Let me make this clearer Sometimes we worry about How many Developers work at Dark paw. About the Games EQ 1 & 2 and EQ's Future. Yes We know the Days of SOE Live & prehaps Daybreak Live is in the Past. Some of us been here or around since 1999 & 2004 and it just seems you went Dark recently. That is up to you but it makes the Fan's worry. Hope you Have a great Holiday and a happy 2023.
Engineering: 5 (-2) = 3 people who do stuff like write code to help improve lag. Art: 11 (+3) = 13 people who do fantastic looking textures for the environments, models, and even the visual pieces of the new UI. + 1 who does models 40% for EQ1 and 60% for EQ2 (along with most of those others shared as well). QA: 3 ...SMH Emphasis provided to show what it looks like to me.
You don't see the work of QA because what they find probably most often gets fixed before the players see it.
As someone pretty ignorant to game development I am curious what is the potential for a team of that size? What should my expectation be? What kind of things are easy or hard? What kind of scale do they work on? It would help me as a member of the community to know what is useful feedback and what suggestions are reasonable.
Im a bit worried about the low engineering count tbh. EQ1 is pretty old and in many ways outdated. Wouldn't more engineers be needed, if DBG had plans for keeping EQ1 up-to-date technology-wise? I mean we just had the 64bit upgrade, but that is just the first step, right? We are on a "path to have more and higher resolution art in the game". But while NoS does look nice, I don't see a pronounced difference between NoS and the older "32-bit expansions". I realise that much of this is up to the art team, but it does look like you still have the same limitations as when you worked on the previous expansions...
There are two parts to the graphics in this sense. The Rendering, through code, so Engineers. The files that you are seeing, models and textures; so Artists. Remember the discussion you and I had, where I mentioned Player Studio artists were asked to 'shoot for' 512x512 textures, but allowed to go up to 1024x1024? And we know there are several good 'HD' re-textures of the character models out there (have been for some time). The 64 bit 'upgraded textures' just means they now work with larger sizes for all the textures (environments, models, and UI). These will also support larger and so better looking UI elements. The upcoming 'UI upgrade' will have nothing to do with upgrading the rendering pipeline. The amount of Engineers aren't going to be re-coding the render. You're getting pretty textures on top of the same old underlying structure, rendered up to you with the same old code. Don't get me wrong. Those artists are excellent, but they don't code.
Exactly! Artists do the textures, 3dmodels, zone geometry, etc. with the tools they are given, and some guidelines that are defined by the 3d-render in the client. None of that seems to have changed since the 64-bit upgrade. NoS doesn't look more detailed compared to the previous expansions, as far as I can tell? So they still have the same limitations regarding poly-count and texturing(or they choose to stay within the old limits?). I assume polycount is limited by the dx9 render, and fixing that is a job for the software engineers. The render is starting to show its age, and it looks like it is a significant limitation when doing zone-design...Of course it could also be a limitation of the tools themselves(but that is also engineering work) I know the UI revamp is (mostly) unrelated to the render, but I really hope they choose to upgrade the render as their next project, after the UI revamp. For the render I think they should give special attention to lighting, it looks awful when everyone in the raid is wearing light-sources...
It's a bit hard to tell on the models sometimes. Twice the texture resolution means the detail is half the size (but twice as much if they use it all). Pretty sure the poly counts are roughly the same as ever. They use the 'normal map' to give a little impression of more surface detail than just a flat triangle. Larger size gives you more there to work with as well. Although the lighting tends to wash out the detail in many situations. And there you go, aging render as you said. Probably most obvious on the environment and structure textures, but I won't be in those cool looking zones anytime soon to see for myself.
You're misunderstanding. The number of engineers declined from 7 to 5 and the number of artists increased from 8 to 11.
Ah yes, EQ dev language. Silly me. /bow You are of course correct. So 5 is gonna get that pet lag fixed? It's indeed better than 3. But I'll stay out on my limb for now. EDIT: I don't want to break out my LDON Decoder Ring. Just give me the raw numbers and I'll make my wild assumptions from there.
Do you guys still get Royalties for products Live Shipped, or was that just an SOE thing? Or did it never happen?
LDoN was one of the last expansion that got shipped or could be bought in the stores. It was also the second expansion that was also available as a download. The RL items were included in the boxes and not available for the download versions. Since then expansions are only available as downloads.
Hmm I thought the final EQ expansion to get a boxed copy was Secrets of Faydwer, but before that they skipped The Serpent’s Spine and The Buried Sea for physical releases. And Legacy of Ykesha was a VERY limited jewel case only release that’s almost impossible to find now. You can always check ebay and see what box expansions are listed
Live shipped is just a term now, shipped a Product to Live includes Digital delivery also. Its just a term used to take a product from a Development/Testing state to a "Live" product. Digital or Physical.
