Hellgate: London

"I think it’s best to really give a mention to the SEA Hellgate community (despite the numerous reports of how small it might be). A mention as to how IAH still has the SEA players on patch 0.7 since January 2nd. Maybe you didn’t read that bit. Patch 0.7 and going strong for three months now. Honestly, if we US/EU players thought we have it bad, just imagine for a second being stuck with the 0.7 patch, a patch we got back on December 19, 2007. Now imagine the original developers, Flagship Studios, acting like as if you don’t even exist by not even recognizing your presence. Whoops, did I say imagine?

Needless to say what has transpired here for what ever is left of the SEA Hellgate community (and I don’t certainly blame the majority of them leaving by the droves to seek products they can place their trust in) has to be some of the dirtiest, underhanded things I’ve seen in the gaming market. Maybe if Flagship Studios didn’t try to put so much on their plate by releasing this game to every part of the world except Uganda or by adding useless graphic features for an already-dated flawed system by adding DX10 support, then maybe they wouldn’t be in the mess they are in now. Either way, neither IAH or Flagship seem interested in acknowledging the SEA community, so I thought maybe we here at Flagshipped would do their job for them and let everyone else know just how bad they have it over there."

"How is it possible that they are getting away with this?

Didn't they promise to update there content for everybody?

What about the founders in SEA?

I think Agamemnon spelled it out clearly enough. This is sickening for a gaming company to be doing this to people."

___

I guess we all love blizzard a little bit more for being generous with diablo 2.  Quotes from flagshipped.com

"

This post is lengthy. I implore everyone to read it, anyway. It contains important information about this game and why it malfunctions so severely.

For the record…

Flagship banned me permanently from their board and without any prior warning, about a month after HGL first launched. This happened immediately after I put up my very first post on their official forums. That post was both an expose` and a firm demand for an explanation from FSS.

In that post, I revealed the *actual reason* for all of the visual lag and overly-long loading times in HGL. I discovered this issue back when I was pulling the game apart and creating my Hellgate: Nude mod. During the course of my dissections, I stumbled across the true underlying cause of loot lag, vendor lag, inventory lag, etc. Flasghip has been outright lying to everyone about the problems with HGL’s performance, so I finally decided that I was fed up with their bullshit and I told everyone the honest truth.

The actual reason, which I posted on their board, stems from the fact that Flagship never created a proper set of icons and smaller textures for this game. Instead, they played it cheap and pushed the game out the door with only its full-sized textures having been completed (those textures were all outsourced to Asians, by the way). This in turn requires the game engine to load full-sized textures for every single piece of armor and every single weapon that is displayed in HGL… no matter where it is and no matter how small it appears on your screen.

Think about what I just said for a moment. Obviously, you want the full-sized higher resolution textures to be used for items that are actually equipped. What you *do not* need is to load up a 1024×1024 pixel (or larger) hi-res texture for a tiny little spinning chest piece dropped as loot. Nor do you need a huge, full-sized texture for all of those itty bitty icons that you see in the vendor and inventory windows. Yet that is exactly what the game engine is being forced to do in Hellgate, because Roper and Co. never took the time to create a proper icon library for this game. Instead, they just added a few extra lines of cheap code to the engine, which is a helluva lot less work than creating a properly extended set of graphics files.

Now think about when you kill a mini-boss, like Shulgoth for instance. When he dies, he “pops,” dropping a big pile of loot at your feet. Well, for every single one of those tiny little spinning loot icons, the engine first loads the set of *full-sized* textures for each item (including their corresponding normal maps, bump maps, color maps and specular maps). Each of those full-sized textures represents a crapload of video memory and system overhead, so the engine next dithers down all of those huge textures one at a time, reduces them by a given percentage and then (finally) renders them at a smaller size on your screen.

This process of loading, dithering, shrinking and rendering happens every single time a new piece of gear appears on your screen, whether it be some loot that drops, or when you interact with a vendor, or when you open up your inventory, or check out your stash. Now you can understand why the game lags so badly during all of those situations: it is literally pushing your computer over the edge, with a bunch of TOTALLY UNNECESSARY graphical computations that are a strain on even a dual 8800GTX SLI system (which is what I play it on).

When I posted the above information on the official forums… which incidentally is information that every paying customer of Flagship is entitled to know about… I was instantly banned and my post was deleted. There was no explanation made until several weeks later, when they covered their own asses by saying that I was someone who ran a “porn site” and that they didn’t want me on their board. Bear in mind that this is the same Flagship Studios who used a naked Templar in their pre-release publicity campaign (she was featured in Playboy magazine and her name was “Avalon”).

“Porn site,” my ass. They didn’t want anyone to know the facts and they knew that I had them by the balls. Only a modder like myself would have discovered those textures (and the lack thereof). So I’m posting this info again here, for all to see. I apologize for the length of this post, but this is *major* stuff in my opinion. So before you run out and buy a bunch of expensive new hardware for Hellgate, please keep in mind that you may not even need it. The game itself is miserably unfinished and broken… not your computer. We’ve all been ripped-off… big time.

Respectfully submitted,

- Tessera -
tessmage.com"

I kinda figured as much when I'd get a constant slowdown every time I'd get one of those boss drops, didn't need to open the files up to figure it out. On the bright side, the game is pretty much a failure commercially, so it all works out. Far as the "Diablo 2 makers", I still think most of Flagship is composed of the rejects from Blizzard, not any of the real talent as far as Diablo or any other game.

Thats nice, I play w/ maxed out settings I never get slowing down while in zone after killing anything, or do I get more then 5 second loads while zoning.  My friend who plays on a 2 year old computer while obvious only running on medium / low settings doesnt have any of those problems either.  All computers are different and while I don't really care to argue the finer points with you.  I'm just saying just becuase you and others experiance things in a pc game doesnt mean everyone will.

So those that arent as okay are like sacrifices to flagships profits?  So that makes it okay?

No that wasn't the point, the point was you were making it sound like everyone would have these horrible issues running the game because of the technical issues you described in your second post.  My point is that everyone will have different results with the game, just like every other game.  Also from all I can tell they have been working hard on smoothing out the bugs, errors and memory leaks that came with the package to begin with.  I quit playing because of them around xmas and only recently came back.  I play in NA and so all the patches are available to me, I'm not sure about other countries however. 

hmmm, k. Let me get this straight. You go ahead and disassemble the game, thus breaking a rule of not only HG:L's but of probably more than 90% of the games out there's EULA. You go and brag about it on the game's official forums and get banned for it. And here you are, complaining that they kicked you out ?

Am I the only one here to think this guy is delusional ?

As a matter of fact, when they could have gone further and sued you, you could be grateful that they were so soft on you.

I won't even go so far as to roll on the floor laughing about your denial of you making nude patches for hellgate, oblivion or VTMB. Whatever you may call it, it IS porn, however soft and high quality it may be. Thus making their reason true, and probably a valid one too, though I haven't read HGL's official forum's terms of use either.

Originally posted by NeoDodge

As a matter of fact, when they could have gone further and sued you, you could be grateful that they were so soft on you.

 

What are they going to tell the court? That they're angry because he figured a way to make their game run better than they can? Newsflash: they probably don't want to look any dumber than they already do.