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Diablo II Version History
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- Patch 1.05
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Major bugs

- Fixed copy-protection for various CD, DVD, and CD-R drives.
- Barbarians wielding two potions are no longer prevented from entering games.
- Socketed items were mistakenly and irreversibly de-randomized in 1.04. Now their gem effect values are taken from the upper end of their original (pre-1.04) random ranges.
- Fixed all spell ranges. They were mistakenly reduced in v1.04.
- Fixed a bug that prevented deleting some Characters.
- Fixed numerous foreign language display problems.

Minor bugs

- Fixed a bug in the trade screen when the Horadric Cube was open.
- Duplicate ladder entries should no longer occur.
- The Ladders scroll properly now when there are less than 999 entries.
- Realm characters should no longer appear as robed.
- Fixed a bug allowing users to appear in a channel twice.
- If the user cannot connect to a default realm, a "Realm down" message is displayed.
- Fixed the "packet sniffing" exploit used when gambling.
- High-durability items no longer lose durability when you join a game after exiting or dying.
- The Conversion skill no longer causes a monster counting error in the Den of Evil.

Improvements

- A prompt now appears informing the user to delete characters when they have greater than eight characters in a Realm.
- Player profiles now have a link to their ladder records, if they are in the top 999.
- A "connecting to realm" message was added.

Balance Changes

- The Paladin's Concentration skill now enhances the damage of Blessed Hammer just as it did in 1.03. The damage displayed on the Character screen is correct, too.
- The Amazon's Strafe skill now correctly enhances base bow damage rather than total bow damage.
- The Amazon's Guided Arrow skill now enhances base bow damage rather than total bow damage.

[mac freak]

Damn, they still haven't fixed the but that screws the damage on exec swords...

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Be Happy.

[graphics84]

still no fix for the Paladin when playing in a Multiplayer Game...

he misses more than he hits....

I expect a game like Diablo 2 to play better or as well as a 3-d shooter. I play (try to) Diablo 2 on a B&W G3 with 256MB Ram(VM off) and the game is still chopppy. Maybe it is ATI's driver problem, but Blizzard should be able to make the game function more fluidly. Other game developers with more graphic-intensive games can!

Well, I don't think it's ATI's fault. I'm on a 300 MHz G3 and it's pretty amazingly choppy at times. I'm not sure why it needs so much more processing power than its predecessor. Fancy lighting, I guess.

Turn off all the unnecessary graphical crap. you can essentially double your fps by doing so. And turn off the music, that eats up a lot of CPU cycles and severly impacts game speed. Also, when playing single player, I'd recommend hosting a game. Singleplayer locks your fps at 24, and tends to drop below that number quite frequently (even on my G4 400), but multiplayer has no fps cap. But when there is studdering,rather than pausing the game, the game will go into fast forward after the temporary freeze.

[mac freak]

On a low-end G3, even if you have a macho video card, software rendering is the way to go.... should yield around 30 FPS (like it does on my beige G3/300. Of course, on my G4/450x2 with a Radeon, I get 65-70 FPS, but that's beside the point ).

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Be Happy.

If Diablo II is stuttering badly (especially if the stuttering occurs when entering a new area), try copying the Music file to your hard drive (dump it in the same folder as the rest of the DII files, like graphics).
On my 9600 w/ G3 400 upgrade, this changed performance from unbearable to snappy.

Originally posted by TheGibe:
If Diablo II is stuttering badly (especially if the stuttering occurs when entering a new area), try copying the Music file to your hard drive (dump it in the same folder as the rest of the DII files, like graphics).
On my 9600 w/ G3 400 upgrade, this changed performance from unbearable to snappy.

i copied every single data file from all three cds to the diablo 2 folder and it runs with out skipping, except when you first start the game up, but after that, smoooth sailing ( this isn't recommended, unless you have about about 1.5 gigs to waste/use up.)

[olePigeon]

Bliazzard just can't program, period. You can get dynamic lighting and beautiful graphics on any other game without the processor limitatations of Diablo II.

For the gods' sake, it's a 2D game and it bogs down on a G4 500 if you have a Necromancer out with lots of critters.

Blizzard programmes about as well as you can eat a Taco while driving.

[error404ts]

I think the choppiness is due (in a very big way) to ATI's drivers. I have a DP G4/450 with a Radeon card and the play is pretty choppy at times, even with all files on my HD. It got worse when I upgraded the driver from Radeon 1.0 to 1.1.1 - the play became unplayable and had to reinstall old drivers.

