Miarina@Runnyeye wrote: Explains why the extra high page file usage too. This game eats memory and everything you can offer it. By the looks of it the textures on higher performance settings have to be in the 1024x1024 or higher range. Load those, in this type of game, and expect the page file to explode. Even though F.E.A.R. was a monster on computers, I did like how level sectoring of the Jupiter system allowed to divide the proc and GPU usage, giving even slower computers a break. A slight hitching when turning a corner while textures load, but anything is better than ingame load screens. Screen resolution was the main problem, but just lowering the res, boosted the fps considerably (10/20fps). Did the Futuremark benchmarking on this 2003 rig. Nothing like the 2008 computers, but the GPU fps is decent (14fps on it's 1024x768 grinds). It's the proc (a 3.2Ghz Northwood) that grinds to a halt -- that mini game Futuremark has, it's but 1 or 2 fps. Balance is needed. 60/40, 40/60.
Dreyco wrote: Animations in themselves isn't the CPU killer, it's processing all those polys (and their vector points). Higher the poly count, higher the proc demand. Those on older computers are also limited to a smaller I/O pipe that has to share bandwidth with both proc and GPU instructions. That's the main bottleneck -- no matter how fast your proc/GPU/memory is the I/O is going to be the main limiting factor. A computer can't read any instruction faster than it can be delivered through that straw. A MMO will never be like Crysis (a SP game), due to existing hardware limitations. Remember with BF2142 and F.E.A.R., it was a nightmare in getting something visually decent to play online, compared to offline. Offline, the fps was good considering the rig. Online -- 640x480 with every perk turned off to keep up with the C2D/1600dpi mouse bunnies. On extreme performance on this 2003 tuned rig for gaming is about all I can do to get through a 8 to 10 mob in this game. Those without the game tuning on older rigs simply couldn't play mob content (no matter what the min requirements say on the box -- in reality online gaming is worse than offline in the fps. Expect 10 to 20fps drops from offline norms. Under 30fps, you will see stutter. Under 20fps it's stop n' go gaming).
As far as MMORPGs go, I think the graphics are ok. Can usually expect all the super high end graphics to be found in more single player games. I'd much rather see the animations improved...the animations while strafting or moving backwards in combat or sneaking are terrible. There needs to be more weapon specific attack animations, spears needing this the most. Idle animations are also pretty unnatural. Tabula Rasa is a good example of life like idle animations IMO. I've love to see a passive animations persona customization. Select appropriate idle animations for your character's mannerisms. Eg a fidgety ratonga, vs a noble/snooty standing elf. Extending on that idea, allow for equipment specific animation options. Eg the ability to use a staff as a walking stick, or the option to keep your weapon unsheathed (but not combat posed) while in a dungeon. But I'm getting carried away. Polish up the moving and combat animations first, that's probably a big job alone D: And mounts on sloped surfaces suck too, but that may or may not be an animations issue
Comit wrote: that all comes down to the skeletal revamp that has yet to be announced when it will be out. A lot of new armor looks BLAAAH. They look smudged and pixalated. I would post some pics of a friend's bruiser if i just had them at work. Maxed graphics and they just dont look good at all.
Kigneer wrote: Not true. There are at least 2 MMO's in production using the CryEngine2. Also, Crysis is both SP and MP...and the MP looks just as nice as SP. Go check out CryTek to see who's licensing their engine
What I've always thought (note this is JUST a theory of mine) is this: EQ2 runs on a custom engine, this engine was developed with future advances in CPU speed.. that never happened. Remember the early devs always saying "the game was built for future tech" My guess is that some of that was super fast SINGLE core tech that never happened, I mean Intel at the time was saying their CPU's were going to hit 7 ghz by now. And Multi-core/multi-threaded CPU's were n't even being discussed in terms of consumer systems. And from everything I've read, taking a custom engine and modifing it from single to multi-threaded/core support isn't exactly easy. Its better than it used to be, but its not easy. I really just think the game engine was desgined with the idea of a SUPER fast single core CPU, and sadly for them, CPU architecture shifted.. totally. So while I DO think they are working on it, and trying to do things, they are hampered by the decision made a long time ago to try and "future guess" how systems were going to go. They guess.. poorly.
Barstile@Mistmoore wrote: I hope Sony doesn't forget their original customers, some of whom are playing on the same computers they had when the game came out. Mine just met the specs back then. I've upgraded the memory and the video card, but I'm hoping to keep it for a few more years.
