Thursday 20 January 2011

Keep it under you hat, but...

...im a bit worried.
With this latest patch for eve we got the character creator..which to be honest was the bit I was looking forward to the most.
Trouble is my laptop cannot handle the creator. It can run the game fine if I turn the graphics down a tad but the creator is a no go for me. Tis initially pissed me off, as I wanted to play with my new toy. I tried updating drivers switching menus in the esc screen and every other method of getting it to work posted all over the internet, nothing.
Then panic set in as it was announced we have 1 month then you MUST use the character creator to redo your toons..
Now at this point I will say I fully intend to buy another laptop, after the 5 grand holiday I have half paid for! So I either lose 2 and a half grand deposit on a holiday or make do with the laptop for 3-5 months? But if I do that no eve.
It was quite a dilemma.
So I did the most sensible thing I could think of at the time. I spoke to a friend who had a gaming decktop of high specs, and asked him to create the toon’s, giving him a rough idea what I wanted. I will keep him nameless incase I have violated the EULA (I of course took precautions of changing passwords before and after, and used some one I know and trust quite well)
So I have now 3 new faces, but still cant use the creator.
Now what has me really worried is everything I have read said the creator was slow as hell and choppy on everything but the most modern gaming PC’s, so even if I go drop £700 on a new laptop in a few months am I gonna be bonned for incarna? My gut says yes.
Don’t get me wrong I’m loving the direction CCP is going with this, but personally I think they are in danger of cutting of a large part of the subscriber base by taking the system requirements to high to fast.
Hope we can all keep up.

5 comments:

  1. I'm running on a laptop that's now three years+ old, and everything worked very smoothly for me. True, it's a gaming laptop, but it's at the point where it struggles with most modern games, at least a little bit. It took a couple seconds to render any changes in textures I made (clothing, skin, etc) but I was able to smoothly rotate and such. There might be some additional issue unless your laptop is a good bit older than mine. For comparison, I have an nVidia 8500GTX graphics card.

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  2. It was major lag fest for me creating my character but that was for the sole reason of me having all the settings at max. I wanted to create my character with the full detail.

    When I set the detail to the low settings everything ran fine.

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  3. What are your laptop specs, and how old is it?

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  4. you didnt even make your own characters, you should look forward to incarna, when your friend plays your chars on stations...rofl

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  5. This is really becoming a point of contention between the haves and the have nots. Although I don't think what ccp did was unfair, I do recognize it as a move made on the assumption that the majority of the playerbase are gamers to some extent and thus invest in their computer equipment appropriately. Now while I do understand the appeal of Eve on a laptop you really are shooting yourself in the foot if you think you can drop 700 on something off the shelf without truely knowing the specifications before you buy it.
    This may help.
    http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Graphic-Cards.130.0.html
    If you really are set on getting a laptop to use as your game platorm you need to be looking at the specs for the gpu. because an Intel GMA chipset is simply not going to cut it. A higher end tier 2 or a tier 1 gpu is what you need to comfortably run the character creator, and its a safe assumption that you will need to be spending just a bit more than 1.3k for a proper laptop to have that capabilities. On the other hand, a desktop solution is cheaper and easier to maintain, and for me, thats where I make my home in New Eden. Its one of two reasons why I have a desktop. Eve Online and Photoshop.
    Best Regards, XMS. Fly Safe!

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