SOE - please do the engine upgrades the RIGHT way

[Cassea]

Is seems that SOE is putting some functions on the 2nd core. While this may be a good thing, what is NOT a good thing is that it seems (please feel free to comment SOE) that they are going to put shadows, and other VIDEO functions?, on the 2nd core. Video needs to be done on our video cards and not on our CPU's. This is why the SWG game engine EQ2 uses is so slow... not because it does not support multi-core.So SOE please take the time and do this the right way. Shadows have no business being done on "any" cores... they need to be done on the much faster video cards. Even the cheapest video cards can do shadows faster and better than a CPU.If you want to read the comments on test about this...<a rel="nofollow" href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=430035" target="_blank">http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=430035</a>I applaud SOE's efforts to upgrade (it's about time!) the old game engine but let's do this right and not use some quick hacks to try and appease us!We are approaching 2009 and EQ2 needs and deserves the first class treatment in order to compete and attract new customers. Sure there are a few "non-video" things that you might be able to hack onto those 2nd cores but shadows?For the sake of those of us who respect the game requirements and have kept our systems up to date PLEASE do the right thing. The only reason I can think of for you to keep doing "video" functions on the CPU is to allow people using old old old DX8 and DX7 video cards to continue to play EQ2. Why punish all of us because a select few people want to play EQ2 on 2003 hardware?

[asmiro]

<cite>Cassea wrote:</cite><blockquote>Is seems that SOE is putting some functions on the 2nd core. While this may be a good thing, what is NOT a good thing is that it seems (please feel free to comment SOE) that they are going to put shadows, and other VIDEO functions?, on the 2nd core. Video needs to be done on our video cards and not on our CPU's. This is why the SWG game engine EQ2 uses is so slow... not because it does not support multi-core.So SOE please take the time and do this the right way. Shadows have no business being done on "any" cores... they need to be done on the much faster video cards. Even the cheapest video cards can do shadows faster and better than a CPU.If you want to read the comments on test about this...<a rel="nofollow" href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=430035" target="_blank">http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=430035</a>I applaud SOE's efforts to upgrade (it's about time!) the old game engine but let's do this right and not use some quick hacks to try and appease us!We are approaching 2009 and EQ2 needs and deserves the first class treatment in order to compete and attract new customers. Sure there are a few "non-video" things that you might be able to hack onto those 2nd cores but shadows?For the sake of those of us who respect the game requirements and have kept our systems up to date PLEASE do the right thing. The only reason I can think of for you to keep doing "video" functions on the CPU is to allow people using old old old DX8 and DX7 video cards to continue to play EQ2. Why punish all of us because a select few people want to play EQ2 on 2003 hardware?</blockquote>i dont know about anyone else, but i am GLAD of these proposed changes to the game engine as a temporary stop gap, IF (key word) they continue thier current work on the game engine upgrade that they have been working/planning on for some time now. this (quick hack) will hopefully buy them the time they need to fully upgrade the engine. one can hope anyway...

[Vodr]

<p>The OP doesn't know much about programming, there on a upgrade path and one the first main issues to getting extra graphic functions onto the video card (being able to thread them seperate of the main game thread) which there doing to the 2nd cpu right now to have them multithreaded.  Now once they can be sure that everything is threadsafe they can work on moving them into the gpu.</p><p>Each and every CPU core handles the instructions the same(for the most part) however GPU cores between brands (ATI, Nvidia, Heck even Intel) handle calls differently so you can have unexpected results.</p><p>Be patient,  engine upgrade of that scale requires much planning and testing.  They also have to make sure it's platform independant.</p>

[TSR-DanielH]

<cite>Cassea wrote:</cite><blockquote> This is why the SWG game engine EQ2 uses is so slow... not because it does not support multi-core.</blockquote>Sadly, I don't have any concrete information about how they plan to improve the game engine.  Hopefully we'll get some more information about upcoming engine upgrades soon.  I'll let everyone know as soon as I receive something.I just thought I'd mention that EQ2 does not use the SWG game engine.  The EQ2 engine actually has more in common with the Planetside engine than it does with SWG.  Some things may be similar between EQ2 and SWG but the engine is completely different.

[Cassea]

<cite>Vodroc wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>The OP doesn't know much about programming, there on a upgrade path and one the first main issues to getting extra graphic functions onto the video card (being able to thread them seperate of the main game thread) which there doing to the 2nd cpu right now to have them multithreaded.  Now once they can be sure that everything is threadsafe they can work on moving them into the gpu.</p><p>Each and every CPU core handles the instructions the same(for the most part) however GPU cores between brands (ATI, Nvidia, Heck even Intel) handle calls differently so you can have unexpected results.</p><p>Be patient,  engine upgrade of that scale requires much planning and testing.  They also have to make sure it's platform independant.</p></blockquote>I do know about programming and the purpose of my post was to attempt to understand why they are moving graphics to extra CPU cores and not the video cards. While each and every CPU core (AMD/Intel) handle the instructions the same it is not true that every video card is a "custom job" because this is what DirectX is for. The game tells DirectX to do something that the driver for your video card interprets how the command gets done... not SOE!So are you telling me that when SOE or EQ2 makes a DX9 video call that they have to program it differently for ATI, Nvidia and Intel? Of course not! Yes there are small glitches in each of the vid cards chipsets but for the most part everything is done the same. 20 years ago, prior to DX and OpenGL you had to have a vast library of video routines for the multitude of video cards out there. This is no longer the case.I worry that SOE is doing a quick hack job to be able to answer the call for multi-core support and once these few hacks are in then SOE will say that they did enough to shut us up and proclaim their job done. While this might not be true I would rather bring this up at this stage so SOE knows that we are not stupid and that popping a few functions to second cores does not alleviate the bigger job which is to put the video on the video cards!So ride SOE I will (and I hope all of us will) and I'll be the first one to post how appreciative I am upon competetion of each step but after years of almost total neglect of the game engine I want SOE to know that we want the full job and not just the easy and quick fixes.Never forget that had SOE spent a little time each year keeping the game engine up to date instead of leaving the engine to rot... well then they would not have the large task that they face today so while I thank SOE for starting to fix things we cannot forget they they have only themselves to blame for putting it off for as long as they did.

