You may be handy with a nanoforge, crafting the ultimate death-lobbing device from nothing but a pair of bracers and a demon scrotum, but do you know where to turn when the gates of hell close in a crash back to desktop? We can't do much about the problem that a lot of Hellgate has turned into pay-to-play, but we can help out with some of the more common technical problems you may face in your fight to save the Smoke from getting blown away.
I'll assume you've already tried updating your graphics drivers and patching the game. Hey, you're not idiots, you're heroic champions.
Where have all my menus gone? The first - and most bizarre - bug you may encounter is that the menu text vanishes or isn't where it should be. This is a compatibility issue between the game and Vista, and can be overcome by right clicking the game icon and selecting Properties>Compatibility and then disabling visual themes and advanced text services. That'll stop Vista's tiresome interfering with the rendering pipeline for text.
I get the error message 'Memory has been exhausted, application will now close'? What can I do? Sadly, not an awful lot - there's a known memory leak which wasn't completely fixed with the first patch, and it's likely to rear its head after a few hours of play. You can't fix it completely, but you can buy more time by reducing your graphics options (anti-aliasing seems to cause particular problems).
Why can't I get the mouse moving fast enough? Here's another peculiar issue. Some people have reported problems with the mouse not moving fast enough in Hellgate, and the fix is a little unexpected. Try turning off anti-aliasing or forcing the game to run in DirectX 9 mode. Both seem to work well. As a last resort, change the settings in Windows' mouse options to 'low' sensitivity and whack Hellgate's mouse sensitivity up to high.
I can see through all the characters on screen. Are they ghosts? Not at all, rather I suspect that you're using an nVidia graphics card and need to tweak your 'Transparency Anti-aliasing' settings in the nVidia Control Panel (right click on the desktop to bring this up and select 'Advanced'). It's an interesting bug, for sure, but simply switching this value to 'off' or 'super-sampled' will cure it and banish the ghosts.
THE ULTIMATE HELLGATE: LONDON TWEAK GUIDE
01. Dynamics There aren't many graphics options in Hellgate: London, but they do make a difference to performance. On our test rig, we gained about 10 frames per second simply by turning off dynamic lighting, for example. We'd rather keep that on and sacrifice other stuff, though.
02. Shader quality You'd think that reducing shader quality would make a big difference to framerates, but here's the thing: you can afford to leave these up if you have a card with plenty of memory and bandwidth. Going from high to medium hardly made any difference.
03. Texture detail Reducing this is the most immediately obvious downgrade in visual quality you can make, but on a lower end card it can make a big improvement to framerate. For our test rig, however, the memory used to store textures wasn't an issue.
04. Shadow detail Our golden bullet for Hellgate lag? Turn down the shadow detail. You'll barely notice the difference once the game gets going, and on our test rig we experienced almost 30 frames per second improvement between the 'high' and 'low' settings. Happy demon hunting.
It says something about the state of the game when you can dedicate a whole feature on "how to make it work".
Which is a shame as I had high hopes for this game before it was released, i'd rather developers spent that extra few months polishing and playtesting than releasing a substandard game.
I understand that developers are always under pressure to release as this is where they start to earn back the cash that has been spent on the game, but by releasing too early as in this case just means they are never going to sell enough units to cover development costs let alone make a profit. I for one planned to buy this game but after reading several poor reviews decided not to.
I think this article maybe a bit late, I'm sure some of these problems (like the infamous memory leak) were solved in patch 0.7 in mid-Dec (albeit 6 weeks after release). Mind you, I can't say that with any too much certainty, as I don't have Vista, which seemed to be involved with most of the problems. These Vista problems were even more disappointing seeing as HGL was supposed to be one of the trail-blazing DX10 games. Interestingly, apparently patch 0.5 saw HGL become the first game to run faster in DX10 than DX9 (yes, you read that right!) in indoor environments, so MS's OS saw the best and the worst of the game.
I reckon the rest of the world was used as a alpha test for the Korean market, who have just started their beta test.
Still, it IS incredibly addictive, and I'm still playing it every night, and really enjoying it.
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