Skeleton rework

Discussion in 'Look and Feel' started by ARCHIVED-Lysara, May 24, 2008.

  1. ARCHIVED-Hugh Guest

    DamianTV wrote:
    Woohoo! That's funnah haha! DX7, well to be honest that might be a good idea to keep people with EQ2 without forcing them to upgrade hardware.

    Now if EQ2 doesn't crash my Laptop with Geforce Go Mx7400 even on Exterme Peformance. :D
  2. ARCHIVED--Arctura- Guest

    Cassea wrote:
  3. ARCHIVED-Cassea Guest

    Well lets look at what can be done (being positive a bit LOL)

    We have two main issues with EQ2

    1. Multi-core CPU support
    2. Video card shader support

    From everything that I have read, retrofitting a game at this stage to support mutilple CPU cores is near impossible. A game needs to be designed for multi-core from the ground up. Sure you can tweak a few things but it will never fully support multiple cores.

    Now lets ask ourselves "why" we want EQ2 to use multiple CPU cores in the first place? Because EQ2 uses the CPU to do so much of the raw video work is the answer so what if our CPU's did not have to do all this video work?

    If SOE rewrote many of the graphics routines to use shaders then, IMHO, we would not need multi-core CPU's. This seems to be the much easier way to fix EQ2. Modern video cards are often more powerfull than many CPU's.

    EQ2's video routines can be pulled out one by one and rewritten. They can work on shadows then lighting then keep moving on one video routine at a time. I'm thinking that this is what they are going to do. It's not easy but it's MUCH MUCH easier than rewriting the entire game to use multiple CPU cores. Once everything is done using shaders then perhaps these snap-ons will be able to be added to the game without causing single digit FPS :)
  4. ARCHIVED--Arctura- Guest

    Cassea wrote:
    (( Re; the shadows, Ive heard they have hired a 'shadow guy' who specializes in shadows.

    Apparently he has come up with an insanely new awesome shadow system, and once they are finished testing it fully, it will go live, and we will have amazingly efficient, yet super duper awesome shadows!

    I cant wait!!!!!!!!!!!!
  5. ARCHIVED-shaunfletcher Guest

    Cassea wrote:
    I only just noticed this.. hope to help clear up a misconception here. EQ2 doesnt add armour or clothing in this way at all. Some game engines did once do so but EQ2 doesnt do anything like that. EQ2 armour and clothing pieces are based on armour meshes (there are not enough of them but thats a side issue) with varied textures.. so most chain shoulder pieces share the same mesh, but its wholly different to the bare body mesh, just as it is not the same mesh as the plate or many of the cloth pieces.
    If you change from one chain piece to another armour piece that shares the same mesh, then indeed all the differences are in the texture. A change from bare to armour, or from plate to cloth, or any change involving a substantial shape change, will mean a different mesh piece.
    I could give some images to show what I mean if thats any use?
    (edited to not be abrasive and mean)
    Shaun
  6. ARCHIVED-Sebastien Guest

    Cassea wrote:
    That's interesting, because I would come at this from the opposite perspective. The client is very heavy on CPU, therefore the first order of business should be multi-core support. It also seems to me that this should be possible without touching any of the content / artwork in the game.. whereas revising for shader support might.

    I would like to see any links or citation where SOE said dual-core support would be nearly impossible for this client. I still don't understand this. My sense was that the Windows operating system hides / abstracts this information from applications. So, in a sense, whether there is one core or four shouldn't even be apparent to the application. I don't understand what SOE's programmers managed to do that forces all cores but one into a coma.

    I vaguely remember that this was maybe an intentional "fix" because the client had extreme timing errors when running on multiple cores? But I'm not sure.
  7. ARCHIVED-Sebastien Guest

    shaunfletcher wrote:
    Yes, that didn't sound right to me either.. because its pretty clear with some of the armors that they have physically different shapes.
  8. ARCHIVED-krrr Guest

    Sebastien wrote:
    To implement such thing they'll have to rewrite everything. And this means whole engine.
    Possible? Yeah sure it is.
    Will this happen? No. It's too much effort, and it is too expensive.
    Same goes to GPU support.
    Small fixes here and there will happen, but don't expect any huge revamps in near future. (Maybe in 2-3 years)
  9. ARCHIVED-shaunfletcher Guest

