Shader 3.0 before & After

Arbreth wrote:

He's not a troll and he does have a very good point. One dev is massively undermanning a project this big. I get the distinct impression they thought one dev to do the tech stuff and we dont need to bother getting anyone else actually testing it because we have a player base who can do that.
In its current form SM3 is far from a release candidate. The fact its gone live is, IMO, because they cant get enough of us chumps on test server. Thus the wider diaspora become the testers. No beef with Imago who has done a great one man job so far but the SOE management are seemingly just not giving it any support at all.
Come on guys, if you can afford to rip off people with an obscenely overpriced mount then you can spend some of that on more game related goodness that EVERYONE can enjoy not just those with sucker DNA or massive wallets.

shaunfletcher wrote:

There was a 10 fps loss with shader 3 enabled on my gtx260. Check out my post, you can see the fps in the screenshots and video.

I love the way shaders look on most items and landscapes, they don't do a great job on the characters. I have turned them off for that reason. Some of the screenshots I took of various races.
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It would be great if the Fae/Arasai skin wasn't so dark and dingy looking, and if the Kerra fur rendered nicely instead of dark and oily.
My crash issues were in my house...I packed my stuff in a moving crate and just left the place. I should have sent in a bug report, I don't know if I can reproduce it now.

Viix@Crushbone wrote:

Yes but if there is then it isnt because the card is too old, its either a fault in the coding, a driver problem or a settings issue. The 260 should be up to this task without any problems. Im actually not criticising you or the other poster, Im saying dont think you have crappy old hardware and shouldnt judge the shader 3 engine on how it performs on your kit because you have good modern hardware, and the engine SHOULD run well on it.

radeon 4750 here. also having issues with extreme darkness, i.e. ALL guildhall walls are plain black. on the other hand: all player characters skin colors are WAY too bright (darkelf doesnt even look like a darkelf anymore) and while moving through sundered frontier / stonebrunt the game will completely stall for 1-2 minutes... every 5 minutes or so
oh and ALL speculars are WAY too bright as well the fomerly black brethren armor ("evil" camp from the vampire advpack) is now lightning white because it only consists of specular lighting in S3

For me it's mostly that everything turned really dark. If I use the Profit UI's "night vision" button, the 3.0 version is still a bit darker than I'd like, but not terrible. Still and all, I've gone back to using the 1.0 version. I like my game a little brighter than I can get it in 3.0 right now.
My only "glitchiness" I've noticed (so far, anyway) is that the colors of some items are changing. For example, in the next 2 shots I am wearing player-made broadcloth vest, sleeves, and gloves, tranquil swiftcloth pants, and the Emissary Slippers quest reward from the Fens. But in shaders 3 the pants turn blue, the sleeves turn gray, and the black boots turn gray too. Makes for quite a different look, doesn't it?
And as an FYI, the shader 1 shot is taken in normal light as night began to fall. The shader 3 shot was taken in full daylight *using the Profit ui's Night Vision.* That should give you an idea of just how dark the shaders 3 make my screen.
Edit to add: More shots here for comparions.

I think Shader 3 is highlighting where EQ2 has relied on the blandness of shader 1 for so long. Places that have a general ambient light now dont have enough lights. Dark dungeons are even darker because there are hardly any light sources in them and what there are are usually coloured - which SM3 takes on whereas SM1 it was just a general light that didnt match the colour of the actual light itself.
Over time the world will improve I'm sure. Just make sure to /bug all the little bits that dont work or have been overlooked. It sucks that the players have to do this and not the developers but SOE seem to be concerned with doing things on the cheap all the time nowadays.
I suppose we should be glad the project hasnt been cancelled like the skeletal animation one.

Imago-Quem wrote:

Thank's for your continued work on this Imago, I think the game actually looks great as it stands in 3.0 apart from some character and armor issues, and the the fact that I crash constantly! (I'll get to that in a minute).
Most people i think have been a bit lazy in this, I notice many of the complaints about darkness are a taste thing, not necessarily a problem with the code. I spent about 5 minutes adjusting the ambient light and gamma, contrast settings and everything looks extremely lush, and not dark at all. I would say that in shader 1 the game is far too washed out and bright. Maybe these settings should be adjusted when you switch too shader 3, but personally i would rather that doesnt happen because i like to set it up to my tastes anyway.
A lot of the character issues are valid though and some areas flat out glitch and corrupt the graphics (training is a shield instances in zek for example). My personal peeve is the evil bloodline armor, which I love for appearance, I will put some screens up shortly to illustrate in shader 3.0 all the ornate detail in the armor looks like it's been made with glitter.
I find it a bit worrying that you have nothing in your list for crashes. I have sent numerous /bug reports and they obviously aren't getting to you, with the current in game system. These are not zone specific it's happening globally and is quite random.
One for instance is the market place. Using the dressing room on the purchased mounts crashes the game as it tries to render them. Otherwise i get random lockup's.
I do have a very strange computer configuration but no other game on my machine has this problem and it's definitely only shader 3.0 where I get the issues. Running things like AOC (in shader 3) with near max graphics with this setup. (latest drivers)
Athlon FX-60 dual core, 2.8ghz
AGP Radeon HD3850 512mb
Windows XP pro.
2gb ram.
I am not surprised I'm getting crashes though as I doubt there are many out there with this particular configuration. Ifthere is anything else you need like crash logs I would be happy to provide. I also have had a huge issue with in game LON since it's release which I have logged at least two bug reports in game and in these forms that although got some attention seemed to have been dropped by your support team.

