Remaking EQ in EQ 2's engine?

I think EQ with the EQ 2 engine would be interesting. Keep both games going as is and focus on recreating EQ in that engine and then release that once it's ready. Since the engine is already built and they own it and the assets and have some people familiar with it already working on it to keep EQ 2 going.

Just an idea but I think it might have some merit. What do you guys think? Let's try to keep it friendly and avoid flaming when posting your opinion so the thread doesn't get locked.

Allow me to be the first to say that this is a stupid idea.

EQ2 engine?

I don't think so.

In my humble opinion, Forgelight engine (property of Daybreak, and used in Planetside 2) would be a far better choice.

It won't happen, but I don't see the point of swapping a crap engine for another crap one

And just to add, EQ looks probably outdated, even ugly sometimes, but it's kind of charming.
Some people still use the old models.
I won't say it's stupid, but the workload would be titanic.

Look at these projects :





It's really nice (I love the 2nd one), but it's ... not EQ1.
Something will be lost in the process.

The 3rd one (Unity) is nice too, and looks more like the old EQ.

I'd buy any of them. Second one would be an amazing dream as long as they kept a lot of the core mechanics. I don't want an action MMORPG. I just want simple attack on and hit my actions/cooldowns. The last one doesn't look like a huge upgrade, don't like the action fighting style...the graphics looked the same but if the engine allowed us to expand on the game I would be for it.

No. Just no.
EQ2 engine was outdated upon EQ2's release already (and placed bets on the wrong horse - aka cpu power, not gpu power increase).

Why make a whole new everquest from scratch, just remake it in a new proper engine that is feasable and might allow importing of old characters.
Everquest is an excellent game, so try to keep it as is.
Have an old farts server for old timers and a new engine for the new pleebs

I have no clue if it's feasible or not, but I can say a new engine could help darkpaw in future proofing stuff for another 20 + years.

Who would do such a stupid thing... *uncheck, uncheck, uncheck, uncheck, uncheck...*

Everquest could benefit from an improved engine(or just some serious debugging/optimization/retuning). even if they did not upgrade the graphic-assets, there are a lot of small bugs and flaws in the current engine that we could do without...
for example:

Inconsistent framerate in lag piles(I have seen many complaints about this).
Better depth sorting of graphic elements(you all know zones that just look "super weird" in some places currently).
Better adjustment of nearplane(looking through walls is a silly bug)
Better handling of particles on raids(i think everyone disables most of them for a reason)
Better shadows
Better light handling(5 players together and everything is super bright, what is up with that?)
Water reflections(remember when those actually worked?)
Smoother movements for other players/mobs(clientside-prediction could use some finetuning here)
Pathing issues
Normalize movement-speed when running diagonally...(noobie coding mistake imo)
New and improved UI(with better scaling support)
Bloom-effects that doesn't makes you "snowblind"
etc...
Features that the engine "almost" already have, fix those first....


All of these issues would make the game a much better player experience if they received some dev-attention imho...

It would improve the overall "player-feel" A LOT!!!

It would probably also open up for a lot of possibilities for future expansions, if they "untangled the spaghetti-code"...

Years ago, I think EQ could have updated the engine. Instead, they made the decision to make EQ2 instead of reinvesting that money into EQ. It separated the player base across two titles, and now I don't think they have the cash influx to do anything with core mechanics, like an engine upgrade, anymore.

For years now, we just get told how difficult and costly everything is. The only real investment we see into the game is a new expansion once per year, and that only caters to the top end level capped players, because they can't give us anything like a new Race or Class anymore. They don't even focus on content for people who may be returning and aren't level capped, they're expected to stay away from Live and go to the TLP servers. (Where no major development assets need to be used.) The engine has reached its capacity with 16 Races and Classes. Unless there is some millionaire out that who really loves EverQuest and is willing to invest the money it would take, I don't think we're ever going to get an engine upgrade.

The most impressive thing I've seen the developers do fairly recently with this engine was the Hero's Forge system. They somehow figured out a way to put new armor models on ancient character models that had the armor built on. And for the most part, Hero's Forge looks great by EQ standards. But, Hero's Forge itself was rooted in a labor of love from someone on the development team. Unless we have some developers staying after work and devoting their free time to totally converting EverQuest into a newer and better engine, I don't think we're ever going to see that. Heck, these days even server stability is a problem. Look at how Mangler crashes basically every single day now. EverQuest is getting long in the tooth, but we as players love the game and we keep coming back and enduring the aches and pains it suffers as it gets older.

Waste of time.

Rather give me more zones. Also I would rather have had more zones than the overseer thing

EQ2 looks terrible. I haven't been able to play past the tutorial.

I'd love to see remastered EQ, but enjoy it for what it is while you have it.

This is not really correct. They updated the graphic engine several times. The biggest update was during the release of Luclin. And since then there have been only smaller evolutionary steps.
There have been also many changes behind the scenes, which the normal player does not really see. I think I read once that their quest engine was rewritten or enhanced at least seven times.

But yes, there have been not major updates to the graphics (except shaders and some lightings / post effects) and I doubt it would be easy to replace the existing graphic engine with a modern Unreal 4, Frostbite, Forgelight, Unity 3D, etc. engine.

