Starcraft II on M11x - General Discussion

I just got hands on Starcraft II, I was one of the last ones to get it before it sold out. If you want to know how it runs let me know. I'm downloading the game right now and it's at 95%, and I bought the hard copy at a local game store. I'll update my status soon..

 

you can play the game at high settings with high performance battery power with ease. i was in the beta and it was a dream playing on this bad boy

 

maybe the retail will run even better. hopefully on ultra settings P: gotta try it out

 

Wow! I still don't have my m11x yet... Can you still have a nice framerate in 3v3 or 4v4 huge battles? Not on ultra, high would be enough...

 

how was the launch btw:? did they have the dude in a marine costume?

 

is it playable without disc by online verification?? or do you need the disc??

 

you do not need the disc. Just verify it with the code, however you buy it. It seems that the code is linked to your account name instead of the CD or game itself, which would allow for playing games without the CD.

 

you can also download the digital copy once you activate your bnet account

 

Can you save your game offline? I mean when you are playing a campaign and you want to save your progress, can you do that without connecting to battlenet?

 

it seems everything at the moment is done online. I need to sign on to my account in order to play singleplayer.

 

It seems that this game is MORE cpu hungry than I expected!.

I LOVE IT

 

Oh my god... I can't even play my game offline... What kind of game is this... MMO?

 

Ya I'm curious to see how they will fix this for us laptop users.
If they won't then I am sure the scene will fix it soon enough, and I won't feel bad about it.

 

Yes you can certainly play it offline. People are just still groggy from the midnight release.

Everyone calm down and get some more caffeine.

If SC2 has a network connection it asks you (and expects you) to log into Battle.net. If your machine doesn't have a network connection or it can't talk to the Battle.net servers it lets you play the single player campaign just fine in offline mode.

Now you do have to activate it once via Battle.Net before it will allow that, but it works just fine.

 

Runs pretty well on my M11x. Played only single player first mission so far though. Settings are generally high.

 

Thanks mwaldron!
Wasn't sure yet how they were making it work, just picked my CE up and now i have 8 hours of work left, hahah ouch!

 

I picked up my copy last night at midnight. All I wanted out of the CE was the thumbdrive, and since I've heard you can't sell the wow pets this time around I decided to not spend the extra $40 on the CE just for a thumbdrive I want for my shelf.

I'm sitting here at work with my m11x next to my monitor, SC2 is installed and patched but all I have done is watched the intro video and tested the network less start-up.

It's painful. I may take my m11x to lunch with me...

 

You don't look well. I'd head home and get some rest. Tell your boss I OK'd it.

 

Its being delivered or me today.
M11X R1 - So what settings? For the phase 1 beta I could use medium at native res. Didn't play phase 2.

 

I just wanna finish work, pick up my pre-order from ebgames and then go and play it. 2.5 more hours!!!

 

Thanks slickie, I'll tell him you said so.

 

What settings are eveyone playing on? I've tried playing on Ultra settings (with Medium shadows), and it seems to work fine for me so far. But then again, I'm only 1 mission in.

 

Trying to download it now, but I keep getting "tracker not responding"
Anyone else getting this or could it just be my works firewall blocking me?

 

Hopefully not from a P2P site.
If you are, you're on your own.
If it's through blizz's program it's probably dieing under stress.. hahah

 

That's a firewall issue, related to trying to download a patch. Blizzard uses bittorrent peer-to-peer file sharing to distribute patches. The "tracker not responding" is the bittorrent tracker that isn't responding.

I would either try and reconfigure your firewall, or just wait. You will still be able to download the patch - at a much slower transfer rate than if your firewall was unblocked, but it should still work eventually.

 

Yeah off blizzards site, I will just let the thing idle for awhile, I am backing up files in the background anyways. Then bring it home after work and re-try running it all.

 

It sucks.....Starcraft 2 is running perfectly on my main, but on my M11X, the dedicated chip isn't coming on. Tried whitelisting it and everything....looks like Im gonna have to wait for one of those magical invisible Nvidia Optimus downloads before I can play this sucker on the go!

 

try differrent driver. workin fine here.

 

Try using the 258.96 drivers with modded INF. I'm running that, and have no problems with Starcarft 2.

 

M11X R1
1280x720
Textures Mefium
Shaders, lighting, shadows Low
Terrain medium
Reflections off
Effects medium
Post processing low
Physics low
Models high
Unit portraits 3D
Movies low

Fps 40-60
Campaign 1mission
On straight medium they dipped in the 20s
Using 258.96 drivers with game booster, battery on high performance

 

that bad? I thought ppl were playing it on high.

 

Im playing at High /Med settings with low lights and med shadows online 4v4. Getting 30 frames avg during end game. may drop to 18 with allot of AI but deff playable (R1 OC)

 

Yeah I am playing campaign still working with settings, doesn't look bad at all

 

Anyone care to report on the framerates for the R2 i7 for the SC2 retail? Please include your settings. What are the dips like?

I have not gotten my copy yet, but was just curious.

