City Of Heroes: Client Performance Profiler Revisited

SuperMartin, Cryptic Studios Programmer, visits the Client Performance Profiler Thread once again. Here's what he had to say today:

Pacur, a player from the City of Heroes Community states:

I simply cannot take screenshots normally anymore. I used to be able to, but now I simply can't. Every time I do, the game freezes, the music sometimes wither loops or just disappears altogether. It freezes for about 10-15 seconds and then everything is back to normal.

SuperMartin responds:

I have no idea if this will help, but you might want to try moving all the screenshots that are currently in the screenshots folder into another folder.

BrimstoneGale, another player from the City of Heroes Community asked:

What kind of an error in code could result in simple blob shadows causing such significant slow down in performance?

SuperMartin's answer:

Honestly I don't know what the problem was with the shadows, but we're unlikely to reveal any low level code details unless doing so is necessary in order to provide a pre-patch temporary fix.

Jitter, a player from the City of Heroes community, who is experincing the same issue as Pacur says:

I have this exact problem, most of the time now. Oddly, it is only *most* of the time. Some of the time, screenshots are lightning fast, as they used to be, back in the day. So, it's not the number of shots in the directory. I tried it with and without HeroStats running, and it made no difference.

SuperMartin responds:

Trying using "screenshottga" instead of "screenshot". Maybe the JPEG encoder is taking a long time. It seems to stall pretty long, but not 15 seconds. TGAs are much faster. We may have switched the "screenshot" command from TGAs to JPEGs at some point.

Or were you previously getting fast performance from the JPEG version?

Here's the Thread