Graphics in Outland totally buggy

[Urbin]

Now that I'm done hunting pets in Azeroth I went through the portal and that
was a really bad idea. Somehow, as soon as I set foot in Outland my textures
take minutes (!) to load (if they load at all). I'll see rough outline of
the ground and some buildings, but the minimap will not - or only partially
- load. Opening any interface will show uniform colour filling but no frame
textures, no buttons etc. No mobs show and entering the HFP inn looked like
I had x-ray glasses (http://www.ursbeeli.ch/bilder/wow_xray.jpg).

I've seen this before two weeks ago, when I briefly flew to Stormspire to
buy a missing vendor pet, but wasn't really bothered back then. But now that
I want to "tame outland" this is really annoying as it makes it impossible
to play.

I've tried this with and without addons, on several characters. Finally I
googled for "world of wordcraft outland texture problems" and found half a
dozen forum threads with loads of people having the same problem. Apparently
it's the client that detects some problem in the data files and tries to do
an "on demand repair" which just means re-downloading data from Blizzard.
Considering I downloaded the MoP client at 580 bytes per second over two
days, it's no wonder Outland is unplayable :-( (and before anyone asks: yes,
I have all the necessary ports open in my firewall and my dsl router).

Apparently the only thing that helps some people (but apparently not all) is
to uninstall wow and reinstall from scratch.

I'm not going to download 20gigs again for my remaining 10 days, so that
effectively puts an end to my pet battling progress :-(((

Ah well, at least I can go back to questing through the rest of Pandaria.

Cheers
Urbin
--
Dun Morogh-EU (PvE) | Tunyatgong (12), Monk | Juran (65), Druid
Urbin (90), Hunter | Surana (75), Mage | Greeta (65), Rogue
Mymule (85), Warlock | Kordosch (75), Deathknight | Gera (26), Paladin
Sunh (81), Priest | Taalas (85), Shaman | Vargal (42), Warrior

[ToolPackinMama]

On 10/24/2012 5:37 PM, Urbin wrote:
> Apparently the only thing that helps some people (but apparently not
all) is
> to uninstall wow and reinstall from scratch.

No!

That should not be necessary.

What operating system are you using? Maybe I can help

[k]

"ToolPackinMama" <philn...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:k69tai$40h$1...@dont-email.me...

got a friend who plays wow? copy his working game directory to a portable
drive then copy it to your PC.. and then keep the backup!

I always make sure I have a copied, backed up folder in case something goes
screwy - be damned going through that whole reinstallation process!

[| || ||| ||||| || |]

"Urbin" <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote in message
news:slrnk8gnss...@stinky-local.trash.net...

> Now that I'm done hunting pets in Azeroth I went through the portal and that
> was a really bad idea. Somehow, as soon as I set foot in Outland my textures
> take minutes (!) to load (if they load at all). I'll see rough outline of
> the ground and some buildings, but the minimap will not - or only partially
> - load. Opening any interface will show uniform colour filling but no frame
> textures, no buttons etc. No mobs show and entering the HFP inn looked like
> I had x-ray glasses (http://www.ursbeeli.ch/bilder/wow_xray.jpg).

Is it downloading a lot according to any meters you have?

It looks similar to the graphics overload I had in wotlk.
Some wow starts would work some like that. Blanks for icons, xray world and worse in
some areas than others.

If you system tools/drivers have hardware tweaking options you could try backing graphics
clocks off by 10%
record the setting before and be very careful setting them back,
there should be a default option, see if it works first
overclocking can destroy things.

[Catriona R]

On 24 Oct 2012 21:37:32 GMT, Urbin <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

>Considering I downloaded the MoP client at 580 bytes per second over two
>days, it's no wonder Outland is unplayable :-( (and before anyone asks: yes,
>I have all the necessary ports open in my firewall and my dsl router).

Have you disabled peer-to-peer transfer in the downloader? Can't help
on graphics issues but doing that made my downloads run a heck of a
lot faster, since uploading anything of any size slows downloads to a
crawl or even shuts it off entirely on my adsl connection (been the
same in two different houses so I assume it's an adsl limitation
rather than a dodgy connection). Always found it annoying to see that
I was uploading far more than I was receiving on the Blizz downloader,
thanks to the uploads blocking me from receiving downloads, no idea
why they couldn't allow a cap on upload speed to prevent that
happening, but since they didn't, it's off entirely for me now.

