Nah, I think people are just worried their third-party cheat programs aren't 64bit-client compatible...
Forgive me if I am wrong but don't the more populated servers suffer the most from the major lag issue EQ has? Why would you guys further the problem before its fixed by making all servers more populated? Seems like if you guys haven't been able to solve the lag issue in 3 yrs, likely because its from the server migration "upgrades" not actually being upgrades. Maybe you should be server dividing ie splitting up some prior mergers creating more servers with less population.
So they have ambitious goals, which the current team(which is capable of making ToL) can't manage... If she is talking about EQ1, it could mean that the next "project" will require more assets than a regular expansion. Right after they finished the content for an expansion and upgraded to 64bit... smells like a very welcome graphical revamp... or that the next expansion will be Impressive...
Wonder if the 64 bit client will make use of the many cores available on most processors these days. Heck... maybe even push some of that work out to the graphics card. Would certainly make things run alot smoother
Curious how many new models and/or animations there are in ToL? Ttobey said he and Covic (both from EQ2) spend about 60%-Eq2 40%-EQ. I get the impression possibly less this time around? My prediction is, art hires would be to staff them up to a proper level for the modeling and animation work that EQ should be getting.
I assure you, those cheat programs will be compatible with any 64-bit client they can launch on the same day the change goes live. They profit from it, they won't just say "oh, it's too much work". If anything, making it 64-bit and getting it in line with industry standards makes the live of those people easier. Going by past "updates", the change to 64-bit will be forced on all the playerbase because EQ Devs do not have the resources nor the willingness to maintain 2 copies of a client, nor allow for backwards compatibility. It will be played as a "woops" moment for a couple days, then they will say "yeah, no, we can't roll it back, suck it" same as the Win7 upgrade. Sure, It will affect maybe 2% of the playerbase, but that's still 2% less players. And to all those people saying "Oh, but they will add new skins, and maps, and effects, and vr support, and the bazaar will go to 4 trillion PP, and we will get facerig support, and it will cure cancer".... No, this is just a technical change to their backend that won't imply any change to the frontend. It's just to make the devs life easier. Personally, one of my PCs is old enough that the processor is just not compatible with a 64-bit OS, so i would need to do a full upgrade, all to play a single 20 years old game, on a computer that otherwise is working perfectly fine for office work (i mean, i could salvage the SSD and a couple screws maybe)... so yea, screw that. .
I do as well. I also remember when one part of SoE was telling folks that they wouldn't need Direct X compatible hardware and the other side was planning to force everyone to have equipment that WAS compatible with Direct X. The Luck-Lin launch was a fiasco on several levels, but the poor communication of that time drove a lot of folks into the arms of competitors. I do hope that the lines of communication from ops. folks and devs. to players will be significantly better this time.
If it is in order to be adequately staffed for the next expansion, isn't it a bit early to hire new artists so soon? I get the impression that the ambitions aren't expansion-related... but if it is, we might get a return to "proper-sized" expansion like VoA. My guess is that the 64bit upgrade, allows them to turn up their level of ambition... whatever that means... either way Im optimistic....
Just a note on this; you literally are missing that there are changes they want to make, that the client being 32bit prevents them from doing. Once they make those changes, there is generally not going to be any going back. Sure they could fork the code as 32-bit and 64-bit and maintain some legacy servers for people who refuse to upgrade... I don't see this being worth the effort on their part. Plus it would almost certainly be totally frozen at that point. the servers will always be an option, and all of them are using an old 32bit client.
Nope, it is an upgrade for the backend AND the frontend...read the OP again. My prediction: 32bit is dead...
I'm saying they need their own staff capable of modeling and animating, not 40% or less of EQ2 staff. For all things they would do. Not just expansions. They still have Art Direction (last I checked) and some staff that identify as 'art'. I feel they are 'staffing a full house'. (my guess)
Multi-threading is different than the bit the program is compiled in. 32-bit and 64-bit apps can be multi-threaded, but its a whole heck of a lot harder to manage. When you have to block execution anyway to have an order of execution of your processes, multi-threading can't help you. It's better for photo/video processing where you can have multiple processing jobs that combine into one output.
I guess life is full of coincidences. I just thinking about EQ being 64-bit a few days ago and thought yeah I can't see that ever happening. And here we are ...
I would like to echo a statement made by other people on server mergers, fix the lag, stop doing other things. Merging servers with lag like it is will make people quite the game until there are few enough people that the game is some semblance of playable. I don't know how this is possible but you all seem to not grasp how bad the lag is and how bad its been for years and how unacceptable this is.
Don't forget its not just the client going 64 bit they are upgrading the servers to 64 bit as well. I think that would have a fair impact on overall game performance as well. What would be really nice too is if they also updated the graphics engine to one that can handle DX12 and not just almost totally ignore our GPU's
Efficient use of multicore requires a much more fundamental rewrite, even the basic algorithms and dataflow will have to be changed, it is a much bigger leap than the 32bit -> 64bit jump. They could probably split up disjunct parts of the client, like having music playback(which won't need to sync with other subsystems) on its own core. But otherwise it would require some extensive refactoring. Same for modern GPUs, a computer with a modern GPU is a very different architecture than a computer with DX9 graphics. Finding out what can be pushed to the GPU, is just as hard as rewriting it from scratch. I am not saying it can't be done(or that it isn't a good idea), but I don't expect it to happen for awhile.
On the other hand, this stuck out at me. They may be 'farming out' some art work, rather than fully 'staffing up'.
They are already "farming out" to https://lakshyadigital.com/ But they are not asking for more partners, they are asking for more inhouse artists.
