tkia wrote:
Freliant wrote:tkia wrote: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 lol, are you asking a dev to mow the lawn so halflings can see better??That is actually funny!Well I'm sure Brenlo will appreciate it just as much as my fae
Freliant wrote:
tkia wrote: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 lol, are you asking a dev to mow the lawn so halflings can see better??That is actually funny!
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
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
lol, are you asking a dev to mow the lawn so halflings can see better??
That is actually funny!
Well I'm sure Brenlo will appreciate it just as much as my fae
I'll definitely look into it. Seems feasible, and cool.
Pitt Hammerfist wrote:
Imago-Quem wrote: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.Surely Ground Textures and Flora couldn't be that taxing ?Both of them wouldnt need any client/server communication. They just sit there all on the client side ? Maybe just have an option for 1024x1024 ground texures (optional downloadable texture pack, like oblivion and fallout 3), and a new flora system with a slider for transparecy and density ? hehe not asking for much am i?
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.
Surely Ground Textures and Flora couldn't be that taxing ?
Both of them wouldnt need any client/server communication. They just sit there all on the client side ?
Maybe just have an option for 1024x1024 ground texures (optional downloadable texture pack, like oblivion and fallout 3), and a new flora system with a slider for transparecy and density ? hehe not asking for much am i?
I really couldn't say anything for the texture downloads. I also don't "think" it would be very easy or quick for our team to be adding in extra textures to upgrade the zones. In any case, I'll mention it to the art team.
As far as the flora system, I'll definitely see if we can add transparency, density, and height sliders... when I get to building the system.
NrthnStar5 wrote:
I would love to see each zone have their own weather random weather patterns. Most zones have zero weather which, disappoints me. Lotro seems to have a very good weather system. The sky has always been one of my major issues too, look at Lotro and Vanguard's skies for inspiration.
I would love to see each zone have their own weather random weather patterns. Most zones have zero weather which, disappoints me. Lotro seems to have a very good weather system.
The sky has always been one of my major issues too, look at Lotro and Vanguard's skies for inspiration.
I haven't looked into our weather system a whole lot, but when I get there I'll be sure to see how the system works across zones, as well as gaze at the glory in LOTRO and Vanguard for inspiration, hehe.
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..
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.
- 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..
I remember going to Italy for the first time, driving through Switzerland on the overnight coach. I woke up sometime around dawn (having fallen asleep on a motorway in France) with clouds below me and mountains above...
Imagine that from a sokokar in Kylong Plains Breaking through the cloud layer flying from Teren's Grasp from above, into driving rain over Karnor's Castle.
Okay, so it probably won't happen like that... but I can hope.
Dragowulf@Nagafen wrote:
Josgar@The Bazaar wrote:Imago-Quem wrote: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..Could clouds cast shadows?That would be nuts.
Josgar@The Bazaar wrote:
Imago-Quem wrote: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..Could clouds cast shadows?
Could clouds cast shadows?
That would be nuts.
We actually want to add this, and funny as it is, I don't imagine the implementation being extremely difficult, not like new shadows and a shader system. We've only been constrained by time and resources at this point. I'm "the" graphics programmer, so we have to take these one at a time. It takes research, prototyping, integration, optimizations, crazy bug fixing, and time on Test and more bug fixing to make it into the game. We have to take all of these into consideration when thinking about what we're going to add in next. The time it takes to make these systems really makes us think hard about what we'll be adding in next.
vochore wrote:
havnt seen this posted yet or i might have just missed it but do you have any plans of adding ingame aa anytime so we dodnt have to keep doing the ini hack to get aa to work.
No plans right now. Autenil messed around with it a while back, but it hasn't been touched in a while.
Jinj@Antonia Bayle wrote:
Would love to see a corn field that small races/shrunk toons can't see out of and tall races just see tracks of bending corn as the tiny ones move through it!Also, with weather...let druids make it rain or stop it raining (as in EQ, was fun and you felt, kinda, powerful!)
Would love to see a corn field that small races/shrunk toons can't see out of and tall races just see tracks of bending corn as the tiny ones move through it!
Also, with weather...let druids make it rain or stop it raining (as in EQ, was fun and you felt, kinda, powerful!)
We'll see. Details like this are a bit too atomic right now. I think this would require a bit more coordination with team members' work and a bit more work to add in.
Meaghan@Lucan DLere wrote:
Vanguard uses SpeedTree for tree foliage and flora. It looks awesome and runs very smoothly. Any chance of bringing that over here?
I'm sure I'll be looking into a few systems to find out which works best for our engine. It really depends on how things can be added into the game. With an engine already developed you have to bend around a lot of corners to get new techniques to work in old, but HUGE, systems.
How hard would it be to add some sort of displacement/vertex tool to the engine? The Source engine uses it to make terrain and some models with little to no performance decrease and it looks really good. Right now terrain and trees looks sort of bland because everything is seems squared off. I've used Valve's Hammer Editor and believe it or not, the displacement tool is sooo easy to use.