C'mon, ATI - et with it. Blizzard, too. They were so happy to have Apple machines come with a standard chipset so programming would be easier.

Anyone know what play is like on a PC?

When playing on PentiumII400 with GeForce 1 it plays well but is choppy when there´s lot of activity onscreen.

In general the game seems to eat computer resources badly. On PB G3 400 it is CHOPPY toplay. My LVL 50 paladin that I played with on the PC now dies because of the limitations in the hardware. In hi-level play there are small margins....

[GravitationX]

You guys seem to be forgetting how processor intensive a game of this type is... In your typical shoot-em-up game, the processor is only used for sound/basic AI. In Diablo II, especially with lots of characters, the CPU is computing random movement, dynamic lighting for EACH of those characters, projectile locations, (and there can be over 500 at any given time) particle effects, random hit/damage/terrain generation, and in multiplayer, the fact that the simulation also has to occur on the server causes a lot of data to be constantly transfered from the server to the client, again, slowing down the simulation somewhat. If you think Blizzard's programmers suck, why did you buy the game? Because you wanted to play it? That's what I thought.

Graphics84, you are so right.. I was hoping for that in 1.05, to have the paladin fixed. Oh well, I guess I just have to wait longer to actually play my favourite character.

I have owned Diablo 2 since August. I have played single player, on a closed lan, on a realm character and on several hardcore realm characters. I have found a few things that might surprise you about the "lag" in diablo 2.

As a previous poster mentioned there is a lot going on in the game that you dont see on the screen. All the enemies for a section thier location, stats, items carried, items in chests, terrain and so forth. Now I dont have access to the code but if you were a programmer when would you come up with this data?

Would you load it for every area of the game when the user started? No, that would take forever and waste tons of memory.
Would you load only the mosters that are on the players screen? No. as well as making no sense, that wouldn't work well at all.

Somewhere between those two extreemes lie the way that Blizzard did it. From my playing experience in single player or a closed lan game the host computer churns big time when entering new areas. This doesnt always mean like going into the burial grounds from the cold plains, but usually going into kurast bazar from say the docs waypoint. So if I had to guess, periodically the computer in charge of hosting the game has to create the monster stuff for all of the "areas" that any of the connected players are. In single player games you'll notice that when ever you enter one of those new areas your fps will fall dramtically for a few seconds and your hd will churn. There's nothing you can do about that. Well almost nothing...

The answer to the problem is surprisingly bnet itself. Blizzard has the only software to run a dedicated Dialbo 2 server. Bnet games dont experience the lag associated with entering new areas because the server doesn't have to worry about drawing up any of the client overhead that a normal user's computer does. I was shocked when I first noticed that a bnet game on my campus's t3 was faster than a privatly hosted multiplayer game on a 100MB ethernet.

The trick is to not play on bnet when every gamer and his brother is on. Bnet is usually way too lagy from 7pm to 1:30 am EST on the USEast relm. Other than those times it's clear sailing barring an update or other internet outage type problem.

So if you want the best, non-jerky gaming experience go for bnet realm games durring the day or late at night.

Stoner

Hi there,

I haven't read in the whole bunch of messages anyone talking about units sprites, then i am :

Diablo 2 uses a very big amount of graphic elements, for the unis (16 frames or so for each part of the units, in 16 directions), that's a lot of ram. They use internally a graphic data cache, that's filled in and freed up when entering a new area. Here's why there is frame rate dropping.

The second issue, is 3D acceleration, and RAM transfers to VRAM. The graphical elements are stored in conventionnal memory in a packed form. To be used by a hardware rasterizer, the diablo 2 engine needs to unpack the sprites if they are not, then transfert them to the VRAM of the card, in 16bits i presume, and that a REALLY big resource eater, not for the CPU, but for the AGP bus... AGP sucks, and 3D cards simply cannot transfer a lots of datas beetween conventionnal RAM (eg SRAM) to VRAM (video ram)... I presume the more VRAM your video card gets, the more fluid fps will go...

I was very disappointed when i so the fps on my Athlon 1.1G/GeForce for the first time, in 3D acceleration mode (40fps, and lots of drops), compared to a Voodoo2 version, on a P3 300M... (60fps, less drops)

Hope this could help...

Simply play in ddraw mode, if you're on PC...