Call me simp, whatever. I just wanted to post that as the owner of a small dev company that frequently works with code originating in the 90's, the task of moving to 64-bit can't have been as trivial as it should be. Well done for performing what seems to have been a smooth rollout - I know I'd have been sweating during that one! In IT, sometimes the best you can hope for is the phone not ringing - saying thanks for a good job doesn't happen as often as it should. I hope the changes that this upgrade allows are as smooth!
Things went very smoothly. I was worried that we'd see some additional down times but that doesn't seem to be the case. 10/10 would upgrade to 64 bit again.
I just wanted to take the time to echo this sentiment. The zone times and lag so far definitely seem a bit better on FV since the update. Also, with the bot crackdown I seem to be noticing quite a few less bot teams running around in normal zones. Sometimes these boards can be a bit negative at times (myself included), but I have to give credit where it's due.
Feels much better so far as to lag for most things. (chat/raid tool still laggy) Very much looking forward to what the team can do to improve things now that they can spend some memory for speed.
Thank you, Devs! It's interesting that, after the move to 64-bit, all player textures look noticeably sharper. I run 4k resolution and I just chalked the lack of texture detail to poor upscaler performance. I don't have a before and after, but the Hero's Forge Ssraeshzian Plate looks pretty nice! EDIT: Click the photo for the full res. The image even after cropping was still too large for EQ forums to display without downscaling. Texture
I haven't noticed any difference in sharpness to the images. I wonder if 64bit resolved the long standing bug I saw with mipmapping in EQ. With that feature on, it would randomly just make everything way less crisp and blurry for no reason. In order to resolve it, the feature needed to be turned off. With mipmapping on (before patch): With mipmapping off (same day as prior picture, before patch): You can see a noticeable difference in sharpness between the two simply by turning a setting off in EQ. I have more with ornaments, weapons, shields, etc showing a huge drop off in image quality with that feature turned on.
Maybe the old client tried too hard to conserve memory in order to avoid "out of memory"-crashes? and what we see now, is how it was always supposed to look... It always looked like their "texture-streaming" never gave us the full resolution-textures before now... Or did they bump up the graphic detail without telling us?
THE biggest benefit I'm noticing right now is when I'm hoping from server to server to rotate through the toons for various activities, it seems the servers are running a bit faster in the backend and I'm able to get from one server to another far quicker. I'm sure the client's get a huge memory benefit for 64bit, but the servers must really be stretching their legs with the upgrade. /applaud.
Okay, so going through some settings today - and I turned my memory usage up to maximum to see if the game would break the 3.5GB limit. In doing so, the character armor appearance quality reverted back to the blurry mess I had before the move to 64-bit. So I changed the setting back to Minimum Memory Usage and the quality and sharpness of armor textures came back. Bug?
