Nvidia announced a game modding technology today called RTX Remix. Using this technology, textures can be upscaled, refined and convert materials that have physically accurate properties. Omniverse can then be used to enhance the game assets. RTX Remix Jensen Huang talks about the technology I've used the EQ classic upscaled textures many P99 players use and they're WONDERFUL. I know it's a long shot. I don't have the skills or time, but hoping someone out there can take a swing at this.
I don't mean to be debbie-downer, but on the existing engine, this would be a lot of work. Although, it is now certainly a possibility now that they've migrated to x64. To give an idea, almost ever texture in the game would have to be updated, light sources will have to be actually placed in the world, there would be a lot of world-re-building work involved that I simply don't think the game has the profitability to take on.
Let's worry about moving on from DX9 before anything like that. I doubt enough of the player base have machines powerful enough to justify it.
A lot of talk about people buying cheap machines to multi box EQ but I don't think that should be a reason to not upgrade off DX9 to a better graphics engine.
Granted, I haven't looked very far into the technology but this technology would be a mod to EQ. I don't know what would be required to enable the mods, but it appears to me RTX Remix scans the in-game textures and light sources and creates 'new' textures which are then exported to Omniverse where that scanned information is turned into files usable by the game. Then again, maybe I am way off base and have no clue what I'm talking about. Just thought this would be a cool project for EQ.
In my experience, thirdparty mods that enhances the graphics with an automated process, often lacks artistic flair, and tend to clash hard with the intended style. Just because you can add ligthsources and bumpmaps/materials/whatever, does not mean it will enhance the intended atmosphere for the zone. Im a bit skeptical. Best case, is probably games that aims for photorealism, where this tech can move the game closer to that ideal. But EQ1 is not about photorealism.
What I find interesting is there's the occasional texture that also has a normal map, but the lighting doesn't really let those normal maps pop out as well as they should. AI resizing of textures only gets you so far too, but that'll continue to improve. But do you go back and get all the old zones changed (not insignificant amount of work to make sure it's all ok) and then have to hear people pointing out that the trees might have awesome textures, but they're still really blocky. Do you then start replacing the trees? other Geo? Or do you draw a baseline and say "ok, from this point onwards, all new zones use the new tech" and then have the old players/npc's running around? There's not an easy solution, that EQ's still running after all this time is staggering alone. As a brief aside, here's a quick and dirty hack of Neriak running in a WebClient with some different lighting/light normals/roughness maps. Most of the work is deeper in the zone, but you get a brief idea that even with a fair bit of tech thrown at it, old zones only have a certain level of quality to scale up to (but lighting really can help massively here). https://keybiscuit.com/webeq/
I'd agree with the DX9 upgrade comment, but not the playerbase having machines powerful enough... just because we're playing an old game doesn't mean we're using old tech. There are other games, there are other reasons to play an old game than an old computer.
Most gamers in general don't have GPUs powerful enough for much ray tracing. They are only first now (within the last few years) starting to make the cards powerful enough to realistically do it with higher settings, and unless it changes with RDNA3, AMD is further behind even further reducing need. It's just not realistic to expect they have the resources to implement ray tracing, or that even if they did it would be used by enough people to warrant it.
Im sure that a lot of EQ players don't have GPUs powerful enough for raytracing, but im also sure 99% of those players have GPUs that can handle more than basic dx9 era graphics. It might be a problem if you want to box entire raids or something, but for everyone else, a new engine would mean that the game would run and look much better. Im not really that into raytracing either, I always thought it was overhyped. But EQ would benefit from an engine upgrade.
From what I hear.. this games code is held together with spit, scotch tape, and a whole lot of prayer and you want to have this game have ray tracing? ha
Also NVidia is bad at ongoing support of their unique features; DBG could do the work to support their API, and the next hardware revision makes the game crash. for example the NVidia exclusive Weapon Debris feature of Fallout 4.
Unmodded DX9 for Windows does not support ray tracing in any form. Microsoft's own API support for ray tracing requires DX12. Brand-name engines such as Unreal and Unity will support some but not all ray tracing functionality in their own customized versions of DX11.The majority of ray tracing software development for photo- or video-quality rendering is done using other graphics libraries, not DX. Ray tracing does not by itself give you better image quality. It reduces rendering time for complex images which are already designed to heavily use certain 3D features, for example having 100+ light sources in a frame. Use of ray tracing operatives frees up more GPU cycles to do other kinds of image processing. Nothing in EQ is, or has ever been, designed that way. Bottom line: Ray tracing is completely irrelevant to a game like EQ unless/until they convert the entirety of it to one of the modern engines and rebuild every zone from scratch using said new engine. The current engine running in 64-bit is also irrelevant, it's still using a very old graphics API. A build of the current engine to support DX11 is possible; similarly, a port to the somewhat newer engine used by DCUO and PS2 is also possible, but still labor-intensive.
Yeah, ray tracing isn't just a switch you flip on, they'd essentially need to write an entirely new engine to support it.
The over use of ice and blue light in ToV / CoV showed that even after making a mistake with lighting, it's acceptable to make that same mistake again. Many of us have the current lighting turned off. The stuff linked was all dark background with contrast. Theres a serious issue with design when we have blue light glasses and receive 2 expansions back to back that are overwhelmingly an excessive amount of blue light. Even if you like the zone design, you still need to turn the lighting off if you reasonably want to find the collections. EQ is not well balanced for lighting and Ray Tracing is probably not the solution. TLDR: EverQuest has a lot of places to improve but Ray Tracing isn't high on any list. Lets do better with what we have that is working before we change to a system that doesn't work any better.
