Imago-Quem wrote:

- better skyboxes

Do you mean the cloud layer? Right now it can look really aweful at times. It looks like a scrolling flat surface with a texture on it. It can sometimes be yellow and pink acid clouds, and looks very unrealistic. EQ1 has one up on it. A new cloud layer would be awesome.

Achala wrote:

I loved the flora in Age of Conan.  Vanguard:SOH also has better looking flora than EQ2 (though the grass looks odd when you pan your camera around since it looks like it is moving because it always faces the camera).   Those worlds (just the open world outdoor environments, ignoring character models, cities, dungeon design, etc.) were really beautiful and vibrant.   Age of Conan, in particular, is lush and colorful, and most of it was just due to flora. 

 

I think Conan has a real problem with some of its flora though.. nasty nasty photomapped entire bushes that autoface to the camera (as you describe for vanguard) and are really obvious etc. great on screenshots, nasty in moving practice. I think being more efficient and longer range (especially longer range!) would fix the flora here nicely, the popin lets it down badly.

There are two fundamentally different types of flora here.. the one being talked about is I assume only the procedural moving stuff, anything larger or non procedural is just an object like any other in the game (and quality of it is massively varied depending when/by who it was done)

Flora just needs a complete makeover.  As it is now the Flora looks like weeds, it doesn't even look like grass, plants, flowers.  Imo it should be more concentrated oon the ground, and not spread apart 10 ft. away from eachother.  

Long grass, short grass, flowers, plants, wheat fields, finally some real corn fields?  Flora displacement should be the flora displacing in the wind and as you step through it or run by it.  It should have that feel to it...that's what I'm looking for.

Though I think Flora would be a bigger task to complete.

Sky, skyboxes, stars, atmosphere are all just blah (hideous).  As it is now EQ1 has better graphics in that department.

I'm sure that whatever you do with the list and however you do it and in what order - we will see the performance increase as well as a prettier game.

Imago-Quem wrote:

Dragowulf@Nagafen wrote:

kela wrote:

{0}

I was referring to player animations.

We have an AWESOME new animation artist on our team, Tom Tobey.  Just awesome. 

If you were at Fan Faire this year you would have seen some of his work (eg. Panda Bear).  All hand made too!

I saw the video shown at Fan Faire.  It was simply amazing.

There just needs to be more immersive player animations imo.  Especially with moods/socials emotes

Josgar@The Bazaar wrote:

Imago-Quem wrote:

Dragowulf@Nagafen wrote:

Imago-Quem wrote:

Adding it to the list...

So...what's on the list..? 

Well, let's see...

- Hair/Fur
- HDR Lighting
- Fast and expansive grass / flora
- new water
- new oceans
- better skyboxes
- atmospheric haze
- volumetric fog
- God rays
- point light shadow maps

That's what I've got scratched down here.  There may be a few other ideas we've passed around also.

Can you take a look at the lack of any kind of weather in 95% of zones?

Ah, yes.  That was another one.

Pitt Hammerfist wrote:

Imago-Quem wrote:

 

- Hair/Fur
- HDR Lighting
- Fast and expansive grass / flora
- new water
- new oceans
- better skyboxes
- atmospheric haze
- volumetric fog
- God rays
- point light shadow maps

That's what I've got scratched down here.  There may be a few other ideas we've passed around also.

 

 

 

 

holy crap lol now thats a list hope it all gets implemented eventually.

My order of most importance in that list would be:

1. Fast and expansive grass / flora

2. Better skyboxes

The above 2 items are the most common looked at 2 items in the game, the ground and the sky.

I dont mind the sky, and sometimes things like sunsets in majdhul can look awesome, but sometimes the clouds can look a bit old especially in freeport.

The worst thing in eq2 imo are the ground textures like dirt/rocks and grass, they look horrible in some places, and so does the flora. You just have to run around Zek/Commonlands or Moors of Yakesha to see what i mean.

Take a look at games like Tiger woods, and Oblivion, hehe i know they are single player games, but there are ways to draw grass/flora without it being expensive.