[Urbin]

On Thu, 25 Oct 2012 05:06:39 +0100, Catriona R wrote:
>
> On 24 Oct 2012 21:37:32 GMT, Urbin <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
> >Considering I downloaded the MoP client at 580 bytes per second over two
> >days, it's no wonder Outland is unplayable :-( (and before anyone asks: yes,
> >I have all the necessary ports open in my firewall and my dsl router).
>
> Have you disabled peer-to-peer transfer in the downloader?

Yes, believe me, I've tried every suggestion ever made, no matter how
bizzare it might have seemed when I was trying to downlad the MoP client at
500bps :-(

I have no clue what the problem is, it might even be my provider capping the
p2p ports...

[| || ||| ||||| || |]

"Urbin" <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote in message

news:slrnk8hj5k...@stinky-local.trash.net...

> On Thu, 25 Oct 2012 05:06:39 +0100, Catriona R wrote:
>>
>> On 24 Oct 2012 21:37:32 GMT, Urbin <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>
>> >Considering I downloaded the MoP client at 580 bytes per second over two
>> >days, it's no wonder Outland is unplayable :-( (and before anyone asks: yes,
>> >I have all the necessary ports open in my firewall and my dsl router).
>>
>> Have you disabled peer-to-peer transfer in the downloader?
>
> Yes, believe me, I've tried every suggestion ever made, no matter how
> bizzare it might have seemed when I was trying to downlad the MoP client at
> 500bps :-(
>
> I have no clue what the problem is, it might even be my provider capping the
> p2p ports...
>
> Cheers

capping p2p should not limit direct download
but I don't think you were doing that , it would take a year
20 gig over 2 days 10 gig a day , 417 MByte an hour, 116 kByte/sec ~ 1Mbit
If you are doing other things using all cpu idle time. like video encoding, some
download meters give incorrect figures.

[| || ||| ||||| || |]

"| || ||| ||||| || |" <|||||||||||||||||||||> wrote in message
news:5088d5ef$0$21651$c3e8da3$9f40...@news.astraweb.com...

Gah, interruptions , sorry about incomplete message

If you are getting 1 Mbit it should update the areas you are in quite quickly, so it seems
it is something else.
When playing the trial years ago on 1.5 Mbit and loading on the fly I barely noticed any
delay even with a 700-1000ms ping adding to the mix.

[Urbin]

On Thu, 25 Oct 2012 13:57:15 +0930, | || ||| ||||| || | wrote:
>
> "Urbin" <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote in message
> news:slrnk8gnss...@stinky-local.trash.net...
> > Now that I'm done hunting pets in Azeroth I went through the portal and that
> > was a really bad idea. Somehow, as soon as I set foot in Outland my textures
> > take minutes (!) to load (if they load at all). I'll see rough outline of
> > the ground and some buildings, but the minimap will not - or only partially
> > - load. Opening any interface will show uniform colour filling but no frame
> > textures, no buttons etc. No mobs show and entering the HFP inn looked like
> > I had x-ray glasses (http://www.ursbeeli.ch/bilder/wow_xray.jpg).
>
> Is it downloading a lot according to any meters you have?

I haven't checked.

Checking in the logs directory in the on-demand-repair log, it's downloading
stuff by the bucketful.

> It looks similar to the graphics overload I had in wotlk.
> Some wow starts would work some like that. Blanks for icons, xray world and worse in
> some areas than others.

The strange thing is that Azeroth, Northrend and Pandaria yield between 15
and 50 fps on medium settings. The moment I set foot in Outland, even with
every single graphics setting to the minimum value it shows this problem.

> If you system tools/drivers have hardware tweaking options you could try backing graphics
> clocks off by 10%

I would probably need to upgrade my video drivers to get access to such
tweaking settings.

[Urbin]

On Wed, 24 Oct 2012 19:23:54 -0400, ToolPackinMama wrote:
> On 10/24/2012 5:37 PM, Urbin wrote:
> > Apparently the only thing that helps some people (but apparently not
> > all) is to uninstall wow and reinstall from scratch.
>
> No!
>
> That should not be necessary.

I agree it shouldn't be necessary. However, having spent about an hour
trawling throuhg the four or five forum threads discussing this, the only
thing that solved the issue for some of the people was reinstallation.

What everyone seems to have in common is that the problem is limited to
Outland and that the on-demand-repair log shows a lot of activity.

With MoP, Blizzard removed the repair tool, so I can't even try an explicit
repair. The launcher tells me my client is complete, but once in Outland,
the client seems to think otherwise.

> What operating system are you using? Maybe I can help

Windows XP, if you have any hints, I'll be glad to hear them.

