SwagVault MMO Blog

1. One Response to “Are you aware of any plans to improve the character models?”

2. The trouble with Dalaran is that it has a lot of players, a lot of NPCs, and a lot of movement, all of which is set across the backdrop of a city that has to be rendered in 3D due to flying mounts. Even playing with the sort of settings that turn Azeroth into a Third World country — actually, that’s an insult to Third World countries, and I apologize. Even playing with the sort of settings that turn Azeroth into New Jersey, your computer still has to render an awful lot of stuff, and that’s made worse by the absence of visual shortcuts and cheats you’ll find in cities like Orgrimmar and Stormwind, where the developers only had to put in what you could see from the ground. This cut down on a lot of the lag that you would otherwise have experienced in these places, although I feel obligated to note that these cities were so crowded during classic WoW that people with low-end systems might not have noticed.

   In a roundabout way I guess you could say that flying mounts, and the need to “finish” absolutely everything that a player might conceivably see is one of the great unheralded issues Blizzard deals with while trying to make sure that the game remains playable.

   Anyway. I got off track there. Truthfully, Broncofan, unless it’s something that everyone on your realm complains about regardless of the system they’re running, it’s likely to be your computer and not the game that’s causing the problem, even if you’re only having problems in Dalaran. The quickest fixes you can make that will have the largest impact:

   Turn down the options on how far you can see things. Your computer will stop trying to load objects and terrain past a certain distance, which means that instead of loading that giant circus’ worth of players and mounts in Dalaran, it’ll only load it up to a certain distance. Still, Dalaran is so crowded that this might not make a big difference there, but you’ll notice a difference outside of the city. Of course, you may not even need to do this outside the city, so…catch-22.

   This actually helped me a LOT: cap your framerates, at least while you’re in town. The ingame command is /console maxfps n, where n is the FPS beyond which you don’t want your computer attempting to load. Most people will tell you to /console maxfps 30; I’ve had more success with 25. Capping it below that is possible, but in a video game, the human eye can more easily distinguish between 25 and 20 FPS than 30 and 25.

   Max out your computer’s RAM. 1GB is recommended for running Wrath, but if you don’t have much more than that, you’re going to suffer.
   Never log out in Dalaran, period. I know this is a version of the old “Doctor, it hurts when I do that!” — “Well, don’t do that,” joke, but if you’re not having any issues running the game outside of logging in while your toon’s in Dalaran, this is the most expedient means of getting around it.

   By kyrios on Aug 20, 2009

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