Does SOE have any plans to optimize EQ2?

Discussion in 'General Gameplay Discussion' started by Drendor, Feb 17, 2013.

  1. Drendor New Member

    I love EQ2 and have played it for a few months off and on now, but the only reason I haven't gone full out on the game yet is because the game is just poorly optimized for performance. It's not a real intense game to run, yet, it runs worse than Tera on all max settings.

    I really think more people would play this game if the engine was just better optimized.
    So, I really need to know. Does SOE have any future plans to make the game run smoother?
  2. Estred Well-Known Member

    It's an 8 year old engine, hard to update the core of the game. Chances are they are focusing more on EQNext with the more full dev power.
    Drendor likes this.
  3. Drendor New Member

    Ah, this is the first I've heard anything about EQNext. Being a new player, do you think I should just wait until EQNext? Given EQ2 is a huge world and takes lots of hours to get yourself settled.
  4. Estred Well-Known Member

    I would recommend trying EQ2, Next is not projected at least till 2014 I believe though do not quote me on that. I have not checked in a long time.
  5. Drendor New Member

    I was doing a little research and EQNext is said to have "something" this year, but as to what that might is unclear.
    I just really enjoy the challenge of EQ games. Most MMO's really have a big grinding factor to them, but it's mostly mind numbing. I rarely find myself going "Don't die, don't die, don't die, be pro" in other MMO's.
  6. Estred Well-Known Member

    Haha yeah I get that mindset sometimes. It can be a curse though trying to be the best you can.
  7. Drendor New Member

    Definitely between EQ2 and Hello Kitty Adventures Online, but I'm already redownloading EQ2. So I guess it wins. :p
  8. Kalderon Well-Known Member

    Somewhere it was writen, that there should be some optimization.... then there where some badly bugs in this optimzation and they where removed to rework, till today (somewhere where also writen, it was stoped and junked)
  9. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    Honestly, I've been playing EQ2 since the beginning, and with each new alt I make I still find tons of new stuff to do. Visually the game is beautiful. What most people have issues with is because they have some huge graphics card, but not much RAM... and when the game core was designed, it looked like ever-increasing RAM was the future. Instead, graphics processing and memory has increasingly become more loaded onto graphics cards.

    Several easy ways to improve performance:
    • If you have more than one physical HD, put the EQ2 game files on one and your pagefile on the other. I usually put the operating system, pagefile, etc. on one hard drive, EQ2 on another. The slowest part of any computer action is the read/write from a physical device, and by getting the pagefile away from the game files, you can have them both doing R/W at the same time rather than taking turns.
    • Seems obvious, but a lot of folks don't do this. Defrag your hard drive(s). I put this on the scheduler to do middle of the night once a month or so.
    • Get rid of trash and temp files. Look for the free utility CCleaner by Piriform, install, and set it to run every time you boot. You can configure what it cleans and how, but just getting rid of temp files, browser caches and the like can make an enormous difference.
    • The harder one now. There used to be a fantastic guide to optimizing graphics performance which has, alas, vanished into the mists of time is still available on the old forums. The basic principle is: Start the game, click the EQ2 button, and open Options. Turn on the Advanced view. Now turn all the graphics settings to minimal. Then, start with one and see what it does, all by itself, at mid-range and high settings. Turn it off, then check the next. The game will do more spectacular graphics effects than most computers really can cope with. I find that turning OFF bloom, turning foliage off or down, limiting reflections, and limiting particle effects helps TONS. I also turn off third party overhead combat spam (its in the Chat Bubbles settings). Turning shadows off or down can help. Etc. Some effects just don't seem to provide me much bang for the processing buck, so I turn those way down. This makes EVERYTHING faster.
    Note to self: See if I can bring myself to write a new graphics optimization guide.
  10. Feldon Well-Known Member

    If you are willing to spend some money, get an SSD and put Windows and your EQ2 folder on that drive.
    Kalderon likes this.
  11. Kalderon Well-Known Member

    Got that, runs wonderfull (if zoningserver do speed up sometimes)
  12. Polychrome Member

    My personal problem with turning off bloom/foliage/shadows and such is that my computer can handle these easily in other MMOs. Why should I not be able to handle them in EQ2?

    I've got a freakin' hex core for crying out loud, let me put it to use!

    Now my graphics are set pretty high. Yeah, silly of me, I know, but I like the pretty graphics. I don't mind drops in framerate in crowded areas, which is the expected result, and I'm not usually fighting in towns. However, my less-easy-to-please husband then keeps going "OMG WHY'S YOUR FRAMERATE SO LOW LOLOLOL?" I would at least like to be able to stop *that*. :p
  13. Gaarysal Active Member

    Zones quick until you get loading ui bug /sigh
  14. Gaarysal Active Member

    Shadows in particular can be set to render on the gpu which is a huge boost in framerate, I'd recommend that if you haven't already.

    As far as the hex core, I hear ya. It's especially bad when multiboxing it keeps wanting to shove all the instances on the same cores and set affinity keeps resetting (there was a good thread about that while ago).
  15. Kraeref Well-Known Member

    Yep. It's all good and nice to customize the performance with bloom/shadows/rendering and such. But it is really funny that when i do it my nvidia drivers fail and recover all the time freezing the game as a black screen. Good thing is they recover not turning the desktop completely off like my laptop. But the second i put performance on balanced everything is nice and going fine except for frames per sec (in pow falling below 10). So i gave up to play with performance options. It may give you a nice performance for few hours then it's back to crushing. I am getting used to play this game with low frames in raid instances and in guild halls. Mind i run shadows on gpu which doesn't help much and turned off smooth font which helps very little. This game is so cpu intensive that it is ridiculous.
  16. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    As I said, the problem arises because, way back when EQ2 was on the drawing board, everyone thought that computer memory size would be going up exponentially. The game designers didn't envision the kind of loaded graphics cards we have today. The core game engine is built to use RAM, not the graphics card, for the most part, and because that core is the problem, fixing it is extremely difficult because you mess with it and it literally affects EVERYTHING.

    There have been some efforts to improve the graphics performance, and results have been mixed. We really can't expect good fixes for this until and unless SOE comes out with EverQuest Next, which has been hinted at for years now and still not appeared... so do not hold your breath while waiting.
  17. Salty21db Active Member

    No.

    The engine was set to use primarily processor. Intel had told them that there would be large single core processors in the future and not duo/quad. A large single core or duo core with a decent vid card and 8+ gigs of ram would run this game the best.
    Avirodar likes this.
  18. Jack Pipsam New Member

    Hard to tell for me if optimize issues or lag issues.

    Still other SOE games like Vanguard work for me better and that arguably has more complex rendering systems.
  19. VeilShard Active Member

    THanks for this info, my hubby has been saying for a while now I need to get 8 gigs of ram so maybe this will help my performance..

    As for what the others say yeah I always have felt this was the major reason why eq2 didn't become bigger at the time it came out and years later. It never plays well even on systems that can run all the latest games on max settings, and at the time hardly anyone could run eq2 on any more then high performance, i remember people quitting left and right because they hated the way the game looked at those settings. Other more stylized games have been making low graphic settings still look good while keeping the artistic look. Unfortunately eq2 things look very blobby so it's a fine line between what's acceptable to look at and what's playable. Personally I like the graphics even though they are very piece-meal as they have changed and evolved over the years.
  20. Kaladz Active Member

    Yep. Stupid loading ui resources bug =(