Flora in EQ2 is really really poor, do you use Geometry instancing for flora ? if not you should

Geometry Instancing:

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GP..._chapter03.html

 

Look at the below ground textures, i mean i could always link pictures to crysis, but that would be over the top heh, but what would the cost be to render the below terrain/flora

 

Below is an old pic of eq2 running on my old pc, you can cleary see the ground textures are pretty poor compared to new games.

 

Why does the top pictures terrain/flora look alot more vibrant ? is it shaders ? or is it something else ? comparing the 2 side by side it looks like eq2 is running on 16 bit color heh.

Take a look at this guys grass shader, not sure how he did it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwxg59rdxeE

Ya, there's a huge difference between single player and multi-player.  The single player experience is "much" more
controlled, as well as lacking in continuous in-game server updates.  MMO's usually display a ton more characters
on screen, moving objects, etc. as well.  Even just the number of possible armor sets displayed at once, each with
their own shader and texturing, causes a huge drop in framerates.  A lot of sets will even have multiple textures
and shaders used for a single set.  In any case, I'm always looking for ways to optimize what we've got.

shaunfletcher wrote:

One positive note.. those pics show it well. The atmospheric 'bloom' (note the blooming around the freeport floating tower) and distance fade in the EQ2 pic is fantastic and please dont change it too much as its one really good aspect of the games look!

Don't worry, I'm not subtracting anything from the game.

Mythal_EQ2 wrote:

This list... and everything you've changed so far... is simply awesome.

One thing I'd still like to see though (unless it's included in the list somewhere)... Can you move particle effects to the GPU too? And give us some more options with regards to which particle effects to show / hide (especially for raids)?

 

D.

I'm passing this idea around the offices.  I'm still not sure how complex it would be to add this in.  Talked about it for a
while with one of our Senior Programmers and the Artists I've talked to like the idea.  It's definitely an option we'd
like to add in but will have to be prioritized with so many other upgrades we're trying to bring into the game right now.

I wonder, will the sky ever be accurate? cause I don't think around ice cap you'd have the sun right over head at any point of time - in fact should be night / day for weeks at a time >.>

Anyways, look forward to new shader changes! Coming soon to a PC near you. . . LLAMAS IN 3D!

Eschia@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Imago-Quem wrote:

- better skyboxes

Do you mean the cloud layer? Right now it can look really aweful at times. It looks like a scrolling flat surface with a texture on it. It can sometimes be yellow and pink acid clouds, and looks very unrealistic. EQ1 has one up on it. A new cloud layer would be awesome.

Particularly, yes, the cloud layer.  There's not a lot of coding beyond that, besides the bloom and sunset colors.  But
more effects could be added in like a more vibrant sun or other effects visually that interact with the sky such as heat
shimmers, dilating effects, God rays, etc..

Dragowulf@Nagafen wrote:

Flora just needs a complete makeover.  As it is now the Flora looks like weeds, it doesn't even look like grass, plants, flowers.  Imo it should be more concentrated oon the ground, and not spread apart 10 ft. away from eachother.  

Long grass, short grass, flowers, plants, wheat fields, finally some real corn fields?  Flora displacement should be the flora displacing in the wind and as you step through it or run by it.  It should have that feel to it...that's what I'm looking for.

Though I think Flora would be a bigger task to complete.

 

Sky, skyboxes, stars, atmosphere are all just blah (hideous).  As it is now EQ1 has better graphics in that department.

 

I'm sure that whatever you do with the list and however you do it and in what order - we will see the performance increase as well as a prettier game.

I'm sure when I get to the flora system it will be a completely new system, just like the shadows.

Katanallama@Mistmoore wrote:

I wonder, will the sky ever be accurate? cause I don't think around ice cap you'd have the sun right over head at any point of time - in fact should be night / day for weeks at a time >.>

Anyways, look forward to new shader changes! Coming soon to a PC near you. . . LLAMAS IN 3D!

We'll see.  When I start looking into the sky system I'll see if it's feasible to do this.

Imago-Quem wrote:

Amana wrote:

I have a couple of questions if you don't mind answering them Imago. 

First one is how will HDR be enabled for machines using outdated drivers and/or low end graphics cards?  Still using a 256mb ATI 9800 pro card here.  Starting to see most games actually require my card as a bare minimum recommending a 512mb.

