Sacred 2 Patch 2.40 now available.

You can also use F9 to save manually, beats being teleported back to who knows where and having to walk back to wherever you wanted to go in the first place.

 

NiukNiuk,

Merci beaucoup, monsieur

And JonasBeckman

Tack så mycket herrn

i hope i google translated good

 

hi people i have been playing this game for hour and hour over the last 6months and after installing the latest patch i have noticed a good few changes and have experenced my first crash to desktop which im not sure why but im hoping it was my last too, any how i have a question about the new physx feature.

with my 4870x2 card i can enable it but i drop to 4-7fps, im not sure why this is as i get approx 40fps with elte GFX and 16x AF and 2x AA @ 1920x1080, can some one explain how to use physic and if its even ment to work with ATI

 

yeah i wonder it too.

 

It's not ment to work "fine"with Ati cards (you can enable it, but the fps will severely drop).
I don't use it.

 

people how does this game play on ur 4870x2 cards

 

I have between 35 - 40 FPS but you have to consider that I run with Edge Detect AA at 4x which seems to correspond to 12x normal AA samples, also using Adaptive AA for foliage and similar alpha transparency objects.
(Or how to describe it.)

The AGEIA PPU handles PhysX just fine here but as mentioned above it's too demanding for the CPU alone and needs hardware acceleration via a capable processor like just the PPU or a NVIDIA GPU (CUDA supported and with the latest PhysX drivers for optimal performance and stability.)

EDIT: Those benchmarks I mentioned previously.
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...h-for-Geforce-graphics-cards/Practice/?page=2
(AGEIA or NVIDIA PhysX from what I know isn't that "threaded" so it doesn't take advantange of multiple cores as it's made to run with a PPU or Physics Processing Unit via the AGEIA card but this was since ported to CUDA and now uses the NVIDIA GPU and those shader processors to achieve better results as the PPU is pretty old by now though still even a modern CPU can't keep up with it as it's specialized in calculations related to PhysX whereas a CPU handles multiple tasks so that's why there's such a performance hit when running hardware accelerated tasks via the CPU.*)

* Hardware accelerated might be the wrong term though but effects like particles consists of hundreds of individual entities and is simply too demnading for the processor alone so that's where the AGEIA stuff helps with performance or how to best describe it.
(Will be interesting to see what'll happen now with Havok/ATI as competition heats things up a bit, PhysX does support all consoles though so they're pretty secure and Havok has a license fee whereas PhysX is free, from what I've read at least, SDK has been at 2.8.2 for a while though but 3.0.0 should be out this year with new support and enhancements as the latest CUDA physX still doesn't take advantage of all features when running via a NVIDIA GPU, mentioned a bit here - http://developer.nvidia.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2403 and those forum contain a lot of other interesting stuff as well.)

 

@JonasBeckman

what res you game at

 

Unfortunately (For my 4870 X2 that is.) I still use a 22" screen, Samsung 226 CW a somewhat older model now replaced by the T220 and T220 HD from what I can see but it's still a great monitor.
(Been thinking of going up to a 24" as the card can handle it but still checking various models and comparing prices.)

EDIT: Forgot the actual resolution, sorry about that, it's 1680x1050

 

i game at 1680*1050 too. all my games...but i wish i have a 1GB version of the 4870. anyway. i run game very fine. with 2x aa and all max.

 

Elite Textures and Physx do not work well together just an FYI.

If I have them both enabled in game I get massive memory leaks and crashes and freezes.

I decided to keep the Elite textures installed and turn PhysX off.
I still get all the PhysX stuff but the blowing leaves are gone (big whoop).
So turning off the PhysX in game really only gets rid of the leaves blowing around so you dont miss too much.

And to the person who asked if S2 is like the Diablo series...
I have been a HUGE Diablo fan since D1 and I can honestly say this game kicks Diablos ass

 

i wonder if i Downlaod ELITE TEXTURES and apply them, my STEAM version will run?

