I was just reading a post from someone a little while ago and they said that zoning couldn't be overcome in eq. I was wondering why? I have tons more memory in my computer than they had way back when. If I had enough system memory, couldn't the game pre-cache connected zones. Granted that might not work for POK or portals because of the many zone connections. (Although they could change the way the connections work and cover the load time with elaborate teleportation animation, sound, and particle effects to give the illusion that there is no zone loading. ) So if I was in a zone and crossed to a different zone it at least wouldn't have to load the resources from the drive all in one shot. Only thing would be getting the information about dynamic entities like other players and npcs as you were approaching the zone border. I don't know how much system memory it would take but surely it won't always be impossible to have multiple zones loaded into memory. It may even be possible with POK and Portals one day. With enough system ram, like 64 GB, I could load several connected zones. Couldn't I?
Not sure how this would affect the game, but EQ is already more laggy and resource heavy than any current game. This would probably make it worse.
My machine is very good and most of the game runs smooth. It still can't run the GL without frame rate delay but that is graphical lag due to the speed at which the computer can draw. Pre-caching zones is all about system memory (I'm assuming here). With multiple-core machines these days, they could put these other cores to work loading and deleting the pre-cached zones. I'm just saying, it isn't unfeasible to think that Everquest could lose a lot of the loading time in the future.
It would be easier to decrease much of the loading time than it would to make it appear completely seamless. Seamlessness would mean that they would have to trim the edges of the zone connections so that they fit together perfectly. Therefore, you could transition from one zone to another without noticing, as much, perhaps a slight jump of the character when you transition between zones. The game would also have to transmit data from multiple zone servers so that you could see across zone lines. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a major challenge. Just saying it could be done. No doubt there would be hurdles that can't be foreseen. Perhaps, seamlessness wouldn't even work. I don't see how they could deal with pulling mobs across zone lines for instance. I guess the zone servers would have to be able to trade these dynamic entities.
I would be happy with just a fairly fast zoning time, 3 seconds or less. Zoning itself has some game impact though as well in that people use zoning to escape mobs, heal, return. There would need to be a timeout before returning to a zone you just left (somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute?). I don't believe that it takes this long to load up the graphics, I think what is holding it up is all of the information about the newly entered zone and the characters (PC's and NPC's) in it; what gear graphics are needed.
