Not sure if this has been brought before but here it goes..... One of the things the aggravates me about the cities is the constant zoning. With the new expansion, I've the notice the immense size of the zones like Steamfont and Butcherblock. Why not changes the cities into one gigantic zone? Include the tradeskill areas as part of the big zone. About the only thing you have to zone into is player housing. It would be cool to travel from NQ to SQ and just see the doors open and just keep walking. Honestly I would like to see zoning go away but not sure if that is technically possible. Just zone in for instanced content. Another thing that I would like to mention. There some RPG games called Gothic and Gothic 2 and they are your average 3D RPG game. The one thing I always liked about those games is: NPCs follow the day/night cycle. If you see a guard at his gate post during the day when it starts to get dark you can see him leave his post and walk to his house. It would add a nice flavor to the game to not just have the same NPCs there 24/7. There are so many unused buildings in the cities, how about changing the content a bit. Have familiar NPCs have homes and maybe involve quests around that. I dunno, just throwing stuff in the air.
[p]Generally speaking, city zones in EQ2 are far too graphically dense to integrate them any further. If you've never experienced the lag in Qeynos Harbors or Eastern Freeport by some miracle of unholy deities, to which I'm assuming you sacrificed several dozen virgin girls to achieve such a powerful feat, then you're quite lucky. However, most of us have, and to further integrate these zones or even the smaller "suburbs" would only make lag like this more common. Potentially, you would be sacrificing performance-per-zone for the sake of having less zones, which doesn't really get us anywhere.[/p][p]I'm also somewhat annoyed by all of the zoning but, it's the price you pay to minimize lag in high-traffic areas.[/p][p] [/p][p]-Hadanelith Raswrolski / Mossda Odis'Ossda, Kithicor Server[/p]
I see that lag all the time. Some times I have to stand in front of the broker in QH for 30-45 seconds before he appears. If you see the little gnome town in SF, it appears to be almost as detailed as one of the boroughs in the cities. They managed to integrate that into the zone. Going back to the lag, it also occurs in overland zones that are far away from the cities so I'm not sure the rendering lag issue is related to the complexity of the city zones.
Yeah, with the sheer amount of lag that some of the central city zones can generate, it doesn't seem like a good idea, at the time. Eventually though, technology is going to catch up with these zones, and at that time I'd be completely behind condensing some of the city zones together, at least integrating the racial districts into the central zones.
"by some miracle of unholy deities, to which I'm assuming you sacrificed several dozen virgin girls to achieve such a powerful feat" Wow...... just..... wow. Anyways, I'll be the 1st to cheer when SQ and NQ are made as 1 zone. Even NFP, WFP and SFP. QH and EFP should remine seprate because they do tend to be high-traffic areas.
[p]Khat, if you're lagging that badly EVERYWHERE, there's only 2 options I'm afraid...[/p][ol][li]Turn options down[/li][li]Upgrade computer[/li][/ol][p]MOST zones will not lag, or lag very little, if you do one (or both) of these. But even on the best comps, QH and EFP may as well be called Lagolopolis.[/p][p] As far as integrating the other zones together goes, if you cram that many graphics and zonelines (meaning the zones to the ''suburubs'') into one megazone, there will be lag where lag was not before. It'll get icky fast, when the game loads quite literally 3x as many buildings, torches, npcs, particle effects, atmospheric lights... etc, etc.[/p][p]Anyway, I've digressed. Easiest way to cut down your total zoning? Complete the Bindpoint Quest, set it at the place handiest to you, and try ot keep your apartment/house as close to that point as possible. If you run to the bank a lot you'll still have to zone quite frequently but, otherwise you'll be pretty much set.[/p][p]Mariner's Bells FTW.[/p][p] -Hadan[/p]
