Does anyone seriously think that it took 2 years for them to find out it would not work? They had two years and this is the best lie they could come up with? This is all about $$$. They do not want to spend the $$$ to redo the games graphics. A few years after EQ1 was out they not only redid the graphics but they gave us new disk that upgraded the textures for the entire game! SOE can do what they want and they do not want this. They want us to think that it is a technical issue. Does anyone really buy that? I smell beancounters all the way! Want to know what a snap-on really is? It's when you overlay graphics on top of your toon. The problem with this is that it adds polys to the game and slows it up. Right now each toon is made up of x number of polygons. The polygons are "filled in" with textures. These textures can look like skin, armor, leather etc... and this is why the armor does not look real. Instead of appearing on top of your skin, it literally becomes your skin. Snap ons mean that they actually put additional polys on top of your toon and if done right they can look great. They apear as real armor/clothing/whatnot because they actually are added on top of your toon instead of just changing one skin texture for another. They always had this option even from day one to do this. So why was this not in the game from day one? Because adding 20-30% more polys to each players can cause a "huge" increase in graphics requirements if the graphics engine is required to draw all the polys... in other words (and I think this was the reason they wanted to update the skeletal system) the game will draw everything... even what you cannot see. Example: (numbers used are just an example and not real) EQ2 currently draws 500 polygons (triangles) for each player and then sections of your toon are "skinned" via adding textures to give your toon the illusion of wearing cloths/armor or whatnot. As I said before this does not look as good because the armor looks like it's painted on your skin instead of being on top of your skin. So they add snap-ons which add another 200 polygons (or more) on top of your toon. Now your computer/CPU/vid card has to draw 40% more polygons per toon! With a new skeletal system they would not have to draw polys that are not seen and adding new armor would not increase the workload on your computer. The drawback is that a new skeletal system would require the entire games player graphics to be redone. Adding snap ons allows them to keep the existing game as is. Snap ons can work but only if they off-loaded the graphics work to our video cards and right now this does not occur. We have expensive advanced video cards that often have hundreds of special shaders to be used for special effects and EQ2 uses none of these because these shaders did not exist as the time the SWG/EQ2 engine was being made. EQ2 currently does not know how to use the most powerful part of current video cards! So what has been happening in the video card world is that they are moving toward increasing shader performance because this is what modern video games use and not increasing "raw" video card speed which is what EQ2 uses. This is why new video cards are often not much faster and in some cases even slower in EQ2 over your old video card. EQ2 is not using the new features added to video cards over the years. Why did I get into video cards? Because, as hard as I have been on SOE, if SOE moves to snap ons "and" updates EQ2's graphics engine to use shaders then this will work. It's not a very elegant way to to it but it will work. If SOE goes cheap and only hacks a few video fixes then snap ons will only slow down the game even more.
Chayna wrote: Yeah, i also maybe try the PW-I Server when they start, also Runes of Magic is maybe worth a look. The good thing is that you can just test these games at no cost. The next pay-game i maybe will take a look at is Aion. At the moment i also play again a little Lineage *lol*
Cassea wrote: To be fair, the character art team for EQ2 is very small, and those 2 years were largely taken up with 2 expansions, Unrest, Shard of Hate, Neriak, the tail end of class hats and 3 new races. Thats a lot of work for a small team. The skeletal revamp was a project for them to work on between all of this, so 2 years to figure out that they couldn't get the models looking exactly how they wanted sounds about right to me.
Noaani wrote: Why do people actually try to defend such sloppy jobs? First with the engine itself, and now with the failed revamp of skeletons...
Riliszkas@Splitpaw wrote: Not defending anything (in fact, if you look back through this thread, I was the first to predict that the revamp was not happening, months before the devs mentioned it). The development team make enough mistakes, for which we should all try to hold them accountable as appropriate, but when unfounded criticism is launched, it is often best to point out the flaws in said criticism.
Geez, when I was younger I might agree with the haters bashing the devs. However having worked in the biz for a bit I can say the problem is not the devs it is the system. Give them a shot and they will eventually get MGMT to see clearly. In that aspect 2-years is nothing I have been fighting a loosing fight for over 7 and every new system or applicaiton that comes in is comported to the vision of MGMT not the developers/programers or even users. Tell em the truth, work with thier vision as best as you can and try not to tell em I told you so on the way out the door... tis the life.
