Shader 3.0 before & After

Sadly I've moved back to shader one for now. The current incompatibility with AA is offsetting the improvements for me. Getting black screens when raining and following a tracking wisp plus black flashes whenever a party member joins, zones or leaves a group or I get any quest updates.
Plus I'm getting spell sprites canted 45 degrees (such as musical notes and drops of acid in defiler spells etc) with SM3. They revert back to vertical when I switch back to 1.

My experiences with Shader 3.0 so far have been mixed, there are some areas where the FPS drops, but it doesn't feel like its slowed down, some other areas fly especially indoors.

Stability is fairly good as I've run around on balanced on my laptop forgetting it was set on whereas if I set it to extreme quality I'd not be able to forget that setting! I've got that crashing bug in my guild hall which seems to occur every time I enter the east wing, until now I thought it was an object. When it occured one time I had a weird effect where a bench was being reflected in the flames of a fire (very cool looking) but the whole screen darkened a little and a while later it crashed so it seemed to be a setting that corrupted that then changed how everything was rendered. I'll have to upload a screen shot if the bug still exists.

First though some before and after pictures on my laptop on a really ideal character, anything with hard/shiny surfaces really does look amazing with shader 3.0 (I took some pictures with extreme which is unplayable but just to demonstrate).

Before - Shader 1.0 extreme quality



After - Shader 3.0 extreme quality


I cannot fault the rendering myself there, in terms of a speed increase though if I drop it down to something useable on my laptop I get the following

After - Shader 3.0 balanced quality


Which I think is clearly much higher quality then the shader 1.0 could achieve on extreme. These characters though are ideal
for shader 3.0 so its showing an ideal case and cloth/matt characters tend to get less benefit and all the potential problems though (too glossy, wrong brightness, colour errors) but there haven't been many posts showing what works so I thought it would be good to put them up to balance things out.

In terms of bugs and problems I'm seeing a lot of the following (I believe both were on balanced)

Before - Shader 1.0


After - Shader 3.0



In both the texture of the face stays the same (I assume its always intended to be matt, personally for a Froglok I've not liked that look on shader 1.0) but the brightness changes, I see this problem in the New Halas guards too. Commenting though on the two pictures I'd say the shader 1.0 rendering of the armour was a bigger problem.

The other problem I see throughout the zones is the lighting which can be too much or too little, and inappropiate glossy textures, especially on grassland or cloth, seeing the previous Frogloks face I guess we can achieve a completely matt texture.

Kind of hoping that we can get some graphical artists time on this since some of the zones that relied on the less realistic shader 1.0 lighting look like they need extra torches etc placed (a good example is the tradeskill fuel vendor in Castleview Hamlet where it looks like no alteration to the shading would give light that just isn't there, its as if the shader 1.0 had a lot of ambient light that shouldn't have existed and probably contributed to the pea soup look in some areas), it would be fantastic to see the whole of Norrath gone back over a little to fix this since it would give the world a refresh at the same time, many zones would need little or no work too from what I can see.

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but when shader 3.0 is turned on and you go to switch the overall graphics settings (ie:balanced, high performace, etc) it takes literally 5-10 minutes for it to switch, it just freezes until it changes the graphics mode. Kinda sucks when youre entire raid force is waiting on you.

Rick777 wrote:

I just realized this problem after I had done a fresh install of the eq2 client with the station launcher. (with shader 3 on of course). I did not seem to have this problem with my original eq2 installation and shader 3 turned on.

I turned off shader 3.0 also because something in the front room of my guild hall caused me to crash to desktop. Just in case Imago is interested, its on Kithicor in the North Freeport guild hall (spirit callers guild hall). I could move around the two side rooms and upstairs where we have our crafting area without problems, I didn't try downstairs though. But some item used for decoration I'm suspecting is causing the crash.
I played on test and didn't have the problems with the 2 characters I created out in Halas and leveled to mid teens and mid twenties and I played mostly to check out shader 3.0 as well as Halas. Anyway, I liked the looks of Shader 3.0 on test and can't wait for all the items that may be causing crashes to get their textures or whatever fixed.

If you're crashing in guild hall or home, try sending any frost-rimmed chairs to the moving crate. There may be other items causing problems, but I've confirmed that those chairs are definitely an issue.

