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Im on the same boat as you all, i was playing this game with nvidia 2d surround and was starting to feel some eyestrain and such so im now playing it on my 52 inch samsung that has the auto motion plus 120hz gizmo on it. It makes the locked 30 fps alittle easier to bear.
Thiers no reason what so ever that this game needs to be locked at 30 fps, its an obvious console gimmick to help smooth out thier play, 60 fps is easy to maintain it was on the previous addition, please allow us to try this with 60 fps locked and if its jacked up well so be it.
I love this game and fully support the developers here, but this day in age with the power of most computers thier should be no lock at all in my opinion, this is the first game ive had this problem with and trust me thier is a difference, my eyes and these other posters eyes dont lie, you can rant all the tech mumble jumble all you want this game is not playable for most because it hurts your eyes.

Just my two cents, way i look at it its a great game and if this doesnt get fixed oh well two worlds 2 is out next week anyway.

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I hope they will do something about the 30FPS cap because for me its unplayable as i see it is for most that posted here. We can take our chances with a 60FPS version of the game's executable.

http://www.boallen.com/fps-compare.html

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Originally Posted by Ovi
I hope they will do something about the 30FPS cap because for me its unplayable as i see it is for most that posted here. We can take our chances with a 60FPS version of the game's executable.

http://www.boallen.com/fps-compare.html


Some people must be truly special because I couldn't tell the difference between 30FPS and 60FPS in the animation sample, lol. I could see the slight choppiness in the 15FPS sample though. I've experienced games in 60FPS (and higher before) on both PCs and consoles, but it doesn't make a massive amount of difference to me.

I can't say the 30FPS cap bothers my eyesight in the slightest. It bothers me more when a game is choppy due to framerate dropping, that hurts my eyes. Saying that I am playing on the Xbox 360, and not the PC, at an upscaled resolution of 1080p on a 32" HDTV sat about 6 feet away from the screen.

Here's hoping Larian can come up with a solution for you guys sometime in the future.

Last edited by Unreal Warfare; 06/11/10 07:14 PM.


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YOu have a point Unreal warfare, thats why i switched to my 52 samsung in stead of my 3 24 inch samsungs it doesnt hurt the eyes nearly as bad as my tv does the smothing with the auto motion plus. In any rate ive never had problems with 30 fps on consoles because like some one said they usually have a blur shader or some sort other graphical trick to make it look smoother and easier on most eyes.

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Originally Posted by DiceDuP


Why can't that same representative who clearly must have read this thread respond now? Was the fast response earlier because it was something that needed fixing to get my money? Maybe "Lar" would care to take the time to reply in this thread.


Here I am smile It's not as if I want to dodge any issue here, but typically time really is a big constraint so it's impossible to read every message and answer everybody.

Anyway, I can see why the 30 fps issue is an issue for some players and we have been working on it. While it may look as a simple thing (I thought so too initially), for some reason removing the lock causes race conditions to appear. Essentially a race condition is when two threads in a piece of software are waiting for one another to complete, causing a deadlock. They are notoriously hard to debug because it's very hard to reproduce them. Over the last couple of weeks a number of engineers have been working on it, but unfortunately they aren't ready with their work yet. Personally the 30 fps lock doesn't bother me, but knowing that it might trouble some people, we'd hoped to have something ready in time to help them, but that just didn't work out, and at mastering time we decided to remove the option to remove the lock because of the problems that might otherwise appear. We also couldn't afford to have those engineers spend all their time on it, because there were a thousand other things that needed to be sorted out.

The Steam thing was something we could fix rapidly by contacting the right people - the race condition is something for which we have to wait until the guys coding on it are confident that it's solved, and the guys in QA say that it's stable enough for release. But as I said, there are still people working on this.

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Really appreciate the heads up and its good to know its being worked on, weather it gets fixed or not still playing it as its a great game. And its really refreshing to have devs responding honestly to thier fans and supporters thanks !

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Originally Posted by MTB78
YOu have a point Unreal warfare, thats why i switched to my 52 samsung in stead of my 3 24 inch samsungs it doesnt hurt the eyes nearly as bad as my tv does the smothing with the auto motion plus. In any rate ive never had problems with 30 fps on consoles because like some one said they usually have a blur shader or some sort other graphical trick to make it look smoother and easier on most eyes.


I don't think they're using blur on the console version. It seems pretty sharp when turning etc to me. I'll have to double check that later though. Don't think they use any form of anti aliasing either (though I can't clarify that).

It could be down to the display device and the distance of viewing though. Not saying this is the case for everyone but if it made a difference for you then maybe it could be a temporary solution until a more permanant fix is released to the public.

I'm guessing using a mouse with high speed turning etc doesn't help either. Tried using a controller instead (it is possible I believe though not natively supported?)?

In what way exactly does it hurt your eyes? Describe exactly what it is. Is it a form of choppiness akin to a framerate drop?

Last edited by Unreal Warfare; 06/11/10 07:32 PM.


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Lar_g,

Thanks for taking the time to write us. I truly hope your team can track down the problem.

Is it possible to release and "experimental" Unlocked Exe to us? I am more then willing to take the chance of the game locking up smile

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I'm glad to hear that there is a fix in progress. I was not aware of this issue before I purchased the game and I personally would have waited for the fix before purchasing. 30 FPS is not acceptable performance for a PC game for me, and I can see the difference. That said, I have enjoyed all of the Divinity games and I look forward to a good PC gaming experience playing DKS/FoV.

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Lars_g, thanks for the response. Knowing that this *might* be an issue has kept me from buying the game (thus far). It's not so much that I feel "I have to have 60FPS no matter what" but more so that the results must be pleasing the eyes. If it isn't, I quickly go looking for, vsync, No Blur, no bloom, and other settings. No vsync was a major issue in borderlands and I could not play it until I found that you can specify it in one of the config files.

I normally have to have vsync on all my games and Vsync usually implies 60FPS given my current LCD monitor. I'm wondering how that pans out with a 30FPS cap in place?

I think the coders would have already considered this, but I suggest for the time being (and especially in the event that a fix is never produced) to have an undocumented .ini/.cfg option where customers could at least make a manual attempt to address the problem as needed.


Last edited by dblade; 06/11/10 10:06 PM.
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Yea, thanks for the reply, but I can honestly say that I still won't play the game until this issue is fixed. I just went and played the existing old version on steam and checked my FPS on that. I put the settings maxed out on everything there with 1920x1200 and it still reaches 60fps but with the odd place dropping to 40-50. even at those framerates the game is just about playable. Putting various shadow sliders and vegetation down to medium pretty much gives me 60fps constantly on the old engine.

With the new engine the only real change I've noticed in the brief 30 minutes I've played in total is an improvement the character textures and lighting effects. I'm sure there are others but I wait to see them in the future. As the frame rate is so low, the choppy effects the game has as it is, it's missing frames pretty much gives me the same impression for the locations as it was in the original, which is a kind of pixelated effect. Basically it's moving the camera around with my left mouse button (left handed) that makes the game so hard to look at as everything is so choppy.

I understand these things take time to fix, but I'm sure the people over at the steam forums wouldn't mind some reassurance about the issue. In the meantime, as dblade suggests, providing us with an option to at least try to see what happens by messing with the framerate would be nice. Heck it might even provide some feedback to help fix it smile

I will put the game to one side for now and focus on the plethora of games I have yet to get my teeth stuck into. Shame though, because my plan was to start another run through from the start, as the first time around, even with the last engine the game was amazing and hugely underrated by many.

I sit and wait for a fix - go give them coders a kick up the backside! laugh

Last edited by DiceDuP; 06/11/10 11:04 PM.
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After reading the complaints here I'm still going to buy this game b/c I believe in Larian and that they will come through and I want to support studios like this so they can produce more games in the future. But being a developer myself I really do not understand the 30 FPS cap. I understand if 30 FPS is the minimum or worst case scenario or even 45 FPS but I cannot understand it being the maximum.

Quote

Anyway, I can see why the 30 fps issue is an issue for some players and we have been working on it. While it may look as a simple thing (I thought so too initially), for some reason removing the lock causes race conditions to appear. Essentially a race condition is when two threads in a piece of software are waiting for one another to complete, causing a deadlock. They are notoriously hard to debug because it's very hard to reproduce them. Over the last couple of weeks a number of engineers have been working on it, but unfortunately they aren't ready with their work yet. Personally the 30 fps lock doesn't bother me, but knowing that it might trouble some people, we'd hoped to have something ready in time to help them, but that just didn't work out, and at mastering time we decided to remove the option to remove the lock because of the problems that might otherwise appear. We also couldn't afford to have those engineers spend all their time on it, because there were a thousand other things that needed to be sorted out.

Having worked with threading and race conditions in Windows I can feel your pain b/c it is not simple and your code does very strange things that are extremely hard to track down and debug. However it appears to me that the initial design of the system might have been lacking b/c these race conditions should have been at least recognized or anticipated. How hard would it be to simply remove the offending threads and linearize the process instead of trying to separate the tasks into separate threads? I'm not suggesting linearizing the entire game but perhaps the portions that are causing troubles could be.

Thank you so much for recognizing the complaints about the 30 FPS instead of attempting to place blame. It also gives me hope for this game since it appears the 30 FPS might have been achieved by simply wasting cycles (Sleep()?) or using a timer somewhere to slow the system down. Once you fix the race conditions I look forward to these temporary fixes being removed. I can certainly understand your position in releasing the game in a stable state instead of attempting to push out an unstable game that would crash constantly and give it a terrible reputation.

If I had not read your response I probably would not have purchased this game b/c I was afraid the game was permanently locked to 30 FPS.

Sorry for altering my post...my original was posted before I read the post from Larian about the threading. The threading issue definitely hits home with me so I can understand the complexity of the issues at hand.

Last edited by bubbaffffh; 07/11/10 01:25 AM.
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Originally Posted by bubbaffffh
After reading the complaints here I'm still going to buy this game b/c I believe in Larian and that they will come through and I want to support studios like this so they can produce more games in the future. But being a developer myself I really do not understand the 30 FPS cap. I understand if 30 FPS is the minimum or worst case scenario or even 45 FPS but I cannot understand it being the maximum.


Thread deadlocks occured when it was not constant.

------------

As to 60 vs 30 FPS being a big deal or not, it depends on what you are use to. If you play games are 60+ exclusively then it will be a bigger deal that for someone that does not. If you play long enough at the lower frame rate eventually you will get use to it and it will seem 'normal' as your brain will correct what you are seeing.

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Quote

Thread deadlocks occured when it was not constant.

Makes sense. I hope they figure it out soon. I'm also glad I'm not working on it b/c fixing multi-threading issues is not fun. smile

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Hi all

Bought the game yesterday and was astonished to find it was capped to 30 FPS

Came here to find out why and lo and behold, a games company that actually listens to its customers and sets about fixing the problem, nice one Larian and more grease to your elbow.

I'm now going to make some phone calls as three of my friends bought this on my recomendation and have been calling me a slaphead today because of the 30 fps thing.

Hoping for the fix soon and thanks for listening to your customers.

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Originally Posted by Lar_q
[quote=DiceDuP]

Anyway, I can see why the 30 fps issue is an issue for some players and we have been working on it. While it may look as a simple thing (I thought so too initially), for some reason removing the lock causes race conditions to appear.

The Steam thing was something we could fix rapidly by contacting the right people - the race condition is something for which we have to wait until the guys coding on it are confident that it's solved, and the guys in QA say that it's stable enough for release. But as I said, there are still people working on this.


I'm going to have to argue here, first of all Nvidia nor ATI was involved in pre or post production of the EGO Draconis as an official PC release information attempted to be retrieved from Nvidia and a faxed copy from ATI. So how can you say your Engineers are working on it without the support of the video card engineers. This is a pure Xbox release that ported only. Wave the pretty smoke and mirrors but until you advise Nvidia or ATI of issues, so that they can respond in there time frame which right now with the holiday season in full swing for new releases I can tell you this title isn't on there list of things to do, and to have this game pretty much pop up in the Steam list of New releases and then to choose NO forum so that nothing could be talked about and at the time of this writing I'm having problems finding any decent gaming website or magazine that has in their December issue(always a month ahead) any notion of rating so this game I'm sorry to say was a sneak in and currently is holding the 3rd spot for highest sales without any information to consumers on Steam exclusively for digital downloads.

But this ranking will fall as soon as this news spreads like a fire storm to PC Gamers so please if this is accepatable in DE it isn't in the U.S. and some game companies have tried this in the past year and have found that we will not accept ports unless we know thats what were buying and to keep Steam from opening up a direct link to their forums in cowardly at best. Grab the green while you can becouse it will stop as hardcore gamers will not accept and it will be branded weekend special and thats when you'll make your current value which is no way near the $7.99 deal we will wait for.

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Originally Posted by HIlltop67

I'm going to have to argue here, first of all Nvidia nor ATI was involved in pre or post production of the EGO Draconis as an official PC release information attempted to be retrieved from Nvidia and a faxed copy from ATI. So how can you say your Engineers are working on it without the support of the video card engineers. This is a pure Xbox release that ported only. Wave the pretty smoke and mirrors but until you advise Nvidia or ATI of issues, so that they can respond in there time frame which right now with the holiday season in full swing for new releases I can tell you this title isn't on there list of things to do, and to have this game pretty much pop up in the Steam list of New releases and then to choose NO forum so that nothing could be talked about and at the time of this writing I'm having problems finding any decent gaming website or magazine that has in their December issue(always a month ahead) any notion of rating so this game I'm sorry to say was a sneak in and currently is holding the 3rd spot for highest sales without any information to consumers on Steam exclusively for digital downloads.

But this ranking will fall as soon as this news spreads like a fire storm to PC Gamers so please if this is accepatable in DE it isn't in the U.S. and some game companies have tried this in the past year and have found that we will not accept ports unless we know thats what were buying and to keep Steam from opening up a direct link to their forums in cowardly at best. Grab the green while you can becouse it will stop as hardcore gamers will not accept and it will be branded weekend special and thats when you'll make your current value which is no way near the $7.99 deal we will wait for.


The problem is not the card, but rather the solution to a problem with some graphics cards is having issues when the frame rate is unlocked. A dead lock in the graphics engine does not require support from a graphics card company as you imply.

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This is a pure Xbox release that ported only.

This is Larian's first Xbox release, with Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity being PC only. The PC and Xbox versions of D2:ED / DKS were developed in parallel; neither was a port.


and to keep Steam from opening up a direct link to their forums in cowardly at best.

And how did Larian keep Steam from linking to the forum? The reference to Steam that you quoted was about Larian getting them to fix a problem where a discount was not being applied properly for people buying DKS who had also bought D2:ED through Steam.


Welcome to the forum, all the new people above. wave

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Originally Posted by Lar_q

Here I am smile It's not as if I want to dodge any issue here, but typically time really is a big constraint so it's impossible to read every message and answer everybody.

Anyway, I can see why the 30 fps issue is an issue for some players and we have been working on it. While it may look as a simple thing (I thought so too initially), for some reason removing the lock causes race conditions to appear. Essentially a race condition is when two threads in a piece of software are waiting for one another to complete, causing a deadlock. They are notoriously hard to debug because it's very hard to reproduce them. Over the last couple of weeks a number of engineers have been working on it, but unfortunately they aren't ready with their work yet. Personally the 30 fps lock doesn't bother me, but knowing that it might trouble some people, we'd hoped to have something ready in time to help them, but that just didn't work out, and at mastering time we decided to remove the option to remove the lock because of the problems that might otherwise appear. We also couldn't afford to have those engineers spend all their time on it, because there were a thousand other things that needed to be sorted out.


Cheers for the reply Lar_q, I hope you guys will be able to sort it out, there`s tons of e-whining about the 30fps lock. It doesn`t bother me that hard but I can imagine a lot of people don`t like it.

Also interesting to read WHY it is locked at 30fps. Anyway, go squash that bug guys, you`ve got a great game here.


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The fact that Larian is working on fixing the current issues convinced me to buy it, downloading now from steam.I hope that the patch will be available on steam when it will be finished, I would also like more than 30 fps. I want to see what my new ati 5970 can do grin.Thx Lar_q

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