Tales of the Aggronaut

Steam Game Crashes

October 12, 2016 by Belghast

When I get to working on something I can be completely oblivious to the world around me. Last night was one of those times. I got a message from Tam asking if I needed Xephatol one of the new dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV, to which I replied that I had not touched the content yet. I was in the middle of digging into an issue that had been bugging me since building this system over the weekend. Certain games just would not load regardless of how many supposed “fixes” I attempted… namely the whole compatibility mode and run as administrator nonsense that you seem to need to do with Windows 10. He hinted that it might be good to test out Final Fantasy XIV… which is the point where I got super oblivious. Namely that I said I had tested all of the MMOs and they seem to be working… but that I was largely having trouble with Fallout 4 and No Man’s Sky. It did not dawn on me at the time that he was not so subtly hinting that I should come run the dungeon with them… and it even included an obligatory smiley after his statement. So finally it dawned on me what he was trying to get at and I ultimately logged in, and got caught up to the dungeon. It was a good time, and this really is a dungeon of bad ideas. These silly birbs cannot fly… but want to at all costs. More importantly than that however was the fact that it unstuck the logjam my content was in, and the post dungeon revelations were quite interesting. I largely want to finish the story content so that we can talk about it on Saturday during the podcast because it is sounding like we are going to get a really interesting expansion announcement this week as a result.

As to the more pressing matters… the issues I had been having were maddening. The key problem with windows gaming on a new machine… is that you never quite know if what you are experiencing is just strangeness with the game… or if it is the result of some bad combination of drivers. However as a result I updated almost every sort of driver I could think of to make sure that was not it. Like I hinted at before… I tried several versions of compatibility mode, and running as administrator. I tried launching from steam, nvidia experience, and directly from the executable to see if there were any different behaviors exhibited. In all cases what would happen in Fallout 4 was that it would show the “Please Stand By” screen… and would hear about 5 seconds of static and sound… then the spinning blue “not responding” wheel would pop up and Fallout 4 would either crash… or just sit in this zombie state indefinitely leading me to ultimately close it with task manager. Since the weekend I have spent a good chunk of every evening trying different things and scouring the web looking at people who supposedly had eureka moments. Each time I would feel hopeful only to have it dashed almost immediately as the next great fix didn’t do anything for my current situation. So this is the mental quagmire I happened to be in last night when Tam was trying to reach through it… the repetitive pattern of trial and research only leading to miles of defeat.

After doing the dungeon run… I had a bit of my own eureeka moment. One of the posts had mentioned that usb devices being connected could be causing crashes like this on startup. Now when I built the computer I did so seperate from my main gaming rig. Then Sunday afternoon I unhooked literally everything that was in the back of the previous machine and plugged it into this one. That means with it came all of the devices I had been using on the previous setup. While crawling through the config file for Fallout 4 I noticed a setting that I like flipping to disable controllers, because it is one of those games where it is going to try and use a controller if one is hooked to your system. I flipped that setting and bam the game launched. Now previously I had the Windows PS4 Remote Play application installed, and I largely used it as a way to extract screenshots easily from my Playstation 4 for the purpose of these blog posts, rather than ferrying them across on a thumb drive. As a result when I last used my machine I had my Dual Shock 4 controller hooked to the PC. On a whim I disconnected the DS4 from the usb cable, and then suddenly No Man’s Sky would load as well. It seems as though something was timing out when these games were trying to identify controllers connected to my system, and then getting really confused with the DS4 that doesn’t have actual drivers that work successfully most of the time. So it seems as though this has largely cleared up the issues I was having, which makes me pretty happy given that I spent from 5:30 until 7:30 last night trying random combinations of things to get Fallout 4 working… when in reality I didn’t even care about playing the game. I was stuck in a loop of needing desperately to solve the problem, so that I knew everything was functional.

Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker

October 11, 2016 by Belghast

In yesterday mornings post I showed off briefly my transmog to go with the hidden protection warrior artifact appearance, but I have yet to really talk about it. I have to say when I saw the protection warrior artifact during the lead up to the legion launch, I was more than a little underwhelmed by it. However over time I came to love it, largely because of the lore behind it. This is of course a spoiler so if you have not unlocked the protection artifact, and want to be surprised… then I guess skip this post for now. Essentially the shield that you pick up as part of the artifact quest chain was crafted from one of Neltharion’s scales. Yes I mean Neltharion… not Deathwing… as in before the transformation happened. So that alone made me a bit more excited to wield the weapon, however when I found out that the hidden appearance was a Deathwingy version… I knew sooner or later I had to get it. Now apparently in beta this appearance was just sitting out in the open in the Vault of Neltharion area in High Mountain, so for awhile I started making the occasional trip through that region to see if it happened to be up. I had largely forgotten about the appearance however in the hustle and bustle of gearing and tanky bits. A few weeks ago however I found out that apparently the appearance was alive and kicking in game, and that supposedly there was an easy way to get it. That easy method involved standing at the torch in the Vault of Neltharion and running a script to see if the quest trigger that makes the shield appear had fired. Now unfortunately I learned about this… two days after they had applied a hotfix to make the logging thing stop working… and instead give players a single chance each day to get the quest.

/run print("44311:", IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(44311))
/run print("44312:", IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(44312))

So for the last few weeks it has been a nightly occurrence to log in, make a beeline over to the Vault of Neltharion either by running through the path of Huln from Thundertotem or flying directly to the vault via Obsidian Overlook. To explain what the above script does, is that when placed in a macro the first check is to see if the shield has spawned for you and is lootable. The second check is to determine if you have already spent your once a day attempt to get the shield. You are going to see an awful lot of “false, true” on those two before you finally see one that shows as “true, false”. Basically running the script saves you wandering through the cave checking every single kobold gold pile, because apparently it can show up on literally any of them. The biggest problem is that I am not exactly sure what triggers eligibility for this quest. The only certain requirement is that you be at least Artifact Knowledge 5 to unlock it. However others are claiming that you need to have read the artifact book in your class hall, and still others are claiming that it has something to do with the Xe`ra quest chain that lets you see events through the eyes of Illidan. Supposedly when the quest triggers you see an emote in game and hear a gigantic roar… this never actually happened for me during the time when the script actually returned true, so don’t count on that part.

Here is a shot of me standing beside the shield on the pile of gold. Note this is not the same pile of gold that I saw in earlier screenshots of how the process works, so I think that quite honestly it can be any of various gold piles that are guarded by kobolds. Another thing of note… I have also heard that if you die it can reset the flag so I highly suggest you do not take the level or risks I did in trying to get the shield. I did the traditional warrior tank thing and pulled literally everything up to the pile where the shield was and tanked it down. On second thought this was probably not the most prudent way to do this… but dammit I was excited. There is a certain level of paranoia and superstition now associated with this quest for me. As a result I thought I would basically run through all of the various things that might be triggering it. I cannot state that any one thing did it, but I had just wrapped up a bunch of stuff the day I finally got my shield. So here was the status of several variables on that day.

Had obtained Artifact Knowledge 7
Sitting at Revered with All Legion Factions
Had just finished Xe`ra quest chain before attempting
Read the Artifact Book in Class Hall before attempting
leap down from Skyhold to Highmountain
flew to Obsidian Overlook
entered Vault from that direction firing script as soon as I saw the “vault” name text show up

Like I said… none of these or all of these could be significant… or this could just be the ramblings of a madman. Either way I am happy to have my new shield and mace combo and now I am working on the other hidden color schemes. It seems like these are the same requirements regardless of hidden artifact appearance or class.

Complete 100 Dungeons using a hidden artifact appearance.
Complete 200 World Quests using a hidden artifact appearance.
Kill 1000 Players using a hidden artifact appearance.

or you can just do what I do and periodically run this script from a macro to see what your present status is. I basically just recycled what was my Vault macro, and turned it into this one.