 

I just fired it up and experienced the same thing here. I'm on stock drivers with an R2. Now I have to choose the 258 drivers and lose BFBC2 support

 

Well, I am still hoping to hear from people who are using the latest nVidia drivers and playing SC2..... and not using the stock drivers that arrived with your m11x. I am pretty certain the latest drivers(258+) are able to fire up the dedicated GPU well for SC2 and the majority of other games.

 

I'm running the latest drivers and the game set to high quality. I've had no problems at all so far, although at one point it did tell me to reduce quality. I saw no jerkiness nor any noticeable frame rate decrease.

Sorry, I don't run fraps or anything else so I have no hard numbers and can only report what I saw. The nVidia card recognized me playing SC2 and fired up as expected. No additional work or setup was required on my part.

I have only played the first two missions of the single player campaign so far.

 

UPDATE : So, being a little agitated with this, I installed a copy of Driver Cleaner on my M11X and then proceeded to uninstall my stock drivers, clean over them with driver cleaner and then I installed the latest drivers from Dells site, 257.30 (the ones that came out on the 19/07/10)

Fired up Starcraft and the GPU came on perfectly......and it also came on in Bad Company 2...didn't notice too much of a difference in quality between BFBC2 before the driver switch and after. As well as this, my copy of Star Wars : Empire at War on steam wasn't working with the stock Drivers.....its working perfectly right now. Optimus is gonna be so awesome in a month or two (and it ain't half bad right now!!!)

StarCraft II is really awesome so far......I never got into the first Starcraft because I was only a kid when it came out, so I got the Collectors edition of SCII and I've really been enjoying all the behind the scenes retrospectives and stuff. Looking forward to getting really into it shortly!!!

 

great to hear, same here sc1 came out when i was 7 so i would just mess around and play fun games with my cousins, got the ce too looking foward to play competitively. sadly im still waiting for it to download xD

 

Crazy. I was already 20 when Starcraft was released. Man you make me feel old!
You guys should really go back and play SC1, it's a great game, just ignore the horrible graphics


Denholm, did you play BFBC2 online with PB enabled without getting booted for punkbuster multi-display issues?

It usually only takes 5 minutes to get booted from a PB enabled server with any of the 25x.x series drivers. At least that's been my experience with the R2.

 

@mad
haha mybad xD yeah i started playing sc1 again to get ready for 2 still going to until its done installing+patching =]
yay 100th post ^^

 

I'm playing campaign on medium with about 20fps on the r2 i5

 

Best part of the CE is that it comes with a sweet little USB dogtag which has the original Starcraft on it (it boots off the USB. As in, I don't need to install it on a PC, I just run it off the USB.) But Starcraft is only 1.3GB, So I loaded the other 700mb with a bunch of apps from portableapps.com (felt kinda appropriate to make this my "use my stuff on any PC USB drive)

@ madpacket : I didn't try it online, just tried the single player. I generally don't play much multiplayer. I've always been a bit more of a single player guy myself. Ill give it a go tomorrow after work to see if I get kicked off (so like in about 16 hours). Oh yeah, and by multi -display, does that mean its throwing off the error when you play it on a TV??? Cos if so, then I'll factor that into my tests. EDIT : Tried it briefly tonite and I could hardly even get it to load a punkbuster related match, so I might be a while getting back to you on that.

 

So let me get this straight. I can buy the boxed version of the game, use a code that comes in the boxed game and enter it at the battle.net site, which then let's me download the full digital version of the game into the driveless m11x? At no extra cost?

 

yup.just log onto bnet. and add the serial key to your account, and it will let you download it

 

Fan-freakin-tastic!

 

That is the same model they use for World of Warcraft, too. Once you purchase the game, and enter the product key, you can freely download the game client from battle.net. since WoW and Starcraft 2 depend on an active connection and a valid account to Battle.net, they don't need to worry about copy protecting the media.

Hypothetically, you can make illegal copies of the media and game files all you want... but if you do not have a valid Battle.net account with a valid product key associated with your account, then you cannot play the game. Trying to pirate the game by making copies of it becomes useless. So trying to protect distribution of the media becomes irrelevant.

Blizzard is smart enough to know that they need to give you something for the added hassle of requiring you to be online and log in each time you want to play the game. So they give you things like freely downloadable game clients, and friends lists through Battle.net. it is the same model that Steam successfully uses.

 

i think someone here mentioned that for SC2 only during the first time due to the need to activate the product with your key. after which you dont actually need to have active connection to play the game. in terms of single player of cuz.

 

So I am sticking with the settings I posted for the M11X R1. I was on a mission that had rain and it was getting into the 20s, otherwise its up in the 50s and 60s. It looks good to me. Being able to connect to my plasma and play, totally worth it. I found that 1280x720 is overscanned and it doesn't give any custom resolution options, so 1280x800 is the next one that fits right. I could do a screen fit for 1280x720 probably but then I can't have ther pixel shifting. Anyway getting off topic, love this game on the m11x. Desktop gaming in a portable case.

 

is it normal that the installation screen runs using the IGP instead of the 335m?