Uwopo@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Yes. As soon as I took one from moving crate and tried to place it, blam my screen darkened and as soon as I tried to move, game crashed. Turned off shader 3.0, relogged, removed chairs. I think the "mysterious painting" may be causing issues too.

Uwopo@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Uwopo FOR THE WIN. This fixed my problem, explained in detail here, where I'd crash in the Guild Hall consistently.
They're called "Frost-Rimed Chairs" and they look like this:

Thanks again, Uwopo; hopefully these can get looked into.

Uwopo@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Hmm, this must have been my issue as well as 3.0 was working pretty good until I zoned into my house, that's where I kept crashing. I do have one of those chairs, I'll give it a shot as I really really liked how 3.0 looked.

Rick777 wrote:

I'm suspecting that all the house/guildhall crashing is due to a handful of objects with a bug in them. Apart from the house/guildhall crashes are rare (I had one in tenebrous tangle once but could not reproduce it so it might not have even been shader 3.0) and I've been able to run around with it on full time.

Some good news for you folks:
1) The darkness issues are fixed in-house already. We'll be pushing those fixes out to you soon.
2) We're looking into the crash that occurs in guild houses with tons of items in them. We hope to have a solution soon.
3) Frame rate has been improved.

I'd say it'll be about a week or so until we get the fixes out to you, but they're on the way.

Just to add to that, we discovered the issue with the frost-rimmed chairs on Friday thanks to a player who helped us narrow it down to this item and we've already got a fixed checked in for it.
As Smokejumper mentioned, we're hoping to push out an update to address several Shader 3.0 issues in the next week or two.

i had an instant crash with s3 active when i tried to place the aa mirror from my invent

Lemin@Splitpaw wrote:

If you can repro that, please /bug it.

Now that I've played with Shader 3 three for a while, here's the problems I've run into.
First of all, the freezing. Basically the game will completely freeze up for around a full minute. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to how long I need to be playing for it to freeze, as I've had it freeze after I've been on for half-an-hour, and other times after just a couple minutes. I have only had it happen to me once-a-play-session, though; although I haven't been playing especially long sessions, so that may explain that.
I've also noticed a strange case where doing something will cause the shadows on-screen to go really dark for half-a-second before returning to normal. I noticed this while doing the druid ring rebuilding quest in the Feerrott; every time I harvested one of the magiliths or turned in the quest, all the shadows would flash dark for an instant. I'm guessing it has something to do with the little messages you get when you get a quest update. Hardly a game breaker, but it is a little distracting in zones with lots of shadows.

here is something that needs looking at. My Ogress's skin looks metalic.

Oh yeah, and can we see about lightening up the abandoned Kejak village in Stonebrunt a bit? It's gotten rather pitch-blacky in there, with the addition of shader 3 to its normal darkness.

I just checked out S3.0, and while it is quite dark I can see a load of potential in it to make the game look even more amazing.
On the downside though, some items are major color differences between s1.0 and s3.0 that I noticed with some of my characters, mostly having to do with color issues between 1.0 and 3.0
Item: Roger Goldie's Straw Hat
1.0: Yellow base with red trim
3.0: Red base with silver / grey trim
Items: Concordium Weave (Market place set)
1.0: Blue base with white trim
3.0: Helm is DARK DARK blue, bordering on black, the remaining pieces are washed out grey / dirty white
Items: Pious Steel (T1 Templar set)
1.0: Purple color
3.0: Helm is purple, the remaining pieces are washed out grey / white
Other chest pieces I checked out look fine between 1.0 and 3.0, the above are ones that I swap / use often so I noticed them right away.

For those with darkness issues :
I found if I went to my Nvidia control panel and made sure that the colour control was set so that the application didnt control the overall colour but the desktop did - then played in a window - it solves a lot of my darkness issues.
Also without AA the game looks worse overall even with SM3. AA should be a top priority IMO. All the nice shaders in the world cant gloss over the awful jaggies without AA on. SM3 is largely unusable with AA sadly due to totally black screens when raining and using a tracking wisp.

Will any of these fixes include a fix for the client crashing when placing items in your own house? Thanks.