I've had no reason to look at DBG.TXT before, but another thread about persistent disconnects on zoning piqued my curiosity, so I took a look at it on my own system. I was a bit taken aback by the number of errors and failures I see listed. Things like: [Thu Nov 12 18:00:57 2015]00769:LIT data has 0 vertices, expeect it to have 25 vertices, so LIT data is being ignored! and [Thu Nov 12 18:00:58 2015]00770:Requested too many buffered vertices (25498). [Thu Nov 12 18:00:58 2015]00771:CBufferSet::AllocateVertices() failed. [Thu Nov 12 18:00:58 2015]00772:CRender::CreateBatchDefinitionSimpleModel() failed. and many like this: [Thu Nov 12 17:55:18 2015]007593DXCreateTextureFromFileEx()failed to create texture glittersp501.ddsforparticle system. [Thu Nov 12 18:00:25 2015]00600:CRender::CreateBatchWithoutColor() failed. [Thu Nov 12 18:00:25 2015]00601:Invalid render material type. Hundreds of errors that sound terrible. And here I thought my system was working pretty well! It's a moderately good system, with an 8-core 4ghz AMD processor, 16gb ram, SSD for system and EQ, GTX 960 video... I usually don't get bothersome lag, I can run through the lobby without having to detour around the crowd in the center, and I seldom crash on zoning... maybe once every few weeks I'll hit a spell where I crash a few times, but then the problem goes away. So. Is this normal? I used to be a programmer, many years ago. In my day we used things like debug logs, but if there were any errors we FIXED them. I cannot imagine shipping a system that spawned a continuous stream of errors like this. I'm impressed that it just keeps going, and seems basically to get the job done anyway, but it worries me. What's going on here? Is this the way code is written today, expecting lots of failures and still plowing ahead?
I don't recall ever seeing a clean dbg.txt. I do appreciate that at least some things are logged though so if you're experiencing breaking issues you've got some hope of trying to figure out what's going on. I've got nothing but kudos to give to the devs for doing that. The game is a relic though, with bits of code going waaaay back in time, with references to the "Kunark Patch program" and "kpatch.exe" for example I don't particularly envy the current teams job of maintaining it - there isn't many of them and 17+ years worth of closed source development (you have to count dev time before launch) by a changing and ever reducing team of devs means it's probably not the most beautiful piece of code around. Just look at the errors pasted in the other thread that hinted at a single source file (EverQuest.cpp) being over 18,000 lines long ... a single source file ... and there are other messages hinting it goes beyond 23,500 lines ... it hints of either poor design from the start, essay length comments, or most likely something that's just been tacked on to so many times it's not even funny any more I feel for ya's! But the game has a charm of its own, and I'm happy to see it's still chugging along. While I didn't directly answer the OP's final questions, hopefully the info gives you some pause for thought, and you can maybe imagine what the answers might be
