Curse

Lagg · Jun 14, 2009, 04:22 PM // 16:22

With the steady rise of netbooks and Guild Wars 2 on the horizon, I'm sure many players will soon no longer be interested in running Guild Wars on their high-end gaming rigs. No matter how many shaders have been added to Eye of the North, Guild Wars is now an aging game with aging graphics.

However, I can see it having a long and productive end-of-life cycle on ultra portables (netbooks), due to its ease of access and lack of subscription fees.

I've been beautifully running Guild Wars off my four year-old 17" HP Dv9000 laptop with a Nvidia GF 7600 graphics card for the past year or so, using my actual gaming desktop for, well, more actual gaming that requires my full attention (I'm a flightsim nut).

Not that I don't like Guild Wars anymore, on the contrary, I just find it something that I like to do "on the side" while doing something else, such as watching TV, reading a book or filling in my tax declaration. We are, after all, a multitasking generation.

Right now, I'd like to take it down a notch further and run it off my Samsung NC10 netbook with an integrated Intel 945 graphics controller.

Now, first of all: I tried it and it sort of works. I'm well aware Guild Wars was never intended to run off these kind of machines at all. Still, props to ArenaNet's efficient coding and rock-solid graphics engine.

This said, it could run a whole lot better. With graphics quality turned all the way down, I'm still not ever getting more than 20fps. Once again, I'm well aware that I shouldn't be getting anything more, I know, the game was never designed to run on this machine at all.

So this is what I propose: develop an ultra portable graphics "compatibility" mode for netbooks. Fancy words for: go even lower than the lowest settings are now, but stylize them more.

In essence, throw out any last fancy effects that eat away at the framerate (especially skill animations, burning animations and others) and give us something that looks akin to r_picmip 5 in Quake III Arena. Almost devoid of any textures at all, but looking quite stylized in a cartoonish kind of way and running smoothily even on old rigs (or tiny new ones).

And really, it would beat the lowest quality texture mode that we have now, which looks plain ugly.

What say you?

I'm almost sure that it's possible, but would ArenaNet allow us to butcher its graphics completely for the sake of playability?

And just to safeguard myself from any possible angry mobs: no, this wouldn't affect the high quality modes in any way and yes, they should give content creation and/or skill balancing total priority over this.

Still, I don't see this as being something that would take months upon months to develop. Even beta-testing shouldn't be spectacular. Simply release it with the disclaimer: this is not how we intend the game to look like on your system, but we provide it for compatibility purposes.

moriz · Jun 14, 2009, 04:27 PM // 16:27

you can just run with -dx8 and -noshader tags. that will force dx8 rendering and remove all shader effects.

Neo Atomisk · Jun 14, 2009, 05:14 PM // 17:14

I occasionally have to play gw on an old computer with a horrible gfx card.
I don't have the computer knowhow to do anything other than install gw, meaning i have no clue what moriz said. a lower gfx setting would be nice.
/signed

Abedeus · Jun 14, 2009, 05:23 PM // 17:23

/signed

I would love to play GW on my laptop. It's 4 years old, and while it can handle Prophecies, Nightfall and GWEN are too much for it.

Lagg · Jun 14, 2009, 06:10 PM // 18:10

Quote:

Originally Posted by moriz

you can just run with -dx8 and -noshader tags. that will force dx8 rendering and remove all shader effects.

Thanks for this excellent tip!

It's sadly not quite low enough on the effects and general performance hits to make it really playable here.

I'm really talking about a barebone basic mode with simplified textures and with no (or simplified) special effects.

Here's a good comparison between a normal shot in Quake Live (the online version of Quake III Arena) and one in r_picmip 10.

http://img18.imageshack.us/i/rpicmip0.jpg/

http://img145.imageshack.us/i/rpicmip10.jpg/

Obviously, there's no difference in fps here, as the original was already taken at 120fps (limited by the game). It does make a substantial difference if your PC struggles with the normal mode.

An added benefit is that "hardcore" players tend to use the lower graphical mode in PvP to have a better overview and less distracting eye-candy to worry about.

Some of you may remember this, but back in the early days of Guild Wars PvP, there was a certain exploit build that relied on nothing else but crashing out the opponent team's players using low-end systems. It involved placing loads of Elementalist wards and doing lots of burning, two effects that are incredibly taxing graphically speaking.

I'm sure all those involved were reprimanded, but the underlying mechanics of the exploit were never really fixed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Abedeus

I would love to play GW on my laptop. It's 4 years old, and while it can handle Prophecies, Nightfall and GWEN are too much for it.

I find this to be very much akin to my experience.

Prophecies runs better, being the oldest chapter with the least amount of eye-candy. However, when, ahum, excrement hits the ventilator, and a whole load of special effects are being used on screen, the framerate will still slow down to a crawl, regardless of the campaign you're in.

riktw · Jun 14, 2009, 09:04 PM // 21:04

i am waiting for the lenovo S12 wich will come in july.
it got the ion platform and will be under 500 dollars.
the ion platform is an G9400m VGA card and an atom CPU, so you can play games on an mini laptop.

Mangione · Oct 10, 2010, 11:37 AM // 11:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lagg

So this is what I propose: develop an ultra portable graphics "compatibility" mode for netbooks. Fancy words for: go even lower than the lowest settings are now, but stylize them more.

In essence, throw out any last fancy effects that eat away at the framerate (especially skill animations, burning animations and others) and give us something that looks akin to r_picmip 5 in Quake III Arena. Almost devoid of any textures at all, but looking quite stylized in a cartoonish kind of way and running smoothily even on old rigs (or tiny new ones).

And really, it would beat the lowest quality texture mode that we have now, which looks plain ugly.

What say you?

I'm almost sure that it's possible, but would ArenaNet allow us to butcher its graphics completely for the sake of playability?

Sorry for thread necro-ing (well, Sardelac rules allow to raise from the dead old suggestions, instead of making new ones).

I'm moving around a lot, and I would love to have a way to make GW run smoother on my netbook. I wouldn't care for lowered graphics,as long as the game, the story, the mechanics are still there.

Lagg has made many good points here.

/signed for lowered specs (and graphics) for GW