Quick Tip: Planetside 2 - Medic Revive Not Working [Note]

Just a quick tip for those who have recently jumped back into playing some frantic Planetside 2 and thought there was something wrong with the medic tool, being unable to revive, thinking they can't revive, etc - there was a patch a bit back that changed the Medic Tool so that Left-Click will Heal and Right-Click will Revive. Although changing such a long running/'staple' operation is a little lip-pursing, it should have the overall positive effect of assisting with attempting to revive within a tight group of teammates (instead of your tool randomly healing someone close, it should more effectively target the face down teammate on the ground). Just a note.


See You In The Games!

Planetside 2 - How To Find Snowmen (Winter Event) Known Facts, Tips and Suggestions

[Update: Note that although these Tips And Tricks noted herein have been noted to be of note during the first year of note in this notable noting, they have been tested to be valid for successive Winter Events, meaning that these Tips are still viable and applicable and other terms that end in -able for following Winter Event years. Enjoy!]

 Merry Auraximas!


For those playing Planetside 2 at this time of year, there is a Winter Event from SOE going on, that involves hunting snowmen in the blowing snowdrifts of the continent, Esamir. Killing 10 of these somewhat-rare snowman spawns earns you a new Title for your Soldier. Killing the far-more-rare Golden Snowman unlocks a Golden Hood Ornament instantly! This post is a collection of tips, strategies and ideas to help you do these very things this winter season. But first, an introductory video to the Winter Events, from the Official Planetside 2 Channel:





Known facts about the Snowmen:

• The elusive Snowmen are not quite as tall as a human/soldier, but they are definitely not "small" - the main problem is that they are...white - on a continent of snow. [They are about 2/3 the height of a player/soldier] 
• To help with spotting them, they have NC gloves stuck in the sides of them, a TR hat put on them and a VS stylish scarf draped around their necks knife as a nose 
• The snowmen cannot be run over, spotted, or their visibility increased by using thermal vision, as they are snowmen and do not have souls are cold [they did appear stark white on night vision however, in my tests] 
• They do not take many bullets to kill, they seem to take about the same damage as a regular player/soldier. For instance, in one test, a snowman was done in by two knife/melee hits [they are not excessively hard to kill] 
• They are somewhat-random spawns. They seem to appear at the same locations, but the spawn timers are unknown
• They can be found in groves of trees, near rock formations and even in the nooks and crannies of building structures, but only on the Esamir continent [there may be a queue in your region/server primetime playtime]
• There are two types of Snowmen: Regular Snowmen and Golden Snowmen. They both seem to be able to appear on the same spots (share spawn points), as some have even reported that one type of snowman was 'inside' another type of snowman (they were 'on top' of each other/shared a spawn point)
• The main difference between the two types of snowmen is that Golden Snowmen are far more eXPerience, reward a Hood Ornament upon "killing", and it seems that there can only be one Golden Snowman on the continent in existence at one time - all of this making the Golden Snowman a much more rare (but rewarding!) find

Snowman found in grove of trees, not far from a road, with some rocks around

Tips and Suggestions:

• Although a Flash is fast and versatile, I suggest trying a Harasser, due to the difference of having a 360° rotating camera, while still being fast and relatively easy to steer/handle (and it can 'power' over some hills that the Flash cannot). You can also switch to the 2nd seat (hit the F2 key on your keyboard by default) and use the mounted weapon, even if you did not (or cannot) purchase any vehicle upgrades or add any weapons at all [the Flash would require a weapon-add upgrade] to kill found Snowmen (and contesting enemies)
   
• You can use an empire-specific fighter (jet), but it has been reported that the snowmen cannot be seen from very far away (and some are under overhangs, etc) so this makes it somewhat more difficult if it is true, even with the difference in travel time.. [I have not tested this bit of info at this time]. You'll have to make that decision for yourself. Many people have reported flying around (low to the ground) has been fruitful for them
   
• All classes have their strengths with this event [no doubt thought of by the developers]: Infiltrators can scan a wide area with their scopes, sniping the snowmen from a distance and can cloak if threatened (or fight). Engineers can refill their own ammo and repair their transport vehicle if it becomes damaged. Light Assaults can utilize their Adrenaline Pump ability to sprint faster to their destinations, as well as jump-jet up to higher points and over rocks [I prefer the Light Assault for these reasons, but the choice is up to you] - however this is just an example of some of the benefits of some of the classes for hunting
   
