This game's been around for a long time, many generations of pc, network and memory upgrades. Althought EQ could never transition to an open world, I had an idea about just that. Would it(should it?) be possible to have a setting in the game which allowed the preloading - in the background - of all zones connected to you? Such that when you zoned or were traveling you could have near instant zoning to connected zones? Surely the size of the individual files we are talking about are now trivial with today's computers and bandwidth. Other than in zones like pok/pot that has/have many attached zones, I would think implementation of this for all zones with less than 5 connections or so would be possible and result in a much smoother gameplay experience for all of us. It wouldn't be open world and it wouldn't get rid of zone times for any ports or teleportations but it would make a huge difference in gameplay during many play hours. Thoughts?
Zoning in EQ is ridiculously slow but I dont think HD read is the bottleneck. Measured 21 seconds from guild lobby to pok and watching taskmaster the HD read never went above 5%. If reading zone files was the issue that would have gone much higher. Its something else. While watching the HD read I noticed that eqgame.exe said (not responding) for some time. It may be a glitch in the program where it doesnt know what to do next until some process times out. Just a guess.
The vast majority of the zone time is like the server having to process and re-send you all your toons data (like gear, inventory, bank, etc) plus all mob data and such, so the more progressed your character in general the worse your zone times will be comparative to a fresh character The actual zone files should be rather small for any Hard Drive newer then like 10 years ago, even mechanical 7200 rpm hard drives that old can read at like 120 mb/s, when a recent modern expansion full zone + all models in it is prob in the like 30-75 mb range or something Probably the main reasons for Dragons Hoard and TS Depot were to push more files out of this constant processing part to lessen load on server and so lessen the zone time bloat for you
The client has to suspend the main thread until the next server connection is established, its a synchronous operation.
I remember how disappointed I was when i put EQ on a ramdisk and zoned only to see negligible performance improvement. I think a lot of the zoning time is decompressing textures but i never profiled my cpu usage or looked at function calls when zoning. I know my main box that doesn't use stick figures takes slightly longer to zone. I wouldn't mind having EQ store uncompressed textures on my disk if it helped it load faster.
I disagree. I don't think decompressing textures makes much difference unless you are using a 15 year old PC. You can choose to use compressed textures for some things by the setting here: https://everquest.fanra.info/wiki/Graphics_and_performance_settings_guide#LaunchPad_settings Note the explanation was created many years ago by someone else. At this point I don't think it does much.
Nope. Its a network bottleneck. Spinning drives vs NVME vs SATA SSD barely makes any difference at all. Nope. Its a network delay. The way EQ works is old school you have to connect to the zones individually when you zone. If it where decompressing textures your CPU usage would reflect that and if that where really the case modern CPUs would have made loading instant long ago. Even being single core bound the IPC rate of modern CPUs is orders of magnitude better than it was in 1999. I have played this game on everything from Pentium 3s to to an r5 3600. I have tried everything from 5400RPM drives to 2000MB/s NVME drives. The only noticeable difference in loading speed is with a 5400RMP drive. There is next to no difference between 7200RPM spinning drives and NVME drives (unless you are running multiple clients). You are simply waiting for the server. I doubt they can even fix it. Its part of how EQ was designed.
But unfortunately, Dragon's hoard, which might have improved load times and gameplay, is instead an opportunity to make more DBC sales. It's also clunky, since I now have to search my inventory, search my tradeskill depot and search my dragon's hoard independently. We could cut bank use, but of course we want to sell bags.
Also appears to have a synchronous part on the server; if melee combat is happening I see it pause for no apparent reason for a second, hitting /who shows someone new in the zone. Also when I swap boxes, the whole zone stops for a fraction of a second. actually, I haven't noticed it recently, maybe it got fixed?
Many years ago I tried loading EQ into a ram disk and found it had almost no effect on zone time. If you watch your CPU usage you will see it doesn't spike either. Conclusion: The delay is waiting on getting data from the EQ servers.
Whats the size of your log file? You do not have Journal enabled (unless you specifically enabled it but you shouldnt)? Thats gotta be something going on locally on your computer. Do you exclude eqgame.exe and the Logs directory from your AV scanner?
New hardware and uber-fast internet makes a negligible difference to EQ load times. Server load and zone population seem to have a negative impact on load times. I presume as the server gets busy with fetch queues the DB I/O gets further behind. Happens even on modern games. /shrug
There is nothing to log when someone else enters the zone from the opposite end. I can even still move around, my client doesn't freeze (from this) just no data comes from the server for a moment, like when going linkdead, except it recovers in a fraction of a second. In any case, I just tested it, and it didn't happen now.
There was a setting implemented years ago (like ~2002) where you could run it once, and it would "uncompress" (not sure of the technically correct term) your zone files, so that they would take up much more disk space, but you would zone faster. I ran the command, and sure enough, after that, zoning was much faster. I'm sure the "uncompressed" state is the only option now.
If you want to get into the game from character select faster then put as much of your housing & bank inventory as you can onto "mule" characters, all those huge bags in your bank filled with crap are slowing your main down, and heavily stocked houses do this too. I am not sure if that approach would also speed up zoning but I would not be surprised if it does. Other than that running the game from an SSD will definitely be better than from an HDD, if your PC has a PCIE NVME type SSD even better. I noticed zone times were much faster from EQ on HDD to EQ on SATA SSD - I have no idea why some are not seeing any difference. Pre-loading tech as some games have is usually something considered during development rather than as a consideration later on, I have no idea if that could be done for EQ but I would expect it to be very difficult to do, or very expensive & it would very likely entail only being an option for PC's with enough RAM to support it.
Zoning is iconic and should not be changed. Particularly the "can I make it to the kitchen for a drink or a bathroom run before it's finished." If anything zoning on death should take 3 times as long to publish you for not getting a heal.
I would like DBG to give me full control of the character before dropping it into the zone. Everything else aside, allowing the zone to attack and kill you before you even have control or a visual is just bad order of operations in a multi-step sequential process. Spawning into the zone should be the very last step. There was a work around on PVP servers where they gave everyone Divine Aura on zoning in order to prevent bind and zone camping. Assuming a proper fix won't be done, I can think of a couple of better workarounds for PVE servers. 1. Zone in with an evasion short buff that combines stealth and sanctuary so that no NPC will attack. Any action including movement dismisses the 6-12s buff. 2. Zone in with GM invisibility short buff (similar to above). 3. Zone in with Beta Neutral faction maxed. Character stats and faction seems to get loaded in steps. Insert a step to neutralize faction (indifferent to all) and load actual faction as a last step after the player has control.
I've always felt this could be handled better and dinged EQ for doing this. Then I discovered EQ was not the only game that does this and I cut them some slack. Still, it should be fixed and here is my idea: The game should do everything to prepare you for the new zone but not put you in it. Then the server checks with your client to ensure it is ready. Only then, after your client has reported it has completely loaded everything and is ready, does the server put you in the zone. As a result, the server puts you in the zone and reports you are there to the client and, Bob's your uncle, you appear at almost exactly the same time as you are able to see and control your character.