I'm pretty sure they would need to recreate all models, zones, etc .Also only an engine replacement alone would not change the graphics. In just enables you do to better graphics. But this has to be done as well.


This 10 year old information about the Everquest graphics engine is from the project 1999 forum.
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Back in 1999, EverQuest was released with a hybrid DX6/GLIDE graphics engine. This graphic engine was mainly built off the True3D engine and used sky resources found in sky.s3d.

On November 11th, 2000, the engine was revamped to use DirectX 7. The Velious only new armor textures and full screen user interface were also added at this time.

On December 4th, 2001, Luclin was released. An upgraded DX8 based graphics engine named "Umbra" was included in the release. This new DX8 engine still used the old sky.s3d file and introduced new features such as back culling (via dpvs.dll), higher resolution textures, and ground foliage. Sky.s3d was updated to add the new skies for the Luclin zones. It took Verant nearly a month of daily patching to sort out the bugs and stabilize the game. Somewhere down the line, the graphics DLL was split out from EQGame.exe into it's own file, EQGfx_DX8.DLL.

On July 24th, 2002, the XML/TGA based SUITE user interface system was released that enabled the bazaar zone and user interface customization. The SUITE user interface also killed/abandoned the old in-game bulletin board system. The SUITE user interface eventually became mandatory on January 9th, 2003. A couple of new skies were added to sky.s3d for the Planes of Power release. Around the time of Lost Dungeon's release, the ability to specify NPC model loads using zone "_chr.txt" files was added.

On March 23rd, 2004, Sony Online released the 3rd generation EverQuest engine that required DX9, called "EQGraphics". This engine was contained in a new graphics DLL file, "EQGraphicsDX9.dll". Unlike the first and second generation engines, the EQGraphics engine revamped most of the major data structures behind EverQuest. Sky support no longer used sky.s3d and instead drew all its data from the newly formed "Resources" directory. The default engine graphics format changed from "BMP" to "DDS". A new zone resources format called "EQG"/"ZON" was created for newer zones. "S3D" compatibility was maintained for legacy purposes. The entire collision system was revamped at this time, causing months of collision related issues.
-------

The addition of the dPVS middleware from hybrid graphics was a huge update.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Graphics

dPVS was later sold/rebranded as Umbra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbra_(3D_technology_company)

Umbra middleware is still used in modern games and engines.
I'm not sure, if Everquest was updated or replaced dPVS with a more recent version of Umbra or something similar. Only the devs know, but not sure if they are allowed to tell us.


Here is and old interview with one Everquest developer regarding the Everquest engine updates.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050208022848/http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/521/521504p1.html

Don't you need permission from Daybreak to do this?

EQ in Unreal Engine would be cool but makes me fatigued after hrs of play.

It's kind of like fan art. They wouldn't be able to monetize that. YOu wont see that person launching EverQuest remastered without DBG giving them a cease and desist or sueing them. Even if they don't call it "EverQuest", they would still be using the DBG IP by using the maps and etc from EverQuest. You can see comparable examples by checking out the right of fan art for things like Mickey Mouse.

There are a lot of grey areas. Hooters tried to sue wing house and lost.

Black and white...
Names like kelethin are probably protectable.
but...
Wood Elf wouldn't be any more than using Fae or other terms which come from history. They are elves that live in the woods. Wood elves. DBG probably can't protect that.

The grey area is if they tried to make wood elves live in oak tree tree houses using rope bridges and elevators. That's like the hooters/wing house argument that can go either way. Pretty sure that DBG would win if they used that video because it is an exact copy, but not if they used the same concept.

I think P99 works out because they are using retail copies of the game, thus ownership, while not charging subscriptions for hosting the servers.


Looking at the gameplay in Pantheon, you can see exactly how much of EverQuest that DBG can protect.

That's a bit far. EQ2 looks fantastic. Even if you aren't a fan of the graphic style, the artwork and zone design are amazing. The sound and music are STELLAR.

A pic below of Estate of Unrest in EQ2. How anyone can say that looks terrible...just wow.

I admitted to haven't gotten past the tutorial. I haven't seen the estate of unrest. I keep wanting to try EQ2. My initial turn off was all the crashes before I figured out it had to run in compatibility mode.

Not sure if unrest is a later expansion and looks different than the boat tutorial or not.

I admitted my limited experience in my post when I made the statement.

Saying EQ2 looks terrible is a bit extreme. It looks just fine for its time just like EQ and WoW look for their time.

I just look at modern engines and compare it and think, if EQ1 is going to get updated, why use the EQ2 engine? That doesn't make any sense to me.

I get it. Just refuting the blanket statement that EQ2 looks terrible. It doesn't.

The character design isn't for everyone. That's a perfectly valid opinion.

Unrest was included with EQ2 Live Update #32 (2007).

I played EQ 2 for a few years off and on. Everquest 2 was very terrible at scaling the dungeons.

that Unrest looks WAY too clean/polished/square to be a place of "unrest" neglect and full of undeads wanting to kill you