/run local q,x,_,a,b = GetAchievementCriteriaInfo,0 for i=1,11 do _,_,_,a,b = q(11152,i) x=x+a end local _,_,_,c,d = q(11153,1) local _,_,_,e,f = q(11154,1) print(“Dungeons: “..x..”/”..b) print(“WQs: “..c..”/”..d) print(“Kills: “..e..”/”..f)

Which simply causes some numbers to print to screen indicating how many of each item you have completed. In any case good hunting and hopefully you too will find your silly shield so we can stop caring about the Vault of Neltharion!

Serenity Lives

October 10, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday was largely spent setting up a new machine, and with it comes the arbitrary logging in of various games to see how they perform on the new setup. I should have said “new” in quotes because this system was absolutely another one of my craigslist wheeling and dealings. Some time ago I saw a system that I was interested in, but I was simply not willing to pay what the guy was asking. I made an offer, one significantly lower than he was wanting… but something in the range of what I would be comfortable with. He initially sounded insulted but after a handful of texts went into the lengthy story of why he was parting with the machine. It turns out he had just ordered all of the bits to assemble what he considered to be the ultimate gaming machine… and then his wife got mad at him for doing it. Firstly of note to any of my readers…. you should never purchase anything big without consulting your spouse first because you are just asking for trouble. I told him that my offer was all that I was comfortable spending on that machine, and that the offer would stand. Now we scan ahead roughly a month and a half, and I still have not purchased anything… and I receive a text out of the blue from the guy. He apparently got no offers at all and was willing to drop down to my offer to move it quickly… and by quickly I guess that means two months later?

The problem with me and a new machine is that I only really felt comfortable building it on Sunday after I finished up the podcast and made sure it was published. That whole adage of the show must go on and such. So I sat down a few weeks ago to get things built… only to realize that the power supply that he had in the machine was going to be completely inadequate. I was swapping over the GeForce 980 that I had previously… which requires 2 8 pin power connectors. The card he had in it was a r9 380 which required a single 8 pin power connector. I can largely tell that he assembled this machine through PC Part Picker, and went with the bare minimum power supply the it said was compatible. The end result was that the “ultimate gaming machine” had a Corsair 450 watt power supply in it, that I needed to upgrade into something that had dual 8 pin power connectors. Being cheap like I am… I decided to just order something from Amazon rather than run out to Best Buy and pick something up that day. Unfortunately the PSU that I ordered kept getting rescheduled… over the course of two weeks… finally updating from what was supposed to be a Friday delivery this week… to this coming Wednesday. I gave up, cancelled that ordered and found something available in store local, the end result being a 750 watt corsair modular PSU which honestly was going to work better than the non-modular ketchup and mustard colored setup that I was trying to order on the cheap.

So yesterday I got everything up and running and set it up beside my existing computer so that I could install without having to give up access. This is my first real foray into having an SSD, and from thumb drive…. windows 10 installed in about 2 minutes. I was shocked at just how fast that whole process went… what I thought was going to be another screen asking for me to pick some options… ended up booting into windows. For the time being I have Rift, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, and Final Fantasy XIV running off of the SSD and everything else off of larger mechanical storage. The biggest shock with this system is just how well Rift is performing. That is one of those games that I thought no system would really run what I considered well. I rarely see more than 40 fps and my last AMD based processor struggled to give it even that. This new system was running it at 80+ fps with everything cranked up, even under the load of doing intrepid adventures. So far I am pleased as can be, and while the games I play most of the time are not extremely graphically intensive… they are however apparently CPU locked… and my AMD FX-6300 was simply not performing that well. This was really noticeable when my laptops with mobile i7 processors started out performing it. Then again that machine was roughly three years old at this point, so I was prime for an upgrade. Tonight I plan on getting Adobe Creative Cloud installed because I want to see what this does for rendering time…. which is something that the previous machine struggled at. For those wondering the final specs look a little something like this.

