Thats the thing as many people want to revisit the old stuff as those who want new places to die. The balance needs to be kept right. in Velious the expansions were aimed at those who like the old zones, TBL was the other way, EoK and RoS had a new zone each, which was still a little bias to the old zones. House of Thules revisit to old content was extremely well done, it felt like new places. The same can be said with Seeds of Destruction, seeing Qeynos before it was Qeynos gave it a fresh new feel.
As much I would like that, I do not see them updating EQ to 64 bit. That would actually require an entire rewrite of the code as x86 (32-bit) works differently than x64 (64-bit). What is holding back EQ isn't so much the engine as it is the 32-bit aspect of it; they could make a new engine, but as long as EQ is still a 32-bit game, it is going to have most of the same issues it does today. I think that they could do a new content expansion between CoV and whatever a return to Luclin would be like; or even have an expansion which leads into it. Have us finally actually go to Drinal in an attempt to find Luclin's actual position.
64 bit will happen, JChan has said it will need to eventually, but that's a long term projection type thing. I think of all the people we have had in her position she is easily & by far the most clued in person on the tech side of things and I think she has a lot of plans for what she wants for EQ on that side. I like the idea of exploring Drinal, having that tie into Luclin in some way, or as a precursor to a revisit to Luclin would be really cool. I do like the revisits I just wish that among all the revamped familiar zones they would throw in at least 1 new one.
Technique wise they are really in a mess. The constant crash in this game and the choas of each expension's launch shows it. They probably don't heve a meaningful core dev team anymore and the best thing they can do is to keep pumping assets with a team of asset creators (artists, designers, scripters, etc) in order to keep the game alive. TBH I don't think there's an ideal solution for this. The hiring market for graphics / engine programmers is kind of on fire these days and anybody who can revamp EQ is definitely going to have an easier life in those bigger companies. I think maybe the EQ team should open source they engine & graphics code and hopefully let the programming community to help this.
There really hasn't been actual chaos during expansion launches in well over a decade, and the same can be said for constant crashes. Now, in modern EQ there have been more crashes than we have come to expect in the past year or so, but it hasn't been as bad as in the past.
Ok, I had not seen that one, I just knew in the past it was not entertained due to the time and resource investment it would require as she references. But it may be that MS and Windows eventually dropping support for DX9 and supposedly 32-bit at some point which might be pushing them to make the change, as it would actually be worth the investment for those reasons. Personally, I think that her estimate is a bit optimistic for a single engineer's time; but she would have a better idea than I would. Using her estimates I would not expect EQ to make the jump to 64-bit for another 3-5 years, unless they go in whole hog with the entire team working on it for a significant portion of a year and pushing an expansion launch into the following year, which then runs it up against anniversary time.
32 BIT / DX9 will drop at some point. Since they purchased EQ you have to figure that type of upgrade is the type of thing they bring in more dev/pull from other games to do it in the course of a year - otherwise they end up ending their own investment.
Yes I would be inclined to agree with that, leveraging upon access to a bunch of different personnel resources for things like this is really one of the benefits of an "umbrella" company that can source things internally, Daybreak is like that now within itself and EG7 from its presentation seems to be looking at this being where efficiencies will be created across their portfolio.
They won't have a choice. Things are ramping up.... https://www.daybreakgames.com/careers?department=engineering_and_core_tech
Eventually yes, but not anytime soon. As far as I have found MS has not even given a vague date on EOL of DX9 or anything about stopping support of 32-bit programs (this is different from MS no longer allowing OEMs to sell 32-bit versions of the OS). Until MS starts given some dates for these things actually happening, then the EQ team is going to do it over time. With how it was discussed in that video, I almost think that they will just have 1 team member who will be developing these things and primarily with them helping on other things as needed. To the point where they might actually finish it in 3-5 years rather than in a single one.