I doubt you dip any part of your body in this deparment, but it's worth a try.
Just to derail this (VERY GOOD) thread for a second:
Thank you Imago-Quem for this wonderful interaction with us.
These kind of threads make me happy to be part of the EQ2 community!
Now let's get back to the regular schedule.
Meaghan@Lucan DLere wrote:Vanguard uses SpeedTree for tree foliage and flora. It looks awesome and runs very smoothly. Any chance of bringing that over here? I'm sure I'll be looking into a few systems to find out which works best for our engine. It really depends on how things can be added into the game. With an engine already developed you have to bend around a lot of corners to get new techniques to work in old, but HUGE, systems.
Awesome, thanks for the reponse. Good luck, I'm sure it's not easy.
I think this is the first direct reponse I've EVER gotten from a dev in this game, I hope they give you a raise soon.
With an engine already developed you have to bend around a lot of corners to get new techniques to work in old, but HUGE, systems.
I work in SCADA on the development side. Trust me I know about "old, but HUGE" systems. There's literally parts of our code that are over 20 years old (C, but still quite good, and not evil "wtf" type code). Not MANY, but a few, and we're still constrained by some of those requirements, so believe me I understand.
Imago-Quem wrote:Meaghan@Lucan DLere wrote:Vanguard uses SpeedTree for tree foliage and flora. It looks awesome and runs very smoothly. Any chance of bringing that over here? I'm sure I'll be looking into a few systems to find out which works best for our engine. It really depends on how things can be added into the game. With an engine already developed you have to bend around a lot of corners to get new techniques to work in old, but HUGE, systems.Awesome, thanks for the reponse. Good luck, I'm sure it's not easy. I think this is the first direct reponse I've EVER gotten from a dev in this game, I hope they give you a raise soon.
Yea seriously aside from yourself, Domino and Rothgar...and perhaps a few others, many of the other developers are far too "aloof" and detached/unreachable by the player base for their own good.
Katanallama@Mistmoore wrote:
Would there be any room for astronomical events?Such as a moon cycle, where every say 6 days you get a short like 10minute long eclipse, turning everything dark haha. Or very cloudy, dark miserable days of endless rain. . .Dust storms. . . jet stream effect ~ volcanoes around Lavastorm would give Faydwer occasional smoke covering the sky. . .Although to be honest I'd expect a continent like Lavastorm to be far cooler given its location right next to north pole, but then again I think that Norrath continents were just laid out aimlessly as the expansions come and go in thought 'hey this fits here.'I expect Odus to be to far left of the world map between feerrott and Karan, and a bit over further to left than where Mara is. . .Then when we get Velious its going to be down at very bottom of map by that little peninsula is Just my predictions!Anyways. . . Yea will we get cool effects like eclipses, dark cloudy days, dust storms, etc.
Would there be any room for astronomical events?
Such as a moon cycle, where every say 6 days you get a short like 10minute long eclipse, turning everything dark haha. Or very cloudy, dark miserable days of endless rain. . .Dust storms. . . jet stream effect ~ volcanoes around Lavastorm would give Faydwer occasional smoke covering the sky. . .
Although to be honest I'd expect a continent like Lavastorm to be far cooler given its location right next to north pole, but then again I think that Norrath continents were just laid out aimlessly as the expansions come and go in thought 'hey this fits here.'
I expect Odus to be to far left of the world map between feerrott and Karan, and a bit over further to left than where Mara is. . .
Then when we get Velious its going to be down at very bottom of map by that little peninsula is
Just my predictions!
Anyways. . . Yea will we get cool effects like eclipses, dark cloudy days, dust storms, etc.
This would be more for the designers to ponder about. We can already add these in but they have to be planned way in advance to fit the zone. The designers write it into the story of an area, the artists develop the textures and event landscape, animations, etc.. I could then implement the eclipse lighting effects, dust clouds, weather effects, etc.. I'll talk to them about more epic events happening around the world more often while players travel throughout the lands.
If I end up on a weather system upgrade I'll be sure to look into these types of weather effects.
JFantasy wrote:
Is the shader in eq2 just 1.0 now(b4 the shadow map coming)? It looks better then using shader 1.0 in eq2.
There are "some" 2.0 code segments in the game, but nearly all 1.x. Pretty amazing, hu! I was shocked when I found it out looking through the source code. The reason why it looks so good is because the system is built on a layered effect technique, is very optimized, and cuts costs with pre-calculated data. The layered effect allows the artist to virtually add and add small effects to the seen until it has all the coolness they want. With 3.0 we are using a single set technique to improve quality and performance. We also have more control and, like the difference is between drawing in Microsoft Paint vs. Adobe PhotoShop, we have more power with less brush strokes.
The downside to the layered effect is the cost of each layer. The more layers the more costly, and each layer has a high cost for not doing much given all the restrictions of 1.x shaders. In 3.0 we can combine these layers to perform the same effect at the fraction of the cost. But in 3.0 we're also implementing more precise, realistic lighting effects.
