Sporkfire just announced that an interface for dual wielding would be one of the game enhancements included in April’s Dragon’s Vault module.
At last, we dual wielders will be able to switch between weapons easily. Extremely good news.
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No more completing South Threnal in fifteen minutes flat, rushers! Unless of course you’re in Europe, in which case you probably have at least another week. :( Shadowbane is now free to download and play. Most bizarre. I might take advantage of this and check it out, in the interests of research, of course. (Naah. Oblivion is so close I can taste it!) My working theory is that the developers have evolved into beings of pure energy, and now have no need of things like food and rent. Thanks to Aggro Me for the heads up.
– Graal Sounds handy indeed! This refers to the tiny icons that are put on top of the regular item icon. I would like to see, at some point in the future, a wider variety of potion icons. Baldur’s Gate 2 was particularly good for having a wide variety of these, making it simple to grab the right one in a hurry. Having mage scrolls look different to clerical scrolls would also be rather useful.
I wish they’ed hurry up with giving us some details. I’m eager to have something to talk about other than a rather flakey rollout. Though happily the global system failures striking the US servers don’t seem to be happening in Europe yet. What we do know is that the first update will add the first dragon (red, I believe) to the world, which is mildly exciting. Rumours regarding monks continue to circulate, but the only thing I’m confident will be in the first update is some high level adventures, and a whole lot of bug-fixes. Anything else is being kept quiet for now. Hopefully the material components for 4th level bard spells will make it in, if they aren’t hotfixed first. Of course, there’s probably multiple reasons why folks are crashing. This is but one of them: For some reason, DDO does not limit the amount of frames it outputs in the same way as other games. It is massively overtaxing your graphics cards, quite possibly causing overheating. If you do not select “sync to refresh” it is pushing out frames at a rate that simply force your PC to pass out. As seen in this pic:
Here, I have very briefly unticked “sync to refresh”. I am getting an FPS of 209, shown by Fraps in the top right hand corner. This is clearly an utterly ridiculous frame rate. Until I discovered that ticking “sync to refresh” would limit my fps to 60 (as my screen refresh rate is 60. Yours might be something else), I couldn’t make it to the end of character creation without crashing. Even at 60 fps, I have to turn everything down to low in order to prevent eventual overheating. I don’t need 60 fps at ugly. I’d be a lot happier with 30 fps with some detail. I can’t post on the US boards. I am getting very frustrated with the tech support over there suggesting that this mysterious epidemic of overheating graphics cards is due to hardware failure. Please, tech support, acknowledge this issue, and stop blaming our computers. It is true that some folks don’t seem to be having a problem. Such is the way of bugs It is however, affecting both NVidia and ATI cards. I also expect that the same issue is also responsible for some the stuttering and jerkiness that people are seeing. I am sure this will be fixed, but I really hope they make it quick. Release is a really bad time for such a bug to be added to the game. Later note: It appears, that on my PC at least, this out of control framerate only occurs in windowed mode (or in full screen mode if you have not set AllowFakeFullScreen=False in UserPreferences.ini, in which case full screen is really just a borderless window). Unfortunately, alt-tabbing out to check other software eventually causes me to crash, so it’s not much of a solution for me. Stephen Colbert has long talked about his love of Dungeons and Dragons. In this segment he hails the release of DDO. Remember, he’s playing a rightwing nutcase, so don’t be upset if he’s mean. Which he is. You can’t get better publicity than that. But what would be even better is if they could sign Colbert up to do the DM voice for one of the updates! He’s a talented voice artist, voicing several characters for Adult Swim. Draft Colbert! In other news, now that DDO has been released in Europe, I’m playing on the Boldrei server with my good friend, Flinch. It’s very early days, but I feel a great future lies ahead for The Green Lodge : Stormreach Chapter! |
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