day for a month is any fun
Neither is Teleios Ascendant
I'd like to know what that really means... How much would be a "large amount of ram"? Are we gonna crash less? Lower loading times? Less lag on open world events? Could you elaborate a little bit more on this, please?
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
90% chance that they did this by implementing a Large-Address-Aware flag on the game. This is a very simple change that expands the amount of RAM an x86 program can use, and is useful because a lot of these programs are designed with rather strict RAM-usage caps in place due to design assumptions that were in place for old, x86 Operating Systems.
The main effect that this change (if it is in fact this one to begin with) is that the program now has access to roughly 4GB of memory it can use effectively instead of the old 2GB. It's only recommended that this is done for programs running on systems with at least 3GB ram. Any less, and the issue of using large-addresses shows up: the program would begin to use and overwrite sections of the RAM that are normally reserved for the OS, leading to basically your computer crashing since it's eating up space on the RAM that's normally used to, say, display your taskbar items or render the desktop correctly.
The main benefit reaped by doing this is that the game becomes much more stable on systems with enough ram, and can load more resources at once without breaking its own usage limit and deciding to throw an Out Of Memory exception. This is a common, easy fix that has been included for mods of games such as Fallout: New Vegas and various other Bethesda titles, notorious for being huge-scope games designed on crappy ancient frameworks and are prone to CTD unmodded, even on modern systems with 8-16GB ram.
One caveat is that, if a game has a memory leak (basically, if game assets and files don't get unloaded completely when the game's done using them and keep using up RAM in some way) all this really does is delay the inevitable. The game will crash if it has a bad memory leak, and it wouldn't matter how much RAM usage you allocated to it. This is why most typical games that are designed smartly, or have a limited scope (i.e. Doom 2016, Source Engine games, Overwatch, any old games ported to new systems, etc) don't usually run into issues with CTD ever because they correctly load and unload the exact maps, assets, and so forth they need at any given time, or (in the case of ported classics) the entire game collectively doesn't even use RAM to even approach that ceiling to begin with. Then we get into games like TES:Skyrim which is coded like trash and has an install size of about 12 GB.
The main downside is, if you're using a toaster that only has 2GB ram, running the game could cause, at best, extreme OS slowdown as it tries to load core functionality off the disk instead of keeping it loaded on the limited RAM (which isn't usually a problem unless you like multitasking while playing CO). At worst, it causes your computer to implode and BSOD. So if this is all the case, then "large amount of ram" would basically mean 8GB or more, I'd imagine.
Effectively this has slightly raised the minimum requirements for the game (might want to update the Steam page for that), but of course this all hinges on everything I just discussed above being what they actually changed. The true answer might be way more elegant or perhaps even more hamfisted and ruinous than what I described.
more points on cosmic rewards of more items being dumb: a comparison of Resource-gain rates:
- 1 hour of doing Smash alerts repeatedly gets you about 40G, if we make a rough estimation that you can get about 11 of them done.
- Finishing the entirety of TA nets about 10G (ish...) And can take shorter or longer depending on the team, but usually also takes about an hour if it goes smoothly. Of course, this is also at a higher cost of required roles and more awareness.
- Defeating a cosmic currently earns you.... like 1 National Resource. Or 0.01 G. And this is for an event that requires more coordination and people than either a TA or an Alert, and certainly more time than doing one Smash which earns you about 3-3.6G per completion.
But I guess having more items to sell offsets that, sure ok. Selling items to Karneeki the Goofball is fun and good gameplay yay aslrkdhfwl(fun fact, one time I accidentally typed /renderscale 5 instead and... My game actually didn't crash. My CPU was fuckin' dying, to the point that my OS, Google Chrome, and CO were near-unresponsive and I had to restart, but technically my computer and game didn't crash. I think it did end up breaking my CPU's cooling unit though...)
What really determines the amount of RAM used is assets such as textures, models, and code loaded. This is also why, if you do stuff like mod your Skyrim game to use 4K textures and high-quality models without implementing other fixes, your chances of crashing skyrocket, because its now loading much higher filesizes into RAM without having the architecture to deal with it.
I guess the real way you would fix crashes during big event fights, instead of using Renderscale, would be to reduce your character/environment/texture detail levels, but I think the renderscale suggestion propogated since it was a very fast option to change without moving 4 separate sliders that improved performance. I will say, from personal experience, that I still got some crashes from attending too many fights even while I was using a small renderscale.
The biggest improvement I got to stability, prior to this patch, was to actually go into the Advanced video settings, under troubleshooting, and disable the option of "reduced file streaming" - which is pretty consistent with what I explained above if you think about it! If you're reducing the number of files you stream off the disk, that means more of it's remaining loaded in your RAM, meaning that's more RAM being consumed out of the tiny budget of 2GB CO initially had to work off of!
I'll have to wait and see how much it actually improves things once I get home of course, so take my ramblings with a grain of salt.
So all in all it shouldn't cause problems for any normal configuration.
With Skyrim switching that flag on did give people higher framerates ( and me too back when I played on a laptop ) so there is a good chance you may be able to bump your settings up a bit ( if your system supports 64 bit as aiqa explains above ). Just a bit tho, don't go nuts.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
And I don't understand all that talk about the stars. The very fact that people have hundreds of them shows they don't need them. Why would I need more then twenty stars if the max I use at a time is five? Even if they only drop half as often now I'm still getting more then I use up. And it's not like they're important anyway. The effect is minor and doesn't matter in 99% of CO content. (I'd only exclude Dino and Eido here, where quenching the last few percent of dps out of your char can be helpful)
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
So with the stability, does that mean less hardcrashes for top end PCs?
42 40s, LTSer.
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My characters
This is all really epic knowledge that I wish I had like 10 years ago. I'm going to try upping my settings from "Potato" to "Stick Figure" then use these other things to see if I can actually keep things going.
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Used to be coach on the forums. Still @coach in game.
I think you get 3 stars per cosmic, so to get a full stack you'd have had to fight 333 cosmics. More for me since I used the stars drops when ever I wasn't at full stars. There hasn't really been anything else I even wanted from cosmics for a few years now. And while stars are also not really something I need it was a bit of an accomplishment thing to get 2.5 full stacks, and that still made it fun. And that also let me feel I gained something, at least I wouldn't have to "worry" about stars ever again.
And besides that, the reason given for the change made no sense.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
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