[Vodr]

<p>Please feel free to go to <a href="http://www.garagegames.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.garagegames.com</a> and purchase a game engine license,  look at the source code for tgea which is a dx9 based engine and then you will understand that there is a HUGE difference between how nvidia and ati handle dx calls.</p>

[Cassea]

<cite>TSR-DanielH wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Cassea wrote:</cite><blockquote> This is why the SWG game engine EQ2 uses is so slow... not because it does not support multi-core.</blockquote>Sadly, I don't have any concrete information about how they plan to improve the game engine.  Hopefully we'll get some more information about upcoming engine upgrades soon.  I'll let everyone know as soon as I receive something.I just thought I'd mention that EQ2 does not use the SWG game engine.  The EQ2 engine actually has more in common with the Planetside engine than it does with SWG.  Some things may be similar between EQ2 and SWG but the engine is completely different.</blockquote>Anyone who played both EQ2 and SWG at launch (not now LOL) will tell you that the games were near identical. Crafting was the same (aside from SWG being able to put down crafting machines which was kind of neat), the character creation was identical (aside from the looks of course) and skill trees were the same, the class structures were the same.This is not a put down because the graphics in SWG was the only thing good about that game... and the crafting. EQ2 is wonderful and while EQ2 and SWG may not have been twins at birth... they were at least brother and sister <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />So I keep hearing how they are so different but are you able to say anything about the background of EQ2? I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be interested in the roots of EQ2. I read the book from SOE  about the origins of EQ1 and EQ2 and found the inside very interesting.Any info you are allowed to give out would be most welcome-JB

[Cassea]

<cite>Vodroc wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>Please feel free to go to <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.garagegames.com/" target="_blank">www.garagegames.com</a> and purchase a game engine license,  look at the source code for tgea which is a dx9 based engine and then you will understand that there is a HUGE difference between how nvidia and ati handle dx calls.</p></blockquote>Since you seem to know would it not be easier (and cheaper on my wallet LOL) for you to explain what the purpose of DX is if games need to "custom" program multiple codepaths for every video card company?

[Vodr]

<p>EQ2 was far from SWG at launch for the 2 in both char creation and crafting.  Crafting in SWG was never wack a mole,  and allowed experimentation so you could better a item in a direction which was really cool and allowed unique items to be made.  The only portions of the char creation that are even similar would be the facial portion as in SWG you could control much more body type changes and the characters were more dynamic.</p><p>I remember my first char I gave a little beer belly to for fun.</p><p>The other thing to remember about DX though, how the card uses resources varies even on card generation.  Example in the eq2 world,  look at how long the 8000's gpus from nvidia performed poorly due to how they used and released textures compared to a 6000 or 7000 series gpu.  Give them the time to get the threadsafe multithreading to work correctly and properlly sync all the time and I'm sure there new graphics programmer who the introduced in fan fair will work on getting each style of card to work with them properlly.</p><p>DX is a middleman,  if you know the exact target hardware (xbox360) then you know exactly what quirks you are going to hit.  No matter what you do with DX you are still limited to how the driver interperts the calls into the video card and how the hardware on the card re-acts to said calls.</p>

[Vodr]

There isn't Full changes as most calls work without a hitch,  however you would be surprised how many "hacks" there are in a game engine to make different brands of cards show the exact same info on the screen.

[TSR-TrevorG]

<cite>Cassea wrote:</cite><blockquote> This is why the SWG game engine EQ2 uses </blockquote>I appreciate your posts and technical knowledge. But this is false.  EQ2 and SWG <b>DO NOT </b>share an engine.

[Cassea]

<cite>TSR-TrevorG wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Cassea wrote:</cite><blockquote> This is why the SWG game engine EQ2 uses </blockquote>I appreciate your posts and technical knowledge. But this is false.  EQ2 and SWG <b>DO NOT </b>share an engine. </blockquote>Well I thank you for this but I wish you could provide some insight.Both games were made by SOE. Both games have (or had LOL) "very" similar aspects to them. Are you saying that they share zero code between them? This is what it sounds like but it's hard to understand how certain aspects of both games are so close in design as to be using 100% different programming.SWG came out first and about 2 years later EQ2. Why would SOE create a game engine from scratch that was praised for it's design and then not use at least parts of it for EQ2?If I remember correctly, one of the reasons I was sure that they were based on the same engine was that the extensive game settings were very very close.I'll drop this because it seems to upset some devs and this was never my intent. Apparently I was wrong about both games using the same engine. Let's move on to others things <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />