Eternity Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire + DLC Thread - now with turn-based combat!

[aweigh]

wow, that was an excellent tutorial TT1. Managed to do everything I wanted to do. BTW, i begin to see the utility in the way they set up everything by classififications, since spells are an ability now for example the passive/modal stuff works on spells too. really, top notch write-up there.

i changed almost all of the proficiencies and removed their penalties and then gave them really minor, very "balanced" bonus, like for example having rapier proficiency is a passive now that gives +3 accuracy, stuff like that.

the only thing left i want to do is make the armor tiers each have their own specific Recovery speed like in PoE1, how in PoE1 a leather armor was i think 30% recoveryt penalty and a breastplate was 35 i think, but both were still medium armor tier. in poe2 they made each armor tier have only one recovery penalty amount instead of being granular.

seems like the only way to do this would be to manually edit the recovery values for each armor since the uniques are listed apart from the base models, and that's way too much work so... oh well.

 

[TT1]

wow, that was an excellent tutorial TT1. Managed to do everything I wanted to do. BTW, i begin to see the utility in the way they set up everything by classififications, since spells are an ability now for example the passive/modal stuff works on spells too. really, top notch write-up there.

i changed almost all of the proficiencies and removed their penalties and then gave them really minor, very "balanced" bonus, like for example having rapier proficiency is a passive now that gives +3 accuracy, stuff like that.

the only thing left i want to do is make the armor tiers each have their own specific Recovery speed like in PoE1, how in PoE1 a leather armor was i think 30% recoveryt penalty and a breastplate was 35 i think, but both were still medium armor tier. in poe2 they made each armor tier have only one recovery penalty amount instead of being granular.

seems like the only way to do this would be to manually edit the recovery values for each armor since the uniques are listed apart from the base models, and that's way too much work so... oh well.

Ask a modder to do it for you, I think its a pretty good idea: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/104758-mod-requests/

We have a group on slack and people used to be pretty active. I am not so active anymore, because I got pissed at Peardox and gave him a "go fuck yourself" :D

 

[aweigh]

Peardox... lmao

 

[aweigh]

bah, reached Neketaka for the 1st time and frame rate took a nose dive. I tried lowering settings but not a single one had any effect on the frame rate, not even "Lights" option which is the heaviest. Normally this wouldn't really matter but in overhead games likes this anything below 60fps is juddery and stutter-y when panning the camera so...

dropped it. Panning the camera is just too full of micro-stutters (in harbor), and the game's not good enough to put up with them. Even tried kaldaien's fix program to see if it helped, spoofing the core amount, but nothing. I can deal with a low framerate in a third-person view game, or even an FPS with a good double-vsync if necessary, but in an overhead view game where the scenery is 100% static when you pan the camera and it hitches it's really noticeable and distracting. I didn't expect this since up until now frame rate had never gone below 60.

I played thru poe 1 at 20-35 fps back when it that came out and I'll be damned if I'm gonna put myself thru that again with poe 2... in poe 1's case that time I put up with it because it was new and all that, but this time I know there's no reason to suffer thru bad performance for poe 2, there's no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.

 

[TemplarGR]

bah, reached Neketaka for the 1st time and frame rate took a nose dive. I tried lowering settings but not a single one had any effect on the frame rate, not even "Lights" option which is the heaviest. Normally this wouldn't really matter but in overhead games likes this anything below 60fps is juddery and stutter-y when panning the camera so...

dropped it. Panning the camera is just too full of micro-stutters (in harbor), and the game's not good enough to put up with them. Even tried kaldaien's fix program to see if it helped, spoofing the core amount, but nothing. I can deal with a low framerate in a third-person view game, or even an FPS with a good double-vsync if necessary, but in an overhead view game where the scenery is 100% static when you pan the camera and it hitches it's really noticeable and distracting. I didn't expect this since up until now frame rate had never gone below 60.

You should upgrade your toaster man...

 

[aweigh]

i'm using i5 7500 and gtx 1050Ti with 16gb ram. old but still capable. runs doom 2016 at 75fps at high settings so it's "good enough" for modern games.

 

[TemplarGR]

i'm using i5 7500 and gtx 1050Ti with 16gb ram. old but still capable. runs doom 2016 at 75fps at high settings so it's "good enough" for modern games.

I am using an AMD FX 6300 with 8gb ram and an r9 380 with 2gb vram... And i have no frame issues at max settings... Of course, i am on Linux, so i wouldn't know about windows faggotry.

 

[pomenitul]

I have an i7-7700k + GTX 1070 8gb and while I get nominally better FPS, visible stutters are still a problem, so your rig definitely isn't to blame, aweigh. It's a known issue that they identified months ago but still haven't fixed. At this point, I've stopped expecting it to go away short of switching to an AMD GPU.

 

[pomenitul]

To make matters worse, I also get microstutters in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. All other games run perfectly, including more graphically-intensive ones. Bah.

 

[Lacrymas]

AMD master race. I specifically only get AMD cards now because older games have no problem with them for some reason and a lot of modern games seem to have problems with Nvidia. Also, either Unity is shit or nobody ever optimizes.

 

[pomenitul]

Pretty sure Obsidian never optimizes. Haven't noticed the slightest hitch in Unity games from other developers. Oh, and Tyranny for whatever reason.

 

[aweigh]

I found a solution to my "stutter" problem:

- I made a custom resolution and overclocked the Refresh Rate to 80hz, which is the max my Acer monitor can handle (native is 75hz)

- In RivaTuner set the frame-syncing to "x/2" which is half the refresh rate (basically Double Vsync)

Game runs well at 40fps, zero stutter, etc. Very smooth, very "synced". The lower frame rate creates a kind of pixel-jitter, or what some would call "strobing" effect when you pan the camera but it's not that bad at 40fps; it's at 30fps when things get really CINEMATIC. For those who don't know what I'm referring to the "strobing" effect kind of looks like a vague ghosting or motion blur that gets more pronounced the faster the camera in the game pans, which is part of the reason console games use such low analog sensitivity for the control axis.

Anyway, that's that. I recommend this usage of RivaTuner to cap the framerate at whatever, doesn't have to be half your refresh rate it just syncs better when it is because of mathematics or whatever.

I also discovered another thing by accident: go ahead and enable cheats in the console by typing iroll20s and then press F11 key during game play and a debug menu appears that lets you choose any location in the game to teleport in a nice and handy menu!

Very useful for teleporting to areas inside a map with many sub-areas without having to go to the map screen or trudge across town or whatever.

 

[pomenitul]

Glad it worked for you.

I still get drops when capping the frame rate, except it's no longer 100 > 70 but 60 > 35, 30 > 15 or whatever.

 

[aweigh]

try out RTSS's scanline sync option it's new. It's the option I selected for the above. Syncing options for scanline only accept "synced to your Hz", double your Hz or what I'm using half-your-Hz. It is basically a different kind of syncing, NOT a frame-cap (although by syncing it effectly caps your framerate).

According to the information I read about it this is a form of the same kind of v-sync that emulators utilize where it syncs to the tear-line/scan-line instead of using buffers and it then keeps the tear-line hidden.

Try it out, just click on the scanline sync option and use a value of "1". A value of 0 is OFF. It automatically overrides any number you may have currently in RTSS's framerate cap field as well, so no worries about accidentally enabling both or whatever.

If i cap to 40fps with RTSS = smooth... but still stutter when panning camera, very much what they call "micro stutters" or hiccups or whatever. Things feel weird.

If i enable scanline sync x/2 value of "1" to sync to half my refresh rate (which coincidentally is 80hz, so the sync would be capped at 40fps) = perfectly smooth, no stutters, except it produces the same kind of pixel-jitter that is present in all CINEMATIC games on console. Most people don't even notice this, btw, but once you spot it you can't unsee it.

The trick was getting the refresh rate to a number where using scanline-sync x/2 would produce a playable framerate, aside from that using this is simple as pie. I got lucky that my monitor OC'd up to 80hz.

EDIT: I use program called CustomResolutionUtility (CRU) to make custom 1080p resolution with refresh rate of choice. It's much better than nvidia/amd control panel function for making custom rez.

 

[pomenitul]

I'll give it a shot as soon as I can, thanks.

EDIT: Didn't work, unfortunately. I still get noticeable drops every two minutes or so. Oh well, it's pretty smooth otherwise.

 

[aweigh]

ah well. i mean, the game itself chokes inside neketaka, no amount of v-syncing or frame capping is gonna help with that. it's particularly painful because previous to neketaka i was getting +60fps always, 100% of the time, however in neketaka's Berth area it tanked to 45-50 which created the "stuttering" when panning the camera I mentioned.

syncing it with RTSS helps in that, if i were to use a normal frame-capping program to cap it to 40fps (to allow a frame budget that takes into account Neketaka's performance) it would stutter/hitch/etc and not feel "smooth" when panning the camera. That "smooth-ness", you know the kind that only a good v-syncing provides, that's what using RTSS scanline-sync provides: the actual frame-rate itself still tanks of course, sync or no sync, just that now i can play it with a capped framerate AND avoid the micro-stutters that using a normal frame-cap produce.

however in terms of performance it's still 40fps instead of the previous 60fps, a definite DOWNGRADE, obviously, but that' can't be helped (on my end), though I suspect that PoE2 is so badly optimized it would give trouble to even top-end card.

Anyway, doing this I found a useful program called DISPLAYCHANGER 2 that lets you use it in conjunction with console commands (the cmd.exe kind) called via a batch file to run any application, including a game, launched in your specified resolution/refresh rate, then when you close the application it restores the previous resolution/refreshrate.

I had to google for this because PoE2's shitty lack of full-screen means it's permanently windowed-borderless, and that always uses the refresh rate of the desktop-resolution, and I wasn't about to be changing my desktop resolution's refresh rate every time, y'know?

extremely useful little program: displaychanger2.

 

[Mazisky]

Both Pillars have crappy performance on my good rig (I-7, Geforce 1070), i wonder if devs are not good at optimize or if Unity is bad. Wasn't Divinity on unity too? I don't like D:OS, but at least it runs fine.

 

[aweigh]

in my opinion it's a very clear cut case of them overloading an area map with NPCs and shit, that's all. I mean, that's no excuse of course. Kaldaien says that the way that the global illumination package they utilized for the game is very hard to optimize for, he wrote that it's the same one used by the recent port of Nier Automata which has terrible performance without his patch that fixes it: that's why turning on/off the "Lights" option is the single biggest performance differentiator.

NOTE: For example put on Xoti's lantern out in a place with lights and watch the frames die, and the best part is: where do you get lots of global illumination? during battles of course! the spells that reflect light off "illuminated" items like Xoti's shield kill frame rates because they only optimized for the 4 wall sconces or whatever and didn't take into account in the performance budget a rolling ball of fire.

Some informative stuff about the middle-ware tools used in these Unity games over in the Steam discussions thread for Kaldaien's cpu spoofing tool for PoE2, very illuminating pardon the pun. These unity games are basically made with all pre-made application packages that are notoriously all very difficult to optimize for individual usage scenarios which is part of the reason performance is uniformly bad in most unity games. it's basically a fancy RPG Maker.

although, something that can't be blamed on Unity is the work they did on the GUI;the UI element performance is shit, very badly coded though, go to berth harbor and find a grouping of people, then go into stealth... as soon as all of those people's detection cones appear watch your frame rate go down! it's pretty funny. It does make one wonder: don't they have budget PC's on hand for testers to at least walk around in an area or something? jeez.

I wonder if killing all the npc's in neketaka would help performance :makesyouthink:

 

[Quillon]

So sanctum releasing tomorrow & there is no teaser/trailer/anything :/

 

[Abu Antar]

They probably just want Pillars 2 to be over with and move on, to be honest.

 

[Quillon]

They'll probably lightly support it till the console release.

Tho other DLCs got trailers.

 

[Ulfhednar]

So sanctum releasing tomorrow & there is no teaser/trailer/anything :/

Isn’t release on Thurs, 12-13-18? Think there is still time...

 

[Quillon]

So sanctum releasing tomorrow & there is no teaser/trailer/anything :/

Isn’t release on Thurs, 12-13-18? Think there is still time...

Yeah, I'm reading the calendar wrong, read the month as the day

 

[aweigh]

TT1

hey, is there a mod that you know of that disables all of the ship bullshit? I don't mean the combat, that's fine because you can always just close in and fight it out, i mean like I don't want to fucking micro-manage supplies and crew and that shit, i just want to go from point A to point B on the ship.

are there any values in the bundle files to make this possible?

 

[aweigh]

Alright, having spent a large chunk of yesterday and today going thru the first 2 districts of neketaka and having done fort deadlight just now, I have come to the following conclusion:

- PoE 1 is much, much, much much better in everything so far EXCEPT in the class and battle mechanics. PoE 1 dungeons (so far) were better, with eothas temple and raedric and caed nua being faaaaaaaaaaar better than their PoE 2 equivalents (dig site and deadlight).

- PoE 1 "exploration" was also better (so far). The ship sailing is extremely boring, unrewarding and tedious and slow, whereas in PoE 1 you went thru wilderness areas and other area-types on your way to places and you did stuff in these areas.

That said Neketaka is head and shoulders better than Defiance Bay, so PoE 2 does have that... but you know what's crazy? I'm getting nostalgic for scenes from PoE 1, like the hanging bodies off the tree, the entirety of the eothas temple, the look and feel of Gilded vale; the more I play PoE 2 the more I can't help comparing each new PoE 2 area with its PoE 1 equivalent.

EDIT: Also just the general placement of encounters and individual enemies was sooooo much better in PoE 1. Like I said: i'm getting nostalgic over the shadow enemy gang-bang encounters from PoE 1 beginning dungeons... because the shit I'm doing in PoE 2 so far is boring af.