About the big technology update launch

[Adrian]

Hello everyone,

As you may already know, tomorrow Wednesday 16th we will finally launch the Regnum Online Engine Update.

As we said before, a new download of the client will be mandatory. To help you with the download process we have designed a new installation scheme with an auto downloader featuring pausing and resuming, we have also installed more download servers to be able to handle the load.

This is a very important milestone for NGD Studios, for Regnum and for Regnum’s future, but considering some of the constraints that we have as a development studio it is going to be a tumultuous transition.

The main objectives of this update were:

1 - To increase performance on high-end hardware, allowing us to add more graphical effects and in the future, high definition player characters.

2 - To increase the performance on mid-end hardware with similar graphics to our previous version (shader model 2).

3 - To fix the client side stalls and hiccups that generated client side LAG when entering populated areas making the game unplayable.

4 - To increase performance on low end hardware regardless of the graphics quality.

5 - To have a more stable/reliable version of the engine in order to continue improving, fixing and adding features to the game.

While we think that we have achieved good results on 1, 2, 3 and 5, we believe that point 4 will need more work after the launch.

These are the main problems you may encounter and some possible solutions:

1 - Compatibility problems:

Update your OS and the drivers for your GPU and hardware in general.

2 - Performance problems:

Update your OS and the drivers for your GPU and hardware in general.

Try lowering your settings / shader model, the new Regnum is trying to do much more things in this version so it may run slower if you push it to the max and do not have the appropriate hardware.

3 - Stability problems (crashes):

Update your OS and the drivers for your GPU and hardware in general.
Send us your crash information and please have some patience.

We really need your support during this transition so we can fix everything.

If the game doesn’t run properly on your system please don’t panic, just give us as much information as possible so we can fix your problems.

Problems with Intel graphics card users

As you know, the only hardware that we support officially is nVidia and ATI. In the last year, Intel users have been able to play so far as the previous engine matured. Now, according to our stats, there is a big percentage of Intel graphic card users that play Regnum and we want them to continue playing and to enhance their experience.

We bought low end Intel cards and we are doing some last minute changes to increase performance but we are still slower in some cases (specially Intel cards on Linux).

Please understand that this is not our fault completely, Intel hardware has not been designed for high end games and Regnum made a step in that direction.

Specially, Intel’s support for OpenGL is really bad and that’s why our problems are even worse in Linux.

If you have an Intel card, please try running the game in fixed mode and disable particle effects, and hang in there until we take the best performance out of your hardware.

Problems with other unsupported graphics cards users (S3, SIS and VIA):

We made our best efforts to support your hardware, as you may know already this graphics cards are not designed with gaming in mind and have an even worse record on having appropriate features and drivers than Intel’s.

We won’t (as we didn’t before) officially support your hardware as it is not cost effective for our company. Please try playing in safe mode and send your reports anyway as we will try to fix your problems too.

Conclusion

Once again, we really need your support during this transition so we can fix everything.

I hope you can appreciate the 10 months of work that where invested into this new engine and that when we fix most issues this upgrade will imply a much greater potential for our game. Now, we will continue fixing gameplay issues, balance and adding all the features we can as we have always planned.

Best regards,
The Regnum Development Team