Dealing with multi-core technologies will we see HDR being computed on processors as well as graphics cards?  Also what about people who have crossfired/SLI enabled graphics cards? 

Finally with the upcomming windows 7 how well will HDR mesh with the new DirectX11 that will be pushed with it? 

Designing a new computer and hope to be running windows 7 ultimate with DX11 on it. 

I've seen HDR in effect on console games and it is a very interesting prospect for MMOs. 

Hi Amana,

    Since EQII hasn't decided when/if HDR will be developed for the game, I can't say much due to the lack of
research with HDR + EQII.  I'll do my best here for you: Most HDR requires 32-bit floating point buffer support. 
You'll need that, or maybe at least 16-bit floating point buffer support.  Time permitting and complexity non-gating,
I'm sure we'd love to split processing across multiple CPU's and GPU's.  At this moment I couldn't tell you how
feasible this would be in EQII.  EQII won't be adding any additional DX11 support anytime soon.  As far as having
DX11 support on your system and mixing in DX9 HDR, Microsoft has been pretty good at keeping things backwards
compatible.  I don't foresee any problems there.

    I hope we can make you very happy for a long while, Amana, while we continue to upgrade EverQuest II for you.

Interesting

I do have one last quick question here.  Dealing with your technologies will people who have their computers set to "high performance and low graphics *forget the name*" see better texturing? 

Quite curious to see if new advances are made that will allow for more crisp textures to be shown when people have their computer set to performance mode.  Was deffinately funny being in the RoK beta and putting my computer to Extreme quality in Teren's Grasp.  Took some great shots then BAM!! hit with that max memory 39million number thing. 

Amana wrote:

Imago-Quem wrote:

Amana wrote:

I have a couple of questions if you don't mind answering them Imago. 

First one is how will HDR be enabled for machines using outdated drivers and/or low end graphics cards?  Still using a 256mb ATI 9800 pro card here.  Starting to see most games actually require my card as a bare minimum recommending a 512mb.

Dealing with multi-core technologies will we see HDR being computed on processors as well as graphics cards?  Also what about people who have crossfired/SLI enabled graphics cards? 

Finally with the upcomming windows 7 how well will HDR mesh with the new DirectX11 that will be pushed with it? 

Designing a new computer and hope to be running windows 7 ultimate with DX11 on it. 

I've seen HDR in effect on console games and it is a very interesting prospect for MMOs. 

Hi Amana,

    Since EQII hasn't decided when/if HDR will be developed for the game, I can't say much due to the lack of
research with HDR + EQII.  I'll do my best here for you: Most HDR requires 32-bit floating point buffer support. 
You'll need that, or maybe at least 16-bit floating point buffer support.  Time permitting and complexity non-gating,
I'm sure we'd love to split processing across multiple CPU's and GPU's.  At this moment I couldn't tell you how
feasible this would be in EQII.  EQII won't be adding any additional DX11 support anytime soon.  As far as having
DX11 support on your system and mixing in DX9 HDR, Microsoft has been pretty good at keeping things backwards
compatible.  I don't foresee any problems there.

    I hope we can make you very happy for a long while, Amana, while we continue to upgrade EverQuest II for you.

Interesting

I do have one last quick question here.  Dealing with your technologies will people who have their computers set to "high performance and low graphics *forget the name*" see better texturing? 

Quite curious to see if new advances are made that will allow for more crisp textures to be shown when people have their computer set to performance mode.  Was deffinately funny being in the RoK beta and putting my computer to Extreme quality in Teren's Grasp.  Took some great shots then BAM!! hit with that max memory 39million number thing. 

I don't know of any plans to replace the low-resolution textures used in the game, but 3.0 might make these look a
lot better.  Not sure yet what I'm going to do when settings are turned really low.  At the moment, for 3.0, I don't
let it get that low, still calculating directional lighting and normal-mapping.

Imago-Quem wrote:

I'm sure when I get to the flora system it will be a completely new system, just like the shadows.

When you get to that point could you consider a bit more differentiation on height in the flora?  I've had to turn flora density down, not for performance issues but because half of my height challenged toons can't actually see where they're going in first person view