Intel Core i7-5820K
ASUS X99-A/USB 3.1
24 GB G.SKILL Ripjaw ram
MSI Gaming GeForce GTX 980 4GB OC
250 GB Kingston SSD
2 TB Western Digital HD
3 TB Western Digital HD

The only real thing that I ultimately want to change at some point is the case, which is a budget Antec model. It was perfectly adequate, but was a bit of a pain in the ass to work on. Much of the frustrations yesterday were trying to get the cables to go where I wanted them to go for cable management purposes. I had to disconnect and reconnect things several times to try and figure out the best way to route the cables through the fairly cramped space. Additionally I have slight concerns that there were minimal case fans, but for the time being everything is running fairly cool. Ultimately I am going to leave things be for the time being and see how well it runs in its current state before fiddling further. Basically in its current state I don’t really feel comfortable trying to overclock anything given that there really isn’t the cooling for it. That said performance wise… I have seen no real reason to overclock anything other than the base overclock that the video card is used to running under. Of note… to explain the title of the post I decided to name this machine Serenity, because I am a dork.

Finally Grasp It

October 7, 2016 by Belghast

For several weeks now Tam has been wanting to get those of us together that have Guild Wars 2 and try some of the group content. However the launch of World of Warcraft Legion put a pretty serious brake on that concept. We agreed that last night was a decent night for myself, Tam, Thalen, Kodra and Ashgar so we set forth with the plan of getting together and running something as a group. While we didn’t exactly get that entire team together we did venture forth into Fractals, which are dungeons of a sort, but the closest thing I can really relate them to is the Pandaria Heroic Scenarios. You are dropped on a map and that map has certain objectives that it is leading you towards. However as we found out last night there are several things that exist just off the beaten path, like a champion dragon of sorts that we managed to take down. In total we ran three of them, and we spent a good deal of that time wiping as we adjusted our strategy to be able to take certain encounters down. Throughout the night I flirted with several weapon combos… but wound up right back at Greatsword and Hammer as a warrior. However after the fractals I spent some time playing sword and shield again and found it greatly improved over what I remember from alpha/beta.

Ultimately what it really reminds me of the most are the encounters in Dungeons and Dragons Online. Those were a fairly unique blend of exploration, reasoning, problem solving… and finally a heavy dose of surviving combat. The problem there however is this was rendered in relatively low fidelity, and it felt cumbersome to have to comply with the various rules of the actual pen and paper game system. Admittedly Guild Wars 2 is also fairly fiddly, with a bunch of sliders that you can tweak on your character to build for very specific purposes… however it feels like it does a much better job at the sort of experience that DDO was trying to go for. Fractals feel like bite sized adventures… more than just on rails dungeon crawls. If we can actually get the proper group size on at some point, we need to give dungeons a proper attempt as well because it feels like there are actual tanky characters now. We did some messing about with a training bot system inside the fractal hub, and quickly found out that apparently I have way more survival than either of my companions. This is even more noticeable when we actually started to do harder content, because I could stay in and take those hits longer allowing them to hang out on the boundary and deal damage or reflect effects. In group play it suddenly felt like we each had a clear role to play, and not quite the zergy mess that I remember from the launch of the game.

This is really the first time in a very long time I can legitimately say I enjoyed playing Guild Wars 2. It was extremely fun for group play, and that suddenly makes all of the more casual exploratory bits of the game more enjoyable because I know that it is all leading to something. One of my key problems with Guild Wars 2 has been a feeling that I had capped out and was not really going to improve my gear in any reasonable fashion. That changed the moment I set foot into the fractals hub and saw all of the “better than exotic” items that were available on the vendors there. Additionally I used some of those laurels that I had been getting, and not really knowing what to do with them… to purchase a nice neck piece. Ultimately I feel like I finally “get” why people enjoy this game, and while I doubt it will ever supplant a more traditional MMO for me… it doesn’t really have to. The set up of Guild Wars 2 makes it extremely to drop into game with my friends and have a night of play, much along the lines of how non-mmorpgs work. After seeing that I could in fact be a tank in this game… it makes me feel significantly better about playing warrior, and makes me want to try out some of the other weapon combinations that I long abandoned. I still have problems with the game in a few spots, but I think I have largely reached a point of peace finally after all this time. I can stop trying to solve this puzzle, because I finally grasp what folks see in it.