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    Your Elvenar Team

Release Notes 0.22 and Hardware Acceleration

DeletedUser51

Guest
Dear Humans and Elves,

Please use this thread to share your thoughts on the changes that come with the update to version 0.22 and the release of Hardware Acceleration on August 11.

We are looking forward to your feedback!

Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team
 
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DeletedUser511

Guest
So whats the minimum Graphics card will be needed when the memory is switched to that? I have a feeling this isnt gonna go good. I hope it does too. Is the settings we switch in our browser settings? You wasnt clear on that one. Also will the settings change other games people play?
 

DeletedUser61

Guest
Smarter memory management is baked into the program.

Hardware Acceleration is a game by game, world by world opt-in that will be under the gear > options menu in the lower righthand corner of your display. You can use that same menu to indicate if you want a popup whenever you're about to spend diamonds.

I can't find any specific system requirements on the various InnoGames web pages, but the various game review sites are indicating
  • Recommended System Requirements:
    • OS: Windows XP and up
    • CPU: Intel i3 and up
    • RAM: 1 GB
    • GPU: DirectX 9 enabled GPU
 

DeletedUser43

Guest
It is easy enough to turn off if it creates a problem for you. You will go over to the settings, then go into the advanced settings, and there will be a way to just unclick it if it causes you trouble. (you will find that tomorrow when they update it) I find it works great for some things and not for others.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
Luckily it doesn't look like this needs much in the way of hardware to do the accelerating part. Having played with it on Beta, I can report that it works pretty well with a 2.13 GHz CPU (with 500 MHz integrated GPU) and 4 GB RAM. I'm a bit vague, though, on how it helps shockwave to not use up more and more memory resources for every city visit...
 

DeletedUser61

Guest
http://superuser.com/questions/386760/how-do-i-know-when-to-use-hardware-acceleration is one of several decent articles.

Briefly, you can hand off stuff like butterflies and ponies, or buildings and animations, to a Graphical Processing Unit that's optimized for graphical processing, which leaves the Central Processing Unit, and general memory, free for other things.

Most of the GPUs have a considerable amount of on-board memory, which isn't as useful if you aren't using Hardware Acceleration, BUT even without Hardware Acceleration the new memory management scheme is much smarter now.
 

DeletedUser18

Guest
So whats the minimum Graphics card will be needed when the memory is switched to that? I have a feeling this isnt gonna go good. I hope it does too. Is the settings we switch in our browser settings? You wasnt clear on that one. Also will the settings change other games people play?
The update is addressing fundamental issues on the storage in addition to providing a general Hardware Acceleration option. With the option enabled, you likely won't experience many issues at all - even without the option enabled, you should experience considerably less. The settings for hardware acceleration will be in your in-game settings, just like how you change graphical quality and toggle animations.

You still may have to refresh and clear your cache occasionally (in fact you should do so anyway for the general performance increase) but the issues will be much less prevalent now than they have before and this will be required substantially less.

Please be aware that unlike the Beta release, our current release will be set to OFF by default. So enable Hardware Acceleration if the performance increase and algorithm change is not sufficient in itself to suit your performance standards.

To add to that, Hardware Acceleration is optimized for older machines - newer machines may not require this at all due to higher computing power and the improved memory schemes.
 

DeletedUser18

Guest
Hardware Acceleration is now enabled. First impressions anyone?
 

DeletedUser

Guest
I just gave neighborly help to my whole fellowship without a big jump in memory use or any graphical glitches. Pretty big improvement over having to refresh the browser 4 or 5 times previously. The only problem is that the game no longer "remembers" zoom settings for city view - it defaults to Zoomed In every time you enter city view, a minor inconvenience if you like to keep it Zoomed Out all the time.
 

DeletedUser551

Guest
The only problem is that the game no longer "remembers" zoom settings for city view - it defaults to Zoomed In every time you enter city view, a minor inconvenience if you like to keep it Zoomed Out all the time.

We are aware of that problem. The developers are already working on a fix.
 

DeletedUser511

Guest
It helped a lot but that zoom problem you know but also when I click sometimes I get shot across the town. The chat still has problems loading all the time too. But visiting people is way better.
 

DeletedUser

Guest
excellent job ! working well with Edge browser. The auto zoom in has to go though please ! thx for working on it.
 

DeletedUser61

Guest
The /who chat command is now available, so you can verify your Chat Session without cluttering up all of the other chat screens. That will make the troubleshooting a lot more graceful.
 

DeletedUser43

Guest
It has some good things and some bad things. I am sad that the bad things are things that have already been discussed in beta but they didn't fix them before they brought it over here. Things I like: I can go from town to town pretty easily in my fellowship. I still crash, but rarely. What I don't like: Any time I leave my town to go to the research tree or world map, the screen gets very bright and then turns black and white and it takes about three times as long as it used to change screens. To me that is a big deal. To others it may not matter.

I have also found it takes longer to load the game since this new update. Not nearly as bad as the stalled out loading of days of yore, but it seems to be a step back rather than a step forward.

The hovering over the current quest box is broken. I will put this info in the bug section too. It shows quests that aren't even quests.

Finally, I have heard from many that when they get expansions, they can't place them. I haven't seen an expansion in a while so I can't give you a screenshot of that.