My problem is that it took them roughly TWO YEARS (which could have gone to working more on an expansion and new content) to realize that the skeletal revamp that they were working on would not work and they have now scrapped it. That was not only a waste of their time, but a waste of our money on something that we wont have and were expecting. I was really looking forward to it, but now I'm utterly dissapointed. They should have known that it wouldn't work on the current engine. It's kind of weird though that Sarnak use the new skeletal system. It could be about money or whatever, but I was honestly looking forward to it. They have probably known that it wasn't going to work for a while now. Next it's going to be the new map system that they have been talking about. I'd bet money on it.
Short Answer: They dont want to divide the community by requiring players that have only DX7 compatible video cards to get the short end of the stick. That would cost them money again.
DamianTV wrote: Divide the community? For crying out loud DX8 and many DX9 cards cost about $30! I grow tired of people using obsolete computers and expecting everyone to be held back because they are too CHEAP to upgrade. We're not talking about $200 video cards or $200 CPU's but when a modern CPU costs $50 and video cards the same while they have no issue paying $15 a month... well it is cheap. We are on DX10 now. I don't think they even sell DX7 cards. You can buy a DX9 card for both PCI, AGP and PCIx16 so it's not like you cannot find them. I've seen DX9 cards for as little at $30 and decent ones for under $50. No these are not speed demons but they run rings around any DX7 or DX8 cards. You want to know who may still be using DX7 cards? Yep.... laptop users who bought cheaper, out of date, laptops with rotten video and would be locked out if they upgraded the graphics. These laptops are so bad that they have little memory and even share this limited memory with their junk video card inside. So how many years should someone expect to play on technology that was out of date the day EQ2 was released? This has always been a sticking point with MMORPG's because they have such a long shelf life. The vast majority of people slowly upgrade their computers but there are a few who just do not want to do so. Sorry about the tone but I have been listening to this excuse for years and one of the reasons I play EQ2 is because it does require a decent computer to play. If I had wanted to play a game on some museum computer I would be playing WoW I did have to laugh when you brought up DX7. People are talking about Sony upgrading EQ2 to DX10 and here comes a post that says, in effect, don't upgrade the graphics because then the DX7 people could not play. Are there really DX7 people who play EQ2 in existance?
-Arctura- wrote: HAHA I can attest to that one. With the chessboard I made when mannequins were first put in, with each one fully outfitted (that's about 20 different armor appearances if the differences between male and female also count), the moment I step foot into that room my FPS drops to 2-4 if I don't lower my graphic settings. Making that chessboard was a realization to me that most of the lag in towns or heavily populated areas has NOTHING to do with the character models themselves and EVERYTHING to do with the armor and outfits they are wearing.
They need to revise the engine to support at least DX9 features and dual-core processors. Then they need to revamp their character artwork to be lower poly count. Making characters with such high polygon count was SOE's fatal error. There are games with less than half the poly count, sporting characters that look vastly better. Why? Because with all those poly's to worry about, SOE doesn't have time to actually make.. art.
Sebastien wrote: (( SOE's characters are not overly heavy in poly-counts. Comparatively, Altair from Assasin's creed and Marcus Fenix from Gears of war weigh in around 10-14 POLYS (20k+ triangles). (EQ2 = 4-5k polys) The difference is, in those games the characters do not swap out hundreds of different armor sets, so their 'one outfit' has to be amazingly awesome looking In my opinion anyways, the EQ2 models are very decent with poly counts. Take away any more polys and things will be SUPER blocky like WoW's minimalistic Picasso style 'works on any computer' type look. Remember, you need extra polys in those high-deformation areas like underarms and crotches for things to deform with minimal mesh distortion. This, and intricate knee and elbow pads account for most/many of the denser poly areas on the meshes. It's not texture sizes that are EQ2s problem either. EQ2 uses hundreds of 128x128 to 512x512 maps, whereas AC or GoW use primarily 1024x1024 to 4096x4096's. Mind you, EQ2 has many, MANY more textures, so they must be lower res.... Look at games like Crysis, insane thru-the-roof graphics. Ultra high poly models, ultra high res textures.... But it looks soooo nayyyyce.... its 2008, we are already past the point where computer games are pushing 10k polys per character. Welcome to the future
Snowdonia@Runnyeye wrote: Actually, I wouldnt be at all surprised if the mannequinns are special versions of the character models that are not attached to control logic. The armor and outfits also ARE the player models. they dont add the armor to the models and render then on the outside. They swap out once piece of the model with the new armor and render that new piece.