 

First before anyone asks the "Elite textures" are free, was discussed in the official forums but it's just that it's only available together with the CE version of the game and due to it's size (Dual-DVD 7.5 GB or so) it's not offered anywhere else. (The developers had a idea about offering it as a separate download for a small fee but it wasn't really possible to due the size, instead you can buy the CE carrier imp and other extras for a small fee.)

Secondly there's no real scripts or anything to this texture pack, disc just contains a bunch of zip archives (Same as the other "pack" files the game uses.) that are copied into the "\Sacred2\pak\" folder and once the game detects these (Graphics20.zip to Graphics24.zip) you'll be able to select a new texture quality (Instead of low and standard there's low, standard and elite.)

If you were to open the archives (They're zip files after all.) you would see all those textures in a sub folder called "hq" or high-quality, there's also a lq and mq folder in the graphics02.zip file for low/medium or low/standard (in-game option name) and a few others files for the other quality sets.

In my opinion this is a crap solution and they even use it with soundlq/soundhq.zip and musiclq/musichq.zip

Why? because it takes up a few GB of uneccessery disk space when they could simply use the hq textures as a base in a \textures\ folder instead of those lq\mq\hq folders and then scale via the mip-map values similar to how most other games does it and for the music it could easily be downsampled or some such (22khz/44khz or some such, unsure what the standards are these days.)

For those who wonder mip-maps are part of this texture format (.DDS) and are basically down-scaled versions of the base texture to create a smooth (And optimized) transition between various quality levels often determined by distance to a object. (Level of detail or LOD usually.) and generally games will use the default texture on the highest settings (0 I believe) and then use the following mip-maps depending on texture quality seting or how to best explain it.

Base texture might be 1024x1024 (Mip-map 0) with the 1st mip-map at 512x512 (Medium quality as a example) and 256x256 at mip-map 2 (Low quality as a example)

Beats packing each texture three times doesn't it?
(Can also use mip-map -1 and so to sharpen texture a bit but this introduces shimmering textures, noticable in for example the graphics "extender" utility for Morrowind.)

 

Even with this update, I still have some crashes/memory leaks when I enable the elite texture pack.
The game crashes really often when I reach "Grunwald" (not far away from the dragon), with missing textures/game freezing for a few seconds, then I see my hdd working a lot and finally the game crashes when I teleport.
I think that I don't have enough video memory to enable this texture pack

 

ohh. i found ELITE TEXTURE PACK on another source..7.* GBs..:S..i dont think it WORTHS. anyway. still waiting for STEAM TO APPLY patch

EDIT: and i have a question. U know my hero is Temple Guardian. and his left arm shoots laser thing. is it magical? is it considered as RANGED? so i want to develop my skill points on that weapon too but not sure if it is considered as RANGED and MAGIC

 

good question, i do know that some weapons need a few skill increased to see full effect, maybe this is one of them, also a little tip find all the orange labled items and then u have a complete set they increase their stats alittle but its worth it


p.s. about that question im pretty sure after reading up thats its a ranged weapon same as the Lazar pistols

 

hey, thank you for information. i just leved up to 11.

and now applying some skills to RANGE oriented stuff. or what ever it is

 

So, what's your opinion of it so far?

 

im level 37 and ive uncovered approx 7% of the map, i think that the game over all if great but its get overwhelmed by the constant GANGS of creatures all in groups every 4meters from each other, id say to walk 100yards in any paret of the game you would need to fight ur way though approx 50-70creatures lol, and then its like deja vo every other 100yards their after, "dint i just kill this prick lol, he's back again OMG, AND AGIAN, AND AGAIN, ok ive made it 300 feet and kill the same dude 4times been playing 4hours now its time for bed", woho another 0.02% of thegame completed you get the idea right

 

Yep, I do. I don't mind though. I've been looking for a fix until Diablo 3 hits, whenever the hell that is, and this game may fit the bill. Sometimes a little mindless hacking and slashing is the best way to unwind after a stressful day.