Here is the screenshot of the mistaken quest:

4udhu8.jpg
 

pirateowl76

New Member
The hovering over the current quest box is broken. I will put this info in the bug section too. It shows quests that aren't even quests.

Here is the screenshot of the mistaken quest:

4udhu8.jpg

I keep experiencing this too; refreshing gets rid of it, so far.

Hardware acceleration makes my entire city go black. o_o Only the little bouncing icons above buildings continue to show.

There is also a strange bug in the "move" function, in which a giant blue-black square appears over part of the grid; I didn't try placing a building myself, but I've heard from others in my fellowship that when they move a building into the "dead zone" (dark square), they cannot move it again afterward. I didn't experience this big dark square at first, but eventually it showed up, and really bogged the game down; I had to click "done" to exit it. Refreshing the game made it vanish.
 

DeletedUser43

Guest
Whisper, a whole ton of people are experiencing all kinds of bugs. I can live with this in beta, in fact, I expect it in beta. But, this game is live now and bringing over a very buggy new feature may harm the future of this game. It isn't as if the beta players aren't explaining all the bugs. But I see the hardware acceleration thing has been brought over with nearly ALL the bugs we beta players have mentioned. Why weren't these things fixed?
I have greatly enjoyed playing Elvenar and up until now, things have been getting better and better. But is this kind of thing fair to do to your players in the live version? Is it wise from a business standpoint? I have heard more complaints in the past 24 hours over here than I have heard in total since the US version started. Just thought you all should know. I know that you personally are working hard as heck for free, I am just posting this because 1. you asked....and 2. hopefully you can forward things to the devs and let them know how players are feeling about things. I wish only great things for this game!!!!!

I wish the devs luck in fixing all the new issues that have cropped up!!!

Bugs:
1. cities are disappearing
2. expansions aren't working properly and often won't work to be placed
3. quests aren't showing properly in mouseovers with HA off
4. the first city you load when doing neighborly help from the fellowship tab has the city name obscured
5. loading the world map is slower
6. loading the research tree is slower
7. cities are zoomed in when you visit them
8. the screen is brighter and black and white when you move from home to research or world map (hurts the eyes)
9. troops are invisible again with hardware acceleration on
10. you can't load support from battlefield..the screen freezes
chat has been acting weird (but that has always been a problem, so I won't add it to the total)
11. sometimes the city disappears and all you see are floating coins with no buildings
Shockwave crashes still happen only not nearly as frequently, so I will count this a bonus not a bug.
12. Giant blue black issue from post above
13. Players are having difficulty moving around the city at times.

And that is just what I can think of off the top of my head. That is kind of a lot of bugs with one upgrade, don't ya think?
 
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DeletedUser18

Guest
The developers have been made aware of these issues. Fundamentally, the flash management has changed, so slower loading and some other issue arising isn't unusual. Please note, however that a lot of the features that may have been helping the loading process may now not be implemented in order to lessen the significant Flash footprint (which for me is about 35% of what it was before the update on a fresh load after clearing flash cache). Troubleshooting and update implementation is always an issue, changing one thing can have drastic consequences on another - seemingly unrelated feature. I am confident this will be worked out. Since a fundamental feature was changed, I can only assume that the effects could have been much worse than they actually are currently, despite these bugs.

As a fellow player, I sympathize with the issues that came with this update - however, I believe that these issues are a pleasant alternative to 4-5 flash crashes while helping 24 people. It's not a final touch, it's not a first step, but it is a very significant positive change nonetheless, in my opinion.
 

DeletedUser43

Guest
I was notified about another bug in the trader. If you go to accept a couple of trades from one player, let's say on page 10, after you accept the first one the page changes and if you are clicking quickly, you end up with the wrong trade. If you click on one trade you will see what I mean. I will post the issue under bugs.

Edit: The issue was confirmed and moved into the confirmed section. Hopefully it won't be a bug for long.

I can certainly appreciate that upgrading things causes issues. There is no need for me to belabor any other points.

Thanks for replying!! Much appreciated!
 
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DeletedUser511

Guest
This update was a joke. It fixes one thing and breaks many others. I had no problem loading the game or even in my town now I do. The chat still dont load 90% of the time. Jumping, zooming, errors, sticking, freezing. But going to other town is a little better. After like 5 or 6 towns the buildings dont seem to want to load but fix one thing to break more. A lower graphics button would have been better. To me game making 101 I would think graphics setting being a number one thing to have.
 

DeletedUser18

Guest
This update was a joke. It fixes one thing and breaks many others. I had no problem loading the game or even in my town now I do. The chat still dont load 90% of the time. Jumping, zooming, errors, sticking, freezing. But going to other town is a little better. After like 5 or 6 towns the buildings dont seem to want to load but fix one thing to break more. A lower graphics button would have been better. To me game making 101 I would think graphics setting being a number one thing to have.
A lower graphics option wouldn't have fixed the issue. The issue was with the algorithms and the storage of flash files - regardless of size. This was a necessary update to fix a fundamental problem with Flash. A lower graphical setting would have only meant you get maybe an extra city or two assisted before it crashes. The major issue is dealt with, the minor issues will be simpler.
 
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