Sebastien wrote: The poly count isnt the issue in eq2. Its the outdated engine that were designed with a different future for hardware in mind than the one we actually got. And those other games with vastly superior looks make use of programmable GPUs to have fun with texturing tricks. Which requires more than an artwork revamp. But I for one would love the engine to be revamped so they could make use of the gfx cards more.
Ulvhamne@Nagafen wrote: If this is true, then why do our character's bodies go through them? I can be casting something, on a fully plate armored character, and lo and behold, there, where my armored armpit should be, I see skin popping through. Now, if your assessment were correct, surely this wouldn't happen.
-Arctura- wrote: Of course I know this but apparently you missing the line right before my 500 poly "example" "Example: (numbers used are just an example and not real)" A new skeletal system can very well mean that they do not have to draw anything "under" armor that fully covers up what we can see. The skeletal system is still there but it does not have to be rendered. If you have 10k polys (EXAMPLE please LOL) and 5k are not seen because they are under existing armor then a new system that only renders what you see can help a ton. Right now the polys are always rendered because we really do not have armor but skin that is recolored and textured to look like armor. Look I do not pretent to know everything about skinning, textures and video cards and I always welcome "experts" to correct or add on to anything I post. I'm willing to learn and actually like having a good discussion about the technical merits of the game. A new skeletal system would be alot of work but it IS very doable in EQ2... IF they really wanted to do it. Snap ons will never work unless they do something about the graphics engine either by offloading the work that our CPU's currently do onto the video card or coming up with a new rendering system that does not draw what we do not see. Other games can redo their graphics. EQ1 did it twice with about the same subscriber count. In fact EQ1 even retextured the entire game even the old zones at one point. So it can be done if SOE puts the resources into doing it and this is one occasion in which more people = better as they can all be working on different models. If they did a proper skeletal system they would only need one and be able to scale it up or down to create different sizes/races - yes they would have to make a few mods for the frogs and such but almost everything else could use the very same model. How much work has been done to the graphics engine in 5+ years? As far as I can see, aside from some minor tweaks and patches it's the same graphics engine that we had as release. Reminds me of when I ask my kids to clean their room... But I don't want to cleam my room.... it will take a long long time they say and I say back... but if you would not have let your room go for so long and have kept it clean all along it would not be so much work - you did this to yourself See where I'm going with this? If SOE would have kept the graphics engine up to date each year and rewrote a few routines each year then they might not be in the position they are in now in which it is a HUGE task. So who is at fault here? Did these new video cards featuring tons of shaders spring up just last week? Did Intel/AMD keep secret all those 2x, 3x and 4x cores all these years? SOE knew the train was heading toward the wall and did nothing to slow it down. Now it's about to crash and they complain that it would NOW take too much work to stop the train. Had then been slowing the train little by little for years it would have already been stopped and heading back in the other direction
Even though they have a disclaimer on the retail box, SoE would be loathe to increase the minimum specs for any reason. To me, the answer is to do what they did with EQ1, but do it better. Give us a choice of clients to run, the standard DX7, and then do a DX 9 and/or 10. Creating an entire new client is no small task, but it could possibly work out to be less effort/money than the snap ons they are working on (especially if they end up going down the same road as the revamp). Basically, create a DX 9 and/or 10 client, give people the optino to use it instead of the current. I would assume this new client would need a new 3d renderer and maybe ew models done for it as well, which is a lot of up front work. However, if done in a manner that lets character artests create items faster, it would mean either increasing the number of graphical appearances in game, or reducing the cost of creating any that would be added. If this were to happen, any new items created after this comes out would have to be assinged an appearance from theexisting DX 7 models, and new graphics for the DX 7 client would have to be restricted to new races and new zones. After 2 expansions, the DX 7 client could be essentially no longer supported, with DX 9/10 required from then on for any new content. If people are so concerned about graphics and appearance in this game, they will be running DX 9/10, or have hardware capable of running it. Those people running anything lower obviously do not particularly care, and would be (presumably) empathetic about this change.