[Urbin]

On Thu, 25 Oct 2012 10:22:30 +0800, k wrote:
>
> "ToolPackinMama" <philn...@comcast.net> wrote in message
> news:k69tai$40h$1...@dont-email.me...
> > On 10/24/2012 5:37 PM, Urbin wrote:
> > > Apparently the only thing that helps some people (but apparently not
> > all) is
> > > to uninstall wow and reinstall from scratch.
> >
> > No!
> >
> > That should not be necessary.
> >
> > What operating system are you using? Maybe I can help
>
> got a friend who plays wow?

none within 500km :-)

> I always make sure I have a copied, backed up folder in case something goes
> screwy - be damned going through that whole reinstallation process!

Same here. I did that the moment the MoP client had downloaded and
installed. I already restored from that, but the problem persists, so it
seems even the fresh MoP install has this problem :-(

[| || ||| ||||| || |]

"Urbin" <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote in message

news:slrnk8hml5...@stinky-local.trash.net...

Did you set view distance down? the xray shows a very large distance and it isn't
clipping.
Sounds like it is trying to download everything, and Outland has a lot of floating things.
If you stay still and look at the ground or up in the sky does it eventually catch up?

[Urbin]

I set every single video setting to its minimum value except for the
resolution.

> the xray shows a very large distance and it isn't clipping.

That screenshot was taken before reducing the video settings, but doing that
didn't really change things much.

> Sounds like it is trying to download everything, and Outland has a lot of floating things.
> If you stay still and look at the ground or up in the sky does it eventually catch up?

That depends on your understanding of "eventually" :-) In some situations it
catches up partially after a few minutes, but as soon as I open up another
window (say the guild roster or the spell book or - worst of all - the map),
the waiting starts again. Or if I move to another place within the zone.

I suspect that all my outland data files are corrupt/damaged and there is no
way of redownloading them explicitely as far as I know (plus I wouldn't know
how to identify which files are concerned). Funny that quite a few people
have the problem but many others don't. Might have been an issue of the p2p
method of distributing... if corrupt data gets downloaded to a few and then
keeps getting uploaded by them. On the other hand, a good checksum algorithm
would catch something like this.

Interestingly enough, in all five threads on the forum (where several dozen
people report having the problem) there is exactly one blue post who
advocates... yes you guessed right, ... deleting WTF, Cache and Interface.

Ah well, thanks for your help.

[Neil Cerutti]

On 2012-10-25, Urbin <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> I suspect that all my outland data files are corrupt/damaged
> and there is no way of redownloading them explicitely as far as
> I know (plus I wouldn't know how to identify which files are
> concerned). Funny that quite a few people have the problem but
> many others don't. Might have been an issue of the p2p method
> of distributing... if corrupt data gets downloaded to a few and
> then keeps getting uploaded by them. On the other hand, a good
> checksum algorithm would catch something like this.

Is it in the realm of possiblity that those files are for some
reason unwritable by the WoW process? They could somehow be
locked, have bad security settings, or be marked read-only.

--
Neil Cerutti

[Urbin]

Ha, I'll grant you hero status!

I just right clicked my WoW directory and noticed that "read-only" had the
grey checkmark indicating that some files are r/w while others are r/o
(though that only tells about the directory itself, not the stuff in
subdirs). I removed the mark and applied recursively, then ported to Shatt.

It still took about 2 minutes for all textures to load and switching zones
takes some time, but after that it seems to be ok. I tamed three pets
already. I'll check tomorrow if this fix is persistent or only a lucky
coincidence :-)

Cheers
Urbin, happy

[| || ||| ||||| || |]

"Urbin" <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote in message

news:slrnk8j9m9...@stinky-local.trash.net...

> On 25 Oct 2012 19:52:34 GMT, Neil Cerutti wrote:
>> On 2012-10-25, Urbin <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> > I suspect that all my outland data files are corrupt/damaged
>> > and there is no way of redownloading them explicitely as far as
>> > I know (plus I wouldn't know how to identify which files are
>> > concerned). Funny that quite a few people have the problem but
>> > many others don't. Might have been an issue of the p2p method
>> > of distributing... if corrupt data gets downloaded to a few and
>> > then keeps getting uploaded by them. On the other hand, a good
>> > checksum algorithm would catch something like this.
>>
>> Is it in the realm of possiblity that those files are for some
>> reason unwritable by the WoW process? They could somehow be
>> locked, have bad security settings, or be marked read-only.
>
> Ha, I'll grant you hero status!
>
> I just right clicked my WoW directory and noticed that "read-only" had the
> grey checkmark indicating that some files are r/w while others are r/o
> (though that only tells about the directory itself, not the stuff in
> subdirs). I removed the mark and applied recursively, then ported to Shatt.
>
> It still took about 2 minutes for all textures to load and switching zones
> takes some time, but after that it seems to be ok. I tamed three pets
> already. I'll check tomorrow if this fix is persistent or only a lucky
> coincidence :-)
>