Ryan, good to see SM3.0 finally coming to fruition, your hard work is appreciated.
I /bugged my problem with the client crashing to desktop in my Inn Room with SM3.0 enabled, and as an aesthetic aside I think grass (particularly Antonica) needs some revision, SM3.0 makes it look almost varnished.
Keep up the good work!

What i needed to do to get SM 3.0 to work correctly,
*i had the problem that for instance the floors in the guildhall would be rendered completely black.

Was to start a completely clean client install in stead of the client install i was using since long way back,
there where files in there created in 2005.

Things look a lot nicer now, so if you got some issues with SM 3.0 try to start a new install using the Streaming client
next to you current installation of EQII, and check it out this way.
Hope i gave some others a good direction / idea to try SM 3.0 out again.
Ortahr.

Too bad, I really really liked shader 3.0 and how it made the game look. But last night I kept crashing to desktop over and over again. Turned off shader 3.0 and not a single crash since then. Hope it gets worked on, I would definitely use it, but it's still beta.

I did a /bug report too, but it is kind of hard to explain without screenshots. There is a purple barrier in VD: The Conservatory and when a conjuror using a Master mage pet crosses it, there is a graphical bug that happens. It applies to the flames coming off of the pet (hense why it has to be a master version to reproduce). There are semi clear boxes around the flames. See below.
edit: This is also happening in Lair of the Dragon Queen.
Before Crossing:


After Crossing:

Ortahr@Nektulos wrote:

Ortahr, great idea on your part. I really like simple ideas to fix problems like this and thought it might be the solution. Sadly after a few hours of redownloading eq2 from the newest station launcher, I ended up with same results.
I did study how things were dark and others were light, it looks as if almost every single object in norrath would need to be modified for correct color balance. Looks like a Huge job, might take even years.
Here was a screenshot I took, just after a fresh download, turned on the shader 3, rebooted eq2 and this was what things looked like on my screen.

I just went into my house in Qeynos for the first time since SM3. I'm going to need to take a whole bunch of screenshots and RAR them in a PM or something to Imago. Unfortunately almost everything in my house was rendered incorrectly. After about 5 minutes I crashed out.

In my experience, the "hard pauses" as they've been referred to have been the result of objects not loading their pixel shader 3.0 shaders and, therefore, not loading at all.
Most notably, this happened in which I experienced a long pause, then realized that a druid ring had never appeared when I was finally able to look in its direction (namely, it seems to just be a long timeout before it gives up trying to make the object visible when it fails). I could still collide with the 3D object of the druid ring, but I couldn't actually see what I was bumping into.

I have also started crashing to desktop, since I activated shader model 3.0 (only if loggin to game in GH).
And GH is very dark.
If I turn it off, game runs fine on 1.0.

I have an:
ATI HD5770
6GB DDR3
Win7 64bit
Intel W3570 on WX58BP

shaunfletcher wrote:

Oh, I can get a performance increase in FPS using the new shaders, however I get zones that are unplayable due to the lighting or nearly all black textures.

Atan@Unrest wrote:

Kind of odd. I too lose about 5-10 FPS on average, and going from 30 to 20 is having quite the ill effects on me enjoying the game. Might be connected to me running in windowed mode on a dual screen system, but aside from that, im confused why 3.0 would draw so many FPS, since im using a gtx260 myself

Atan@Unrest wrote:

Im getting a mixed bag. Performance is bascially the same as shader 1 for me. A lot of zones do look very good, but the occasional bit is bad/broken (new npcs at the kejek camp turn black when close for instance). I havent spent much time in guildhalls and people seem to be having a lot of their issues there so maybe thats why Im not seeing these black things. The shiny ground thing is a bit nasty, plain dirt and rock should not be glossy. Lamps can occasionally behave oddly when moving towards/away from them which looks silly.
The reason I am stopping using it for now however is the very bad performance on switching from the game to other windows and back etc. I am an obsessive multi-tasker and cannot deal with a 30 second hangup to switch back to the game.

Issue for me is the crashes. If I face east in the main room in my guild's Freeport T3 guildhall, I crash. I haven't been able to narrow it down to any specific item on the screen, but it's 100% reproducible. If I log back in facing any direction other than east, I'm fine until I turn east.
I've submitted bug reports and PM'd the crash log files.