• They appear at the sides of roads a lot [I ran into most of my snowmen this way, driving down roads and veering off when I saw a grove of trees or an isolated rock grouping]. Rocks seemed to have far less snowmen [for me], but there have been reports of people finding them in rock formations and on mountains [I found a couple, in rock formations; but since many of them seem to be easily found from the road, just driving around on roads and keeping a sharp eye open may be the 'fastest' way, in my personal opinion, at least, when starting out hunting, at first]
   
• As you can see from the maps in the next section below, they are spread out pretty well - there are lots of places to at least have the chance to find one. Of course, it will help [be easier] if your faction controls the area you are hunting in; but even if not, it's a chance to engage the enemy for fun (or if you are less inclined to battle, you are allowed to create a soldier of a different faction on the same server, so you can choose one that 'owns' the territory you wish to go hunting in)

Snowman found by the edge of a road [I personally ran into most of my Snowmen this way, finding them along the sides of roads]

Snowman found near edge of road, while driving around in Harasser

Community-Created Maps:

Here are a couple of maps that were posted on the Official Planetside 2 forums (shared with cartographers' permission):

[This map has been added to since this version by many helpful people at the SOE Planetside 2 Forum here: https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/esamir-snowman-spawn-map.163625/ ]

Esamir Snowmen Locations, map by Slaudog
All markers can be either Snowmen or Golden Snowmen, circles mean more than one was found close to another
[Later versions of this map have more contributors, see the thread for updates]
(Click to see Full Size)

Esamir Snowmen Locations, map by MaxDamage
(Click to see Full Size)

Snowman somewhat-hidden by brush within a grove of trees, not far from a road

Snowman found near base structure, alongside a road

Snowman "kill", showing eXPerience gained. With the Double XP Weekend plus a 10% bonus, it seems that a Normal Snowman will give 500XP

With the great eXPerience that the Snowmen give, if you are a lower level (Battle Rank) you can literally rank up just from popping these party piles of pudgy powder [This one was found right next to the road]

I have already achieved the custom soldier Titles for a couple of my Soldiers since this event began and have started to help others find them and wanted to collect everything I've learned so far together in one post. Hopefully, you will find this information helpful in seeking out these little fellas, especially if you are just starting out - now get out there, start hunting, good luck - and See You In The Game!

Game Tip - Planetside 2: Missing Terminal Panels/Displays with Anti-Aliasing Enabled (Fix/Workaround)

Just a quick tip for Planetside 2 that I meant to post a while back: If you have Enabled AA through the Control Panel of your Video Card (NVIDIA or AMD/ATi) and can no longer see the display screens of the Vehicle/Resupply Terminals or other transparency effects (and if you want to keep AA enabled and see them), all you have to do is go into the in-game 'Graphics' Settings and adjust the 'Render Quality' - even just knocking it down from 100% to 99% will allow them to show up again - a screenshot example of the setting and the result is below
Have fun and See You In The Games!

Quality Test - Planetside 2 and 'Ultra' Settings (1080p Video), Screenshots

Although I am still working on a First Impressions for this game, I am just having waaay too much fun playing and testing out different settings on it. For those who don't know, Planetside 2 is a Free-To-Play MMOFPS (massively multiplayer online first person shooter) and is available on Steam for easy install and login.

Now, when I first tried playing the game, it sometimes got sluggish and choppy, even though my system isn't 'old' yet, with a 6-core AMD CPU and a Radeon HD 6870. So, being a computer technician, I got down to [having fun] troubleshooting..

The first thing I noticed is that larger fights lagged out the game more. Defending a little outpost with a dozen or so people running around, the game flew at 60fps; but in a large Bio-dome 3-faction battle with what must have been a hundred players tearing about, my frames per second dropped below 30 quite often.

What do you do in this case? That's right, lower the graphic settings. In an OPTIONS or SETTINGS menu (as it is in this game) you can usually find Video settings that you can lower or disable, to help the game perform better, by telling your videocard, "don't do this... or that". The funny thing is, putting it on Medium and then Low, made no difference whatsoever.

What does that mean? In case you didn't know, that means that it is not your videocard that is getting overworked. If running on Low settings with no special effects, the game is sluggish and turning everything up to High with all the bells and whistles, the game is just sluggy (yes I make up words), it is not your videocards' fault. Don't send it to it's room just yet.

What is happening then, is that somewhere else there is a limitation of some sort. Loading models/polygons/effects and other things as you move, the hard drive has to feed data to be displayed. My hard drive light wasn't going on much (I defragment often), so it must have been something else. My RAM tested out ok, so what's next? That's right, the CPU. Looking at the performance of my 'main-brain' processor as the game ran, showed it didn't really overuse it either though, only about 20-60% at most. It also didn't use more than about 1.5GB of RAM, so it must be running in 32-bit address space (if your head got 'swimmy' at that last couple sentences, it means the game didn't tire out my computer very much).