Even if they hired someone for the position today, I still do not see the EQ tools, servers, client, and other related services making the jump to 64-bit for another 3-5 years. Two of those jobs are flagged as EQ specific, and similar to the EQ2 specific jobs one is only a temporary position. Neither of the EQ positions sound like what Jenn spoke about in that video. The permanent EQ2 position however does, which is weird. One of the general positions does sound like what Jenn was talking about, and if that one is who will be doing the EQ changes it will most likely be along with things on other games which further supports my idea that this change is not going to be done anytime soon, but possibly in another 3+ years. If it was going to be in the next 2 years, I am fairly sure that Jenn would have stated that it was planned but has not yet started, instead she stated that there currently were no plans, and that but that it is something that want to do and will (have to) do at some point in the future.
Huge thanks for the link. The view of the super secret inner lair was fascinating. I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't in a cave somewhere though. A few things I really found interesting. 1. The look at some old models side by side with then newer models. 2. The pitch for ongoing remote work. 3. That Tom Tobey is also a teacher. I think that is pretty cool. My 15 year-old daughter loves doing very primitive animation and this gives me hope that someday (if she doesn't change her mind again) she can grow up, get a job in that field and move out. I need somewhere to build a full gaming room. 4. The picture of a game animator acting out the animations in a parking lot. My understanding is that the Disney animators used to do just that and would also bring in real animals to study for realism. 5. The remarks about finding passionate people. Passion is such a wonderful thing and then when you can group it with talent and good work ethic wonderful things can happen. 6. The lack of anyone to work on particles. Wish I knew how. 7. EQ1 and EQ2 working cooperatively. It makes sense but I had the sense that at one time that it wasn't done that way. 8. Hearing names ticked off really shows how small the studio is. Thank you.
Not sure where you're getting 3-5 years from. Thin air? That is a LONG time. Paying one person for 5 years or 5 people for one year equates to approximately the same investment. The opportunity cost of stretching it out to 5 years FAR outpaces any savings reaped by minimizing staffing costs.
The question is also how ambitious they are, when updating the engine: Is it just a matter of replacing obsolete system-calls with newer supported ones, just for compatibility sake and keep the original algorithms basically unaltered ? Or are they refactoring the fundamental system architecture, to better take advantage of modern hardware(optimize for modern GPUs with emphasis on parallelism and multithreading etc...) and clean up the hard-to-maintain subsystems, that was holding them back for so long. The first option is probably not that unrealistic, but it will probably not feel like much of an upgrade either...The 2nd option will most likely feel like a completely new game, in terms of performance and responsiveness(I would love to experience a lag-free raid with consistent 120+fps ). Probably a bad analogy, but take a really old game and compare it with a modern sourceport of that game. The difference in performance is huge, and it will most likely have features that feel modern, and a much better "feel".
If they do the work I’m sure some refactoring gets done - how much is doable will be the question. And to what degree can t be done effectively given it is what it is - an incredible game but 21 years old almost 22.
They have been doing a lot of back end stuff for years, it wouldn't surprise me if they had already started preparing for the change over.
Kinda tired of revisiting Velious (SoV, RoF, ToV, CoV), but I’m totally down with going back to Luclin, Discord, etc. how about some more Alarans?! World is big and cool. I like what they did with Kunark and Velious and hope they do a complete lap around the track!
People complain or express concern, because they care about the game. We all support what you all do behind the scenes, because otherwise we wouldn't have a game to play. I know the Dev team wishes they could give us all we ask for as players, and I do hope we get some mid-year content. My biggest concern is the shift in raid loot and raid content release. I cannot survive another Summer/fall spent gearing up everyone's box armies. From what I did see in beta, some of these raids seem to be tougher than ToV raids, and thank you for that. I would like to go back to keyed entry to raid tiers and a scale back of increased raid loot. I hope the whole EQ team had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
I think that if those changes were actually any of the big things for that change over, then they would have stated it as the goal. They have been asked and begged even to change over to a 64-bit client for a long time now, and if they had said we are have started moving towards it but it is going to be a project that takes place over several years people would have been fine with that; and I think that the Devs and those in charge are aware of that. Instead telling us that they have no current plans to re-write the client as 64-bit anytime soon, coupled with all the things that Jenn mentioned in the video linked earlier, makes it such that they have not done any of the things that are the most time consuming and actually necessary steps to change over from a 32-bit game to a 64-bit one.
