T'Kiera wrote: |
One thing I noticed that I hate already is that it will close out any programs running that it deems resource hogs prior to it opening the game. I was watching a movie on my computer and it closed it and a bunch of other programs - and it does it without asking.
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I'm using it and I found the following:
Everything that it can do, you can selectively control/edit.
You can select every system modification or app that you want or don't want it to close down if you tinker with it. Just go into the manual settings.
The park control feature is great, I was using a dedicated app for that called Park Control. It's a feature that while the game is running, keeps your system from "parking" or not utilizing any of your processor's cores. If they do park then unpark, it can in theory cause slight pauses or hiccups in game performance.
There's a feature called Game Desktop which closes everything on your system including Windows Explorer, meaning that it totally dedicates your system to the game only. This means that the computer is kinda like a console in that you're only running the game and a minimal amount of stuff to keep the system going. I wouldn't do this unless your system is pretty stable to begin with. If your system tends to hang or crash while playing STO any more than once a day or so on average, I'd avoid this feature. I would also avoid it if you like to tab out of the game and go to a web browser while playing. This feature makes it so the game is about the only thing running, so there's nothing to tab out to! However, I found that on my system, which is now very stable since I ditched the insane graphics card that I had last year, it works great. I just use my smartphone when I want to research something on the web.
The app will close down every other app not require to play the game by default, but as I mentioned, you can go into a list of them and uncheck ones that you want to remain running. T'Kiera might have had the Game Desktop feature checked, which just blanket closes down everything using the shotgun approach.
In the future, once the silver thingies are awarded from running the game through the Razer app, what you do is log into the app [gives you a silver coin award just for logging in], then you go to Games, and launch STO from there. Even if you have Steam, it will launch Steam and launch the game successfully, just tested that.
My recommendations are:
The app seems pretty handy, and I do recommend it. It will take a long time to get enough silver coins to outright claim some hardware loot, but it won't take too long to get between a $5 to $20 discount at their store.
Do run the park control feature, highly recommended if you get in-game lag, timouts or pauses. Usually most notable when playing mini-games like dilithium mining or the wavelength/particle ones.
Don't run the Game Desktop feature unless you want to dedicate your computer as an STO only playing platform, to squeeze out the most resources to make it perform, and only do it if your system is already rock solid stable. Because if you CTD you'll have to do a hard/power off restart, most likely.
[Thought I just had on this subject- this feature actully could be VERY useful for those of you that have chronic crash to desktop (CTD) problems in STO. If you run this feature and CTDs go away, then you know that there's another app that is interfering with the game. Plus it solves that problem, potentially. You might even be able to figure out what app or process it is that is causing the conflict by going through the checkboxes and re-enabling all the programs one by one until the problem returns. If this feature works for you and you no longer get CTDs then it's a good bet that something else running on the machine is causing your problem.]
Make sure that before you run the game in it, you go through the settings and check/uncheck all the apps and stuff that the gizmo will allow or disable.
The way I have it set, it clears 1.6 Gigs of RAM before launching the game [10% of my total, not bad!] I run the dedicated Game Desktop with Park Control, and as long as I don't have the urge to ALT-TAB out to another window or app that no longer exists, everything is great!
Have run it last two days like this and the game runs great. Requires tweaking to get it the way you want it. I spent at least 1/2 hour going through it all.
I haven't run it with Discord yet, will do that next and figure out if anything special needs to be done to run that at the same time, and if there is any way it can run while Gamer Desktop is enabled.