They've actually made some pretty decent improvements to performance in the last few months. I can finally run the game consistently above 50fps on balanced. If I had to choose between increased performance and improved graphical features I'd take performance every single time. Denn
I think this game, before graphics upgrades, needs to be reworked to utilize technology better. Vanguard runs better than this game does on high-end hardware. AoC ran with better performance on my machine too.
I think an engine overhaul is needed before graphic enhancements can really be done. Thing is, high end machine or low end, an engine optimization overhaul would benefit everyone. Those of us with high end machines should be able to max out the quality without going below 60fps now, and if we dont have high end machines, we could see a huge performance increase and at least increase framerates. Its one thing to not have enough texture memory and not be able to run the highest resolution textures, so taht is pretty well understandable you cant fit 256 megs of vram onto a video card that only has 128 megs available. There was also a post on page one about adding anti-aliasing. Although you can not do it thru the EQ2 Options, you can edit your .ini files to turn anti aliasing on. I have a feeling that due to the performance hit you'll probably take, the dev's decided to not put an option for it in game. With an engine overhaul, I think it would be safe to say we could turn it on from the options menu...
EQ2 runs on the Star Wars Galaxy Game Engine that SOE developed for Lucas and then borrowed for EQ2. The Skeleton Revap have been mothballed so now we are stuck. SOE "can" revamp the game engine just as they did for EQ1 twice but it costs $$$. $$$ that the beancounters does not consider well spent. Right now, IMHO, EQ2 is in "milk mode" in which they are trying to milk as much $$$ out of the game for as little investment as possible. I really beleive that those that run EQ2 want to do all that we ask but the heads of SOE just shake their head and say no to any expenditures of cash that will not increase profit. Let's be honest here... how many new subscribers will EQ2 get? Will the millions invested in a new graphic engine or multi-core support or graphics revamps even make back the money invested? As much as it's the right think to do SOE will only spend "just enough" $$$ to keep as many subscribers as possible. Look at their other games... they spend just enough to make a game stable then go into low cost maintenance mode. This is not me being down on the SOE people in the trenches that run the game... they are very dedicated and hard working people who love what they do... they just do not have the support (Read: $$$) to do the things needed. With under 200k subscribers we should be lucky that we get expansions I guess WoW ruined the entire MMORPG system IMHO because it showed the bean counters that you make more $$$ by placating to the masses and making games for the least common denometor... low end !@#$ computers because lets be honest here.... from their point of view they get the same $15 from someone with an old out of date computer as they do from those with high end state of the art machines.... Guess which system is easier to support and create content? Guess which system allows more "potential" subscribers? I'm not knocking WoW for it game features but clearly they do not have to worry about revamping graphics because they have sold everyone that WoW was "designed" to have !@#@$ graphics because it was an art choice.... in reality it was a business desision that ended up making them a ton of $$$ and every other game before and after has been chasing the WoW model which really makes me sick. In 2008 I want and expect graphics to be near photorealistic. Five years ago EQ2 was dead on with graphics for that day and age... today they are sorely lacking and this entire "we could not get the new graphics to work" is pure BS... they did a dollar-cost analysis and new graphics would cost too much money and provide little or no additional income so they were shelved. -JB
I was always under the impression that EQ2 did indeed start life on SWG's engine but they changed over to this one halfway through,i may be wrong but there nothing between the 2 games to say they use the same eengine,SWG looks awful where EQ2 isnt to bad just hampered by a fitire that never happened i.e CPU speed.