Now I don't want to point fingers without really knowing, but the testing suggests that there is possible CPU optimization problems, either within my system, or on the server systems (and possibly some data communication issues). After doing a little research into what I found was a large number of people having problems, I read that the developers have promised some sort of optimization patches over the next while. Great! I see already, whenever I load the game, that there are little hotfixes and patches coming down the pipe. A good sign of good treatment for the game, hopefully.

Looking around some more, I also found there was an 'Ultra' graphics setting in the Beta (I have been in many but I was not in this game's Beta phase) that was taken out. I assume this is to limit the work put onto players' systems and appeal to a wider audience of older hardware owners. However, it was still somewhat usable now, as long as you didn't mind doing some text editing of a settings file in the game's folder. Of course, I had to test it out!

What was essentially an uploaded text file with no Creditation (it just says Uploaded By: A Guest), what it contained were some settings such as turning up Draw Distance and Lighting Quality, by setting it to a higher number than the game normally does (the game's HIGH setting seems to be '3' and this text file was suggesting '5' in many places). Trying it out, some screenshots of the result are right here:

This wasn't taken with Ultra settings (I was running on High at the time), but 

I liked this shot from the BioLab atrium and wanted to share it, it's my wallpaper at the moment:

The problem was, these Ultra settings didn't really help the lag/sluggish gameplay I was experiencing, although it made it look spectacular. Since the issue of the sluggishness seemed to possibly be tied to CPU optimizations, I further changed the settings on my own, lowering ones that taxed/used the CPU more - and lo' and behold, what I ended up with was a nice, smooth, excitement-adding(!) gameplay performance - from a batch of settings that I now want to share with everyone else!

The [what seems to be] original "Ultra Config" settings are found here:
http://pastebin.com/XFkf8sYJ
^ That is a website where people can upload and share text files and you can simply save it as the text file it is and rename it UserOptions.ini and put it in your
<whatever drive steam is on>//ProgramFiles/Steam/steamapps/common/PlanetSide2
folder. (Make a backup copy of the original if you want)

Since those settings resulted in great-looking graphics, I wanted to keep most of it, but simply changed some of the more CPU-utilizing effects. My changes were all under the section Rendering (you can just copy and paste this 'Rendering' section over your 'Rendering' section in your UserOptions.ini if you want to):

[Rendering]
GraphicsQuality=5
TextureQuality=0
ShadowQuality=3
RenderDistance=2000.000000
Gamma=0.000000
MaximumFPS=60
UseLod0a=0
VSync=0
OverallQuality=-1
LightingQuality=3
FogShadowsEnable=1
EffectsQuality=5
TerrainQuality=3
FloraQuality=3
FloraDistanceScale=2.000000
ModelQuality=5
ParticleQuality=5
ParticleLOD=5
MotionBlur=1
BlurQuality=3
MotionBlurQuality=3
VerticalFOV=74
AO=1
AmbientOcclusionQuality=3
AOQuality=3
GpuPhysics=1

* Update: we have put our own Pastebin text file of the entire UserOptions.ini up here (simply save it/rename it to UserOptions.ini): http://pastebin.com/6j9aHVav

** For even more performance while still looking nice overall, try inserting these settings, most of which release even more CPU demand from the game:

RenderDistance=1000.000000, FogShadowsEnable=0, EffectsQuality=2, ParticleQuality=2, ParticleLOD=2

As you can see, most of the textures, complexity and other effects are up, but I lowered a few things like the terrain and shadows (these seemed to use the CPU quite a bit) and the draw distance, which still looks good at "2000". With these settings, I now had a much smoother, still-pretty result! Recording some gameplay as a test of both the new settings and showing the increase in performance, here is few couple minutes of playing as a Medic and Engineer with the settings above:

Recorded with Bandicam Licensed Version at 1920x1080p, 'Default' setting (MPEG-1 Quality 80 VBR)
playing Planetside 2, a free-to-play MMOFPS

That was just a simple pasting of some short tests together, taken in a time of low light/at night and then during the daytime when I went and found some BioLab fighting (which is usually a site of sluggish performance for most people, I know it was for me) where there are many other soldiers around. It shows an example of  the lighting, effects and clarity of the textures, both inside and outside (except for one or two that seemed to be 'stuck' at low resolution) that you can get with these Ultra settings - as well as the smoothness of gameplay that you can even have with my tweaks to them! If you want to make sure the game doesn't change them back (or you don't by accident), make the file Read-Only.

