Ventisly
12-12-2008, 10:33 AM
<p>My guild has a T3 Freeport hall off the Commonlands docks and I've been having a blast setting it up to be both a functional and nice place to live in. However, once we started to get past about 500 or so items the lag on items displaying started to show up. We continued with the decorating of the guild hall but the display lag continued to get worse and worse. A lot of this was done pre-expansion so I figured I'd wait for a bit to see if they'd optimize things in future updates. During the Dev Chat yesterday I asked about this issue and was told that it's a factor of how many "unique" items are in the guild hall and that they had no definite plans to address this problem.We have our crafting area on one side of our main hall and the merchant area on the other. When running from one side to the other, it can take 10 to 30 seconds for everything to show up. This is not just limited to furniture as NPCs and other players also can take a while to show up. I defraged my hard drive thinking that maybe the files were slow to read from but that didn't seem to effect things (and I've got a pretty decent rig). It's not just a problem for me, it's a problem for everyone in the guild hall.To test things I counted up the unique items in our guild hall and also in my 5 bedroom house. The guild hall had 1497/1600 items and I counted 455 unique furniture pieces plus 12 books. My personal house had 618/600 items and I counted 337 unique furniture piece plus 102 books. I have never experienced any display lag inside my house and I used to craft and run around in there quite a bit before guild halls came out. However, just to even things up a bit I went through the guild hall and removed as much unique items as I could for things that we had lying around in storage, paintings and holiday decorations. I got the guild hall down to 335 unique pieces with 12 books, pretty much a direct match to my personal house.I noticed a very slight improvement after the 120 unique pieces were removed from the guild hall but there was still quite a bit of display lag when moving from room to room. Certianly a lot more than the lag-free display in my personal house. Something needs to be done about this because it's very unlike any other zones in EQ2 and is not fun at all, especially with all the time we are spending in guild halls now. The one exception I can remember outside of guild halls was when Frostfell was added to West Freeport a few years back, the display lag for NPCs and holiday stuff was just as horrible.Of course the artwork/geometry for the guild hall is quite a bit more complex than a 5 bedroom home but I also have to wonder if the geometry for Commonlands in the distance is also adding to the problem. I know of a few guilds that were able to find a "hole" in the boundries of the T3 Freeport guild hall (which has since been fixed) and were able to swim out to Commonlands and actually place furniture out there. The landscape wasn't "decorated" like the real Commonlands is but the landscape extended out to the crossroads, the overrealm spires and beyond. Does that much data for something that is pretty much a horizon really need to be loaded and if that was removed would more memory be available to keep our furniture from being cached out when just moving from one side of the guild hall to the other?Usually when I'm in the guild hall EQ2 is running about 1.1 to 1.3 GB of RAM but I have a whole lot more available. Are there any settings I can change to say that I want EQ2 to keep everything loaded into memory?One major difference between my personal house and the guild hall is that I don't have very much in my personal house that is size adjusted since that was decorated before that feature was added. However, we have changed the size on nearly all items in the guild hall as they were being placed. Could this be the cause of the display lag?Is everyone else experiencing similar display lag in their guild halls? Is it limited to T3 halls (Qeynos or Freeport) or do all halls have similar problems. I've visited quite a few T1/T2 halls and don't see the same problems but perhaps some do.I've got several areas in the guild hall that I would like to redecorate or rearrange but with the dislay lag I'm just trying to leave things alone so that it doesn't get worse and becomes less functional than it is. Some help on this would be most appreciated by this decorator.</p>