EverQuest 2 starts to become dated indeed. Especially the latest RoK expansion shows it with the awful terrain textures to allow them bigger zones. The zones design is nice, just not the quality of the textures. Not to mention that the armorsets starts to become more boring each day. And the scrapping of the Skeletal Revamp was a real letdown for me and a /slap in the face, wich Im sure it was for many of us. As we were really looking forward to this, wich would bring more variation in armorsets. The game engine is just horrible when it comes to performance. The game runs better on my gf's comp (my old AMD64 3200+ CPU with GeForce7800GS) then my new Dual Core AMD 4400+ with GeForce 8600GTS, because the AMD64 3200+ is faster then a single core of the 4400+ as the new CPU's are about multi-threading over multiple cores! When I run EQ2 it clearly shows how outdated the engine is, utilising 100% of a single core my CPU, while my Graphics card is taking a nap I would love to see a revamp of their engine, but I hardly doubt we will ever see one *sigh*
dawy wrote: It's the very same engine. SWG does not look awful - well 5 years ago LOL. In fact the graphics was the only thing SWG got right. I am sure that the engine has been modified over the past five years but there are the very same. It was a stroke of genious (well at the time) to let Lucas pay for the game engine and then be able to use it for EQ2. Maybe this is why they cannot or choose not to redo the graphics engine now... it would cost too much $$$. Now using the same engine does not mean both games have to play the same but in fact most aspects of both games are identical from character creation to crafting to the player models. Sure the textures are different and since release both games have been independantly modified but they both started off with the same parents so to speak. Making the game run on multiple cores is near impossible. Games need to be "designed" from the ground up to take advantage of mulitple cores. Sure they could hack a few things but EQ2 will never be fully multi-core aware unless they were to rewrite the game from scratch. What they could do, however, is to move the graphics that they currently do on the CPU to the video card. This is not an easy thing to do. It's a core part of the game engine and very few people are expert enough to be able to write game engines which is why so many companies just license existing game engines aka Unreal or Quake enigine. Most people think that companies making games hire programmers to make games from scratch but in reality they license an existing engine and modify it by hiring graphics designers do do the textures, skinning and other graphics and programmers to "modify" the licensed engine to tweak it. In this case we have no idea who did the SWG game engine. Did SOE do it inhouse? If so are the originla programmers still with SOE? Did they license it? Is the company still around? My guess is either one of two things happened: 1. SOE hired programmers to create the SWG/EQ2 engine in house but most if not all of those programmers are long gone. 2. SOE licensed a game engine from a company that no longer updated the game engine. The company, for example, that did the Unreal Game engine that so many games use today has been making and updating the engine for years. Unreal2, Unreal3 etc... and if you base your game on a game engine that keeps getting updated I would guess that it's much easier to move a game to the next gen engine. Right now SOE probably is stuck. SWG/EQ2 had a huge (at the time) budget to create the game. Part of these millions of $$$'s was to either create or license a game engine. They do not have millions to spend now and since (I'm guessing) the engine they do use has not been kept up to date they would need a total rewite. When a company writes a game engine they hope to recover the costs of production by licensing the engine to others. It would be cost prohibative to create a game engine from scratch for only one game. If EQ2 was a game with more subscribers then maybe they could justify the expense but lets say EQ2 has 200,000 subscribers (and this is a guess on the high end) Each month (assuming all pay $15 but as we know many people pay less for multiple months or in the all-in-one pass) Monthy: $3,000,000 Yearly: $36 million 3 mill is alot of cash but lets assume they have 25 people working on EQ2 at $100,000 in saleries and benefits $2,500,000 Now what about bandwidth... I have to admit that I have no idea what this costs but it's not free. Add in equipment from server farms to development computers etc... and lets assume (BIG BIG assumption) that this costs $5,000,000 per year So each year EQ2 makes: 36,000,000 -2,500,000 -5,000,000 Total profit: $28,500,000 Wow that's some profit! Could SOE use some of this profit to redo the game? You bet your sweet backside they could. Will the beancounters allow a small reduction in profit to lower their bottom line? You tell me Now I know these numbers are just a wild guess and I admit that most are made up but MMORPG's are a huge because their is so much profit to be made. Why else do so many come out each year and even those with lowly subscriber numbers such as 30,000 subscribers still stay in business. Once the game in on the market it's relatively cheap to keep the game going. Expansions do not count because we pay extra for them. What is staggering is how much $$$ Blizzard makes and how little they put back into that game. QAside from customer support, it costs about the same to develope and run a game with 1000 subscribers as it does for 10 zillion subscribers so why does Blizzard, with subscribers in the millions, need the same $15 a month that games with 1/10 the paying customers need? Because people will pay it is the answer. If they charged only $5 a month they would still make a profit but Blizzard ripping off their customers is a subject for another day SOE is a much larger company than just EQ2. They share expenses with many other games, EQ2 just being the largest. If anyone has a more realistic "guess" as to how many employees are actually working "just" on EQ2 or how much bandwidth really costs I would be interested in hearing your thoughts. -JB
