Suggestion: Disable Visuals for enhancement Companions

drago · May 2021

The Discussion Title already describe it.
I would like to be able disable the visuals for my enhancement companions. You can have divided opinion if you like or not like to have a goat, little monster or little bear run by your side. I would like to be able disable it like I am able to disable the Visuals for i.e. Elven Battle Enchantment.
What is your opinion?

rockster · May 2021

My opinion is this: We asked (and pleaded) for years to be able to disable visuals on armor enchants because they were $crewing up our outfits, back then the outfit transmute system was different and much more complicated (so much better now and thankyou to the devs for doing it) and after spending so much investment to get a look for your character which was exactly the way you wanted it, often the armor enchant would almost completely hide it and you couldn't turn it off and caused a lot of frustration. We asked, we complained, we begged, we pleaded and nothing happened for literally years but finally they did do something about it and they added the ability to turn it off. So what I can say is two things, one: be grateful we can do that in the first place because it took years to get after many people complaining and it was a very hard-won achievement, and two: don't hold your breath on being able to disable augment companions visuals because it may take quite a while if they ever did decide to do it. Personally I have a rat pup augment purely because I like it running around with me, I was the same on my CW with the cat, I was the same with the mirage set when it was nowhere near a good set to have at that time but just because Tom D!ck and Harry kept me company while I was running around soloing and made me happy. I often have things in the game only because I like them and not because they are BiS for my character, so I have this rat augment running around next to me just because it is a cute rat and no other reason. The more customization the better so I support your idea generally, but I wouldn't use it myself.

sandukutupu · May 2021

I have been begging them since ALPHA testing the game, to have an option to remove the stupid reticle. Never going to happen. It is going on 8 years with a stupid blue dot and a circle in the middle of the screen, like I don't have a clue where center of my screen is located. All we want is some controls to toggle features on and off.

Meanwhile other games, go as far as, giving you tools to modify the design of your HUD. I would love to have the options, but the reality is Cryptic's older games, Star Trek and Champions have more control features than we will ever see.

drago · May 2021

sandukutupu said:
I have been begging them since ALPHA testing the game, to have an option to remove the stupid reticle. Never going to happen. It is going on 8 years with a stupid blue dot and a circle in the middle of the screen, like I don't have a clue where center of my screen is located. All we want is some controls to toggle features on and off.

Exactly my feelings.
Win-Win situation. Happy players, less used server resources. Think about the servers cryptic. If you begging for 8 years, we need to change strategy.

kreatyve · May 2021

I think this is a very reasonable request. Not sure how technically difficult it would be for them to pull off but it really doesn't seem like it would be too hard.

blargskull · May 2021

Speaking from experience, it would not only make the gamers happy, it would reduce Direct Draw 3D and increase the frame rate slightly. If everyone in 15 person instance, has a mount, companion, vanity pet, and shadow puppet (yes they are all warlocks too!) active in there. The game client has to render 15 x 5 = 75 3D models, not to mention all the vendors and pedestrian traffic. Users disabling models would have the same result of going to an empty instance.

greywynd · May 2021

Kill the vanity pets!

rockster · May 2021

Nooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!

drago · May 2021

Please. Keep on topic. No one ask for vanity pets. Vanity pets are good example it already work. Some like them and summon. Others do not. All optional.

blargskull said:
Speaking from experience, it would not only make the gamers happy, it would reduce Direct Draw 3D and increase the frame rate slightly. If everyone in 15 person instance, has a mount, companion, vanity pet, and shadow puppet (yes they are all warlocks too!) active in there. The game client has to render 15 x 5 = 75 3D models, not to mention all the vendors and pedestrian traffic. Users disabling models would have the same result of going to an empty instance.

That's what I was after to tell. Thank you for describe in detail.

blargskull · May 2021

drago#3250 said:
Please. Keep on topic. No one ask for vanity pets. Vanity pets are good example it already work. Some like them and summon. Others do not. All optional.
blargskull said:
Speaking from experience, it would not only make the gamers happy, it would reduce Direct Draw 3D and increase the frame rate slightly. If everyone in 15 person instance, has a mount, companion, vanity pet, and shadow puppet (yes they are all warlocks too!) active in there. The game client has to render 15 x 5 = 75 3D models, not to mention all the vendors and pedestrian traffic. Users disabling models would have the same result of going to an empty instance.
That's what I was after to tell. Thank you for describe in detail.

This is very much on topic, please try to follow. I didn't say this isn't optional. As it stands, about the only optional things I listed in my example are mounts and vanity pets. What anyone would be doing out in combat with a vanity pet is beyond my understanding. All I am stating (as I did above) the more flair you remove from your character, the game improves in frame rate. So yes, I am very much on topic here. There is a lot that we can ask for in this game, I seriously doubt anything you or I write down will get implemented.

In short, the forums is an exercise in futility.

rockster · May 2021

So I guess the mirage set should have invisible mirages too because the extra three copies of your character is putting a load on the game?

hotfrostworm · May 2021

rockster#6227 said:
So I guess the mirage set should have invisible mirages too because the extra three copies of your character is putting a load on the game?

This only pertains to a GPU strain on your PC. If your PC can handle the load there is no issue. If you wanted, you could reduce a game down to cubes like the game Minecraft. The result is less GPU usage and more higher frame rates. If you eliminate the pet/augment visual placeholder, it no longer needs to be rendered.

The network tosses tiny packets of information back and forth and none of this contains model or texture information, it is stored on your drive already. The game has sizable libraries called hogg files located in the piggs folder. When they add new textures and models those are updated with the patch. All the network packet says to your client is something like; model #92803 moving to 29.289 -823.125
The model number would be looked up in the hogg library and displayed with the movement animation and in that brief fraction of a second the client reports on your activities as well.

I am assuming the original poster was requesting this as an option for the esthetic value and not to speed up frame rates. To put a simple answer on this thread, the reasons behind fewer options can be any or all of the following;

The creators (IPH) and or developers desire the style to remain the same for all players, and they believe their vision should be the only version you see.
The user menus needed to add all the tidbits of toggle switches and sliders, would consume more than the game data than the client itself.
Allowing the users more control over the clients features could result in unwanted exploits.
Unpacking the textures from libraries for users to alter (make invisible) would expose the copyright assets to the public.
The changes and additions required would not be worth the cost in work force.

rockster · May 2021

I was sort of being facetious but I appreciate the info you took the time to detail. I have no issue with framerate or load, I'm running an RTX2070 on a 64bit system and an i7 processor and get more frames than my monitor refresh rate knows what to do with. I'm just having a dig at the notion of suggesting things are removed so that game load improves, where do you draw the line. Take all the npcs out of PE because it's less load? Remove the mirages and make them invisible? Remove the butterflies on the Wand of Wonders which fill up half a room with graphics? (I would actually support that because everyone hates them) I don't like the idea of taking graphical content out of the game for some minimal questionable load benefit. I do support the option of having things disappear visually (on your own character) if you want to elect do that as a player for your own enjoyment, which is the point of this thread, but I don't like where it can potentially lead where people start saying parts of the game which make the game what it is to players are causing unnecessary load, because it can lead to people starting to ask them to be taken out or disabled under certain circumstances. Slippery slope.

Suggestion: Disable Visuals for enhancement Companions

Comments