I hope so, ask enough questions and a hero will answer, but hope you can hear them after
the fools have had their say :-)

in my usual scattergun approach I was going to suggest antivirus or other app locking
( I do NOT press random buttons, I employ stochastic debugging techniques )
applications can hang locks on files preventing access

What can be more of a lock than a disk r/w flag? :-)


Don't forget to give a rundown to the blizzard forums if it seems to work.

[Neil Cerutti]

On 2012-10-25, Urbin <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 25 Oct 2012 19:52:34 GMT, Neil Cerutti wrote:
>> On 2012-10-25, Urbin <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> > I suspect that all my outland data files are corrupt/damaged
>> > and there is no way of redownloading them explicitely as far as
>> > I know (plus I wouldn't know how to identify which files are
>> > concerned). Funny that quite a few people have the problem but
>> > many others don't. Might have been an issue of the p2p method
>> > of distributing... if corrupt data gets downloaded to a few and
>> > then keeps getting uploaded by them. On the other hand, a good
>> > checksum algorithm would catch something like this.
>>
>> Is it in the realm of possiblity that those files are for some
>> reason unwritable by the WoW process? They could somehow be
>> locked, have bad security settings, or be marked read-only.
>
> Ha, I'll grant you hero status!

[ Achievement Unocked ]

> I just right clicked my WoW directory and noticed that
> "read-only" had the grey checkmark indicating that some files
> are r/w while others are r/o (though that only tells about the
> directory itself, not the stuff in subdirs). I removed the mark
> and applied recursively, then ported to Shatt.
>
> It still took about 2 minutes for all textures to load and
> switching zones takes some time, but after that it seems to be
> ok. I tamed three pets already. I'll check tomorrow if this fix
> is persistent or only a lucky coincidence :-)

Awesome! Best of luck.

--
Neil Cerutti

[Urbin]

On Fri, 26 Oct 2012 07:39:13 +0930, | || ||| ||||| || | wrote:
> "Urbin" <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote in message
> >

> > I'll check tomorrow if this fix is persistent or only a lucky
> > coincidence :-)
>
> I hope so

Played for about 45 minutes during the day, flying through the rest of the
Outland zones. Each of them took some time (maybe 45 seconds when entering
and two or three more breaks of about 20 seconds while moving around) to
load, but once everything was loaded (including going back to zones I had
already seen yesterday) went smoothly without delay. Yay!

> What can be more of a lock than a disk r/w flag? :-)

Except I have no clue how they got locked... weird but I'm happy it helped.

> Don't forget to give a rundown to the blizzard forums if it seems to work.

Yepp, I'll do that.

Cheers
Urbin

[| || ||| ||||| || |]

"Urbin" <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote in message

news:slrnk8obv1...@stinky-local.trash.net...

> On Fri, 26 Oct 2012 07:39:13 +0930, | || ||| ||||| || | wrote:
>> "Urbin" <ur...@invalid.invalid> wrote in message
>> >
>> > I'll check tomorrow if this fix is persistent or only a lucky
>> > coincidence :-)
>>
>> I hope so
>
> Played for about 45 minutes during the day, flying through the rest of the
> Outland zones. Each of them took some time (maybe 45 seconds when entering
> and two or three more breaks of about 20 seconds while moving around) to
> load, but once everything was loaded (including going back to zones I had
> already seen yesterday) went smoothly without delay. Yay!
>
>> What can be more of a lock than a disk r/w flag? :-)
>
> Except I have no clue how they got locked... weird but I'm happy it helped.

Sounds like a fix , yay!
Now fly around a lot , get the changes in and save it :-)
Yeah, would be good to see if others on the forums find the same thing and find how it
happened.
A pity there isn't some log to say why it was reloading, maybe there is somewhere.
I can see why there wouldn't. A lot would just worry and every thing reported is
potentially exploitable.

>> Don't forget to give a rundown to the blizzard forums if it seems to work.
>
> Yepp, I'll do that.

And a special thank you to the person wearing a halo over there ----->