Is there anything in your post that isnt just your guesses and speculation? You know for certain its the same engine as SWG but dont know where the engine came from? I have seen direct SOE employee quotes saying it is NOT the same engine (it is from the same company so it is normal to expect similiar ideas to go into it or even shared designs/modules), so I really am not sure you are right about anything here. Shaun
shaunfletcher wrote: It is the same engine. SWG came out first then EQ2. Both use the same engine... modified, of course, but the same. Why is this a bad thing? The best thing about SWG was the graphics so I'm not knocking SOE using it. Anyone who has played both games knows this to be true. I played both SWG and EQ2 on release date and let me tell you... they are both using the same engine without question. Since they both use the same engine then you would think both could be upgraded at the same time. I guess it's a bit complicated because SOE does not own SWG 100% so they cannot do anything they want. This entire post is about speculation which is all we have because SOE does not volunteer much information. They knew awile ago that the new skeleton system would not be going it and only a few months ago we were told that it was in testing and given the impression that it would be unveiled at the Fan Fair... now we get an.... "Oh... BTW guys no new skeleton system" What? I admited that most of my thoughts were just based on speculation and educated guessed. I'd love SOE to tell us some straight facts... how about asking them and see what answers we get
Cassea wrote: Ive played both and while I see similiarities in design here and there that I would expect from the same company and some of the same devs, and likely some borrowed secondary modules, I dont see the same engine, in fact the differences in engine fundamentals seem quite marked from my perspective. I really think you are wrong about this.. which is fine, and as you say wouldnt be a bad thing at all, but I think the fact you are stating this as a fact in a quite convincing manner might lead to a lot of people being regrettably misled into believing it to be a real fact. By the way I'm not defending them over the revamp (though a re-read of what was said in the interview leaves me confused and wondering/waiting to find out what they ARE actually doing) as Im really unhappy with it, and very much want to see new stuff. Shaun
shaunfletcher wrote: Did you play SWG and EQ2 right at release? In the past 5 years both games have been moving in different directions. I have not played SWG in years but on release date SWG and EQ2 were near clones. You are correct in that I have no hard facts. Perhaps I should notch down my opinion a bit There is one thing that is correct, however, and this is that SOE has plenty of cach to do a revamp "if" they so desired. From a dollars and cents point of view it just does not make any sense unless they were to do in in conjunction with an expansion in which they tossed in a few zones and the graphics revamp and thus our expansion $$$'s would pay for it.
Cassea wrote: And that's what they should do. Do a revamp through an Paid Expansion. EverQuest 2 has come such a long way content and feature wise, that it would be a shame to toss it away and start over with an EverQuest 3. Hence the reason there won't be an EQ3 (At least not on PC as stated in an interview somewhere a while back). The only smart move to do is revamping EverQuest 2. - update the Technology (better support for Multi Core CPU's and moving most graphic processing to the Graphics card where it belongs) - updating the textures and terrain. - revamp the old zones to match the newer ones (like automatic zone loading, instead of clicky clicky on doors). - And with the technology updated, they can finally revamp the Skeletal models to support more armor / outfit customisation. If they are able to pull this off and put it in an Expansion and get their Marketing department to DO their job for a change (and I mean explicitly MORE marketing in Europe as well!!). Then I am 100% sure that they will be able to draw in a load of new players! You cannot deny that a lot of people are drawn towards Eye candy! That's just how it works. You can see all this as a sort of Relaunch of EverQuest 2 in a brand new Graphic jacket, but with full content and features at hand. It will blow the competition right out of the water and give EverQuest 2 at least another 3 to 5 years of life extention. A perfect example how it can work is EVE Online and their Trinity expansion. Subscriber numbers have gone up and up ever since. Just my 2cents.
Jeronas@Splitpaw wrote: Sounds good and all but no matter what they do there is not going to be a land rush of new players into a 4 year old game. Those who wanted to try it have tried it. Too many new MMO"s in the works that will draw people to them. I'm here but always have one foot out the door. I'm sure there are many who feel the same. EVE is probably a poor example. EVE, after a rocky start (yes I was in beta and played the first 8 months after release) has shown modest growth since then. EVE has been a successful game particularly in light of the rather small development team that produced it. It is a unique game in the marketplace right now. Those interested in such a game really have no alternative. The same cannot be said for EQ2. SoE is in a bit of a bind though. Their cash cow, LoN, only floats as long as the Everquest franchise has life. Of course, they can spin it off to LoA (Legends of the Agency) if that game draws any interest. One curious thing to note is that when Vanguard inploded, Jeff Butler and Nino (sorry, cannot recall the guys actual name) were removed from the Vanguard team and sent on to a "secret project" at SoE. What that project is has never been revealed as far as I know. Could have been LoN I suppose since LoN hadn't been released at that point but I have never heard exactly where these guys landed or what they might be working on. Butler was a waste of space in Vanguard but Nino was one of Vanguards best assets in my opinion. Could they be involved in a new Everquest game? How much money could LoN earn for SoE if they actually pulled off a wildly popular third Everquest title? EQ and EQ2 do not really warrant significant investment at this point other than at a subsistance level but a new title just might.