I'm not the greatest player, but I enjoy playing a Medic and Engineer, helping support my team. In the video, you get to see some Healing and Repairing and the Engineer's Turret that he can construct (and then only he can use it) and my Friendly Fire Warning I got using Claymores (if anyone on your team is too close when it goes off after detecting an enemy they get hurt too). You actually get three or four Warnings, but people were standing in front of my Clays a lot when they took out enemies and then you can see my shooting in the back a little in a firefight at the door there, as we all ran in and around it...don't worry it's not easy to get Weapon Locked. If you get a few warnings, just watch out for other people (sometimes you can't help what they do) or even move to a less busy area or just Repair and Heal people for a while.

Hopefully these tweaks will help some of you out there. It's sad to have such a great game with such a large-feeling scope of battle have so many people upset and frustrated that it's too laggy or sluggish and having those people give up or leave or think the game isn't good at all. Don't forget the promise/rumors of further tweaks and optimizations coming out soon, too. Since I can honestly say it helped my bad performance problem, I can honestly say that it should help you, if you are experiencing low fps in your gameplay - and it will look great! If anyone is still having sluggish gameplay, let me know and I can try tweaking the settings a little more to squeeze more out of it and see what happens. Whether you have to turn everything down, or if you can run it full blast, or with these tweaks, I hope you can enjoy the game eventually, and that these tweaks helped some of you at least a little bit.

*** By the way, for those worried about SOE's stance on modifying game files, etc. their Official Statement on client modification is here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/important-client-modifications.54265/ 

Quote:
"The most simple guidance here is do not use third party programs which change the Planetside 2 gameplay in any way unless it has been specifically cleared by SOE.
The above does not apply to user initiated *.INI changes, those are allowed, although setting your own options incorrectly can result in bugs."

So they are mainly talking about hacks like aimbots, memory injectors like Cheat Engine, etc.
Thankfully, merely changing how it is displayed on your own screen (as we are doing here) is O.K. Just don't set any of the settings 'too high' or you can cause problems (they call them bugs) such as corrupted display, really really laggy gameplay, and so on (don't worry, you won't hurt your hardware, the game will just crash or something similar). Thanks for letting us tweak the video options, SOE!

NOTE: When experimenting with these changes, please remember that any problems arising from them should not be added to the already heavy load of Sony Online Entertainment's Technical Support Department. Please 'reset' any modifications by deleting the UserOptions.ini file and then after further troubleshooting, bring PS2 problems to the attention of SOE and their staff. Thanks  

Also.. there seems to be a problem with long play sessions, the game gets more and more sluggish for many people. It has been suggested that is is possibly a Memory Leak problem and for now, to restart (the game and/or your system) after a long battle, so that the next one will possibly have less problems. Hopefully this isn't an issue for everyone.

[Update: Testing these settings with an NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti and then with two GTX 560 Ti's in SLI mode, there was near nil increase in performance when switching to SLI. It seems that the bottleneck truly is within the CPU optimizations.
As a sidenote, I was getting about 30fps on average with the NVIDIA cards in my system (even in SLI) and was getting about 40fps on average with the AMD/ATi card in the same system. This is normal however, as some games perform slightly better with one than the other (as the coders develop the game on one or the other/company optimizations/etc. Something could be said for AMD doing some optimizations between the videocard and the CPU when an AMD GPU is coupled with an AMD CPU in the same system, but as I do not work for the company, I do not know.. it does make sense however).]



Personal Notes/Opinions:

At the time of this posting, the game seems to have a lot of aliasing (in my opinion), even at 1080p or higher resolutions. If you want to enable AA, you can do so by forcing it in your videocard's Control Panel. FXAA (NVIDIA) and MLAA (Morphological, AMD/ATi) are both versions of post-processing that should work and be visible in the game [I tested it with AMD's MLAA, the difference is visible]. 
Note that these post-processing AA techniques may not be able to be captured in screenshots and game recordings (Fraps, Bandicam, Dxtory, Playclaw, etc) although the effects may be visible while playing the game [in some games processing such as SweetFX can be capped, some can't].
As per SOE's Official Statement and replies, use of SweetFX is NOT suggested as it is still in the category of utilities that can result in being banned:
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/important-client-modifications.54265/
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...modifications-announcement.55674/#post-692380




See you in the game!