    Multi core support is very much an application design issue, as the OS can only put something on another processor if it is in another processing thread, and if you wrote a single thread application it will run on one processor only. You can try to modify an application to farm off parts to other threads, but in a realtime app like a game its hard to do after it exists. Not impossible though, but its going to introduce its own problems and issues.
    GPU stuff is way more doable, but how doable depends of course on the architecture of the game, and what kind of dev effort and knowledge is available (and how much you are prepared to compromise people with old graphics hardware)
    Shaun
  10. ARCHIVED-krrr Guest

    shaunfletcher wrote:
    It's 2008, video-cards without SM3.0 support are already hard to find (you can't buy new one, only used one). And there are lots of cheap GPU's with SM3.0 support (in Germany prices start at 35 euros, its not a high-end, but its definitely faster then gf3 card. For 100 you can get nice middle-class card that support everything). + I really do not believe there are still people using something without at least SM2.0 (tbh I think ~80-90% of current subscribers use something like radeon 1x00 or GF7x00, and this hardware supports DX9 just fine.)
  11. ARCHIVED-Sebastien Guest

    Well I don't buy the argument that its so much work it can never realistically be done. Competitors upgrade DX version and add new features to their engines all the time. Look at Valve and Half-life 2. There are plenty of MMO examples too. EQ1, DAoC, L2, AO, TR, LotRo.. heck even Ultima Online... ALL have performed substantial upgrades to their engine, re-drawn textures, added new shader support, etc., etc.
    So, for someone to claim that it is so massive it can never be done.. I guess they have not played many other MMO's. :)
  12. ARCHIVED-Cassea Guest

    Forget adding "true" multi-core support at this stage. It's not going to happen. Everything I have read from multiply sources says the very same thing.... you cannot change a single core game to multi-core without re-writing darn near the entire game.

    Graphic routines are a different beast however.

    Let's take the example of shadows. Programs run in loops.... everything in EQ2 is done one thing at a time.... VERY fast but one thing at a time. When it's time to draw or update your shadow it calls a subroutine (showing my programming age... dunno if the lingo has changed LOL) to do this task. While the shadow is being drawn everything else stops (like I said this is done very very fast so you do not notice any pause) while this task is completed.

    Now "how" this shadow is drawn is by using calculations and calls to a programing library. When EQ2 was designed it was easier to do this with your CPU because video cards were not as advanced then so this subroutine is routed through your CPU and the task is completed. Doing it on the CPU was never fast but it was nice eye candy 5+ years ago and looked good for screenshots... most, if not all, turned off shadows as this was acceptable at that time.

    Today our video cards are blinding fast... even the slower ones as compared to years ago. They have special programable shaders that can do these same tasks MUCH faster than our CPU could then and even now. All SOE has to do is to rewrite the shadow subroutine to use our video cards instead of our CPU's. Certainly not something that takes a few days but very doable and EQ2 could not care less if the shadow calculations are done on the CPU or video card. The same goes for many of the graphics routines. The code just needs to be updated to use the new tech and it can be added on feature at a time without rewriting the entire game.

    As more and more "graphics" tasks are moved from the CPU back to the video card where they belong... well then we free up the single core that EQ2 uses to do other things that cannot be easily moved off the CPU and our game runs faster.

    The real bonus is that once they move things back to our video cards they can at the same time tweak some of the graphics to allow better graphics in the future. The drawback to this is that they might have to move up to real DX9 code. Not an issue for 95% of us but there are a few who either bought an out of date laptop years ago or refuse to pop in a new $50 video card who might be upset that they are forced to move into the world of 2006 computers (note I did not say 2008/09 LOL)
  13. ARCHIVED-shaunfletcher Guest

    Darlock@Runnyeye wrote:
    Im actually on board with you on this. I would go with sm2 and dx9 as a reasonable requirement (and as providing more than ample features) as I think the number of people in a position where it would stop them playing is very very small, and the upgrade cost in those cases generally very small too. dx9 is after all older than eq2..
  14. ARCHIVED-Keeper1975 Guest

    Cassea wrote:
    Funny though, that you're talking about shadows....because the new expansion will be named: shadows of odyssey.
    ...and if i worked at SOE, i for shure would have done an internal joke: The Odyssey of (reengineering) Shadows.

    AJ