Can we expect any graphical upgrades in Velious?

[Lendrcik]

<p>Just hoping and praying they tweak the engine even more, and get some better performance out of it? How about implementing DX10? We should be up to that at least now, I wanna see God Rays... <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p><p>Heres hoping!</p>

[feldon30]

You want them to rewrite the game in DirectX and make it incompatible with Windows XP for some light streaks from the sky? I've heard some dumb suggestions, but...

[Gungo]

<p>God rays are not exclusive to dx10. And you might want to wait to see what new special effects might be coming with velious that people cant announce yet.</p>

[Elizadeth]

<p>DX9/DX10 are not either-or things; every game I know of that supports 10 also supports 9 (and therefore XP).</p><p>That said, this is a 6 year old game. Nothing short of writing new game (not just engine... models, animations, and shaders too) will substantially improve its appearance. In the last couple years they did add multicore support, shader model 3, and GPU shadows. Those did improve performance, but visual quality? meh, not really.</p>

[ShadyCharacter]

It is a little generous to say they added shader 3. <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> There are a lot of bugs with shader 3, a lot of missing textures, dresser room inconsistencies etc but when it does work it can look very nice. It does give you a few more fps which is appreciated but you tend to need shadows to make it look good which eats your frames again. Actually, multicore does not seem to do much either in my experience. As to graphic enhancements, it would be nice but as the above said, it would be a lot of work and I don't think even we could justify it let alone SOE who have shown time and again, EQ2 and us are not their priority.

[Rahatmattata]

<p><cite>Lendrcik wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>How about implementing DX10?</p></blockquote><p>How about fixing AA for ATI cards?</p>

[Shagor]

<p>i think that before graphical upgrade they should try to improve the performance of it...if they tweek it a little doing it, its welcome, but first let em solve performance problem</p>

[zimmer]

<p>I think Shader 3 was supposed to increase performance (orignally) but it did not turn out that way.  So it was supposed to look better while doing it more effeciently.  I would like to see them improve performance.</p>

[Elizadeth]

Personally I'd like to see more of EQNext. It's doubtful that continued hacking of EQ2 is really going to get the rendering engine anywhere. For a little background, from what I've heard, the reason EQ2's performance is horrendous compared to other games is in the way it animates and positions points. Nearly all graphical elements of a game are composed of a mesh of triangles, which are described by a bunch of points in space. The process of properly animating and positioning points on the screen is very well-suited to 3D acceleration and that's what pretty much every game made since 1999 does.... except for EQ2. EQ2 insists on using your CPU to do all this grunt work, and the performance impact is immense. Their devs are aware of this, and I'm sure have looked into moving this operation to the GPU, but have apparently found it to be too much work and/or too risky. As far as I'm concerned, if they haven't made that leap yet, they never will. So my only thought is to wonder what they have planned for EQNext.

[Naelael]

<p>No graphic updates with Velious.</p>

[Gungo]

<p><cite>Naelael wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>No graphic updates with Velious.</p></blockquote><p>This is a complete lie.</p><p>They fixed most of the shader 3.0 issuesThey added ambient occlusionThey added sun shaftsThey added depth of fieldThey redid the reflections on water/mirrors to perform better. and they retouched a bunch of zones for flying mounts</p>

[Naelael]

<p><cite>Gungo@Crushbone wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Naelael wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>No graphic updates with Velious.</p></blockquote><p>This is a complete lie.</p><p>They fixed most of the shader 3.0 issuesThey added ambient occlusionThey added sun shaftsThey added depth of fieldThey redid the reflections on water/mirrors to perform better. and they retouched a bunch of zones for flying mounts</p></blockquote><p>Lol @ complete lie... FOrgive me for not looking through all of the documentation.</p><p>Would you feel better if I said, there is no graphical updates that you can see? Or, no graphical updates that make much of a difference? They can update every texture in the game if they want and post it in notes, but if I can't SEE it, why should I care?</p>

[feldon30]

<p><cite>Naelael wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Gungo@Crushbone wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Naelael wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>No graphic updates with Velious.</p></blockquote><p>This is a complete lie.</p><p>They fixed most of the shader 3.0 issuesThey added ambient occlusionThey added sun shaftsThey added depth of fieldThey redid the reflections on water/mirrors to perform better. and they retouched a bunch of zones for flying mounts</p></blockquote><p>Lol @ complete lie... FOrgive me for not looking through all of the documentation.</p><p>Would you feel better if I said, there is no graphical updates that you can see? Or, no graphical updates that make much of a difference? They can update every texture in the game if they want and post it in notes, but if I can't SEE it, why should I care?</p></blockquote><p>You've been called out as a liar with clear evidence. Just sit there and be wrong.</p>

[Elizadeth]

<p><cite>feldon30 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>You've been called out as a liar with clear evidence. Just sit there and be wrong.</p></blockquote><p>Well, the guy is right in the sense that you can't really tell anything was done at all... I mean we <em>just</em> got done here saying that despite a lot of the work they've put into it, there haven't been any real noticeable graphical improvements in the game. Of all the junk they've added... SM3, multicore support, GPU shadows, something with vertex buffers, on and on, it still looks pretty much the same. You just listed a few more bits of work they've been doing.</p><p>So perhaps Naelael was just saying DoV is par for the course, nothing significant has changed, and you're just copy-pasting stuff from other sites to make yourself sound smart (is it working?). I can't help but to notice that 3 of the 6 things you listed aren't actually graphical enhancements (fixing bugs isn't, improving perf isn't, and retouching maps to enable flying isn't either... the OP is looking for upgrades here).</p>

[Naelael]

<p><cite>Elizadeth wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>feldon30 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>You've been called out as a liar with clear evidence. Just sit there and be wrong.</p></blockquote><p>Well, the guy is right in the sense that you can't really tell anything was done at all... I mean we <em>just</em> got done here saying that despite a lot of the work they've put into it, there haven't been any real noticeable graphical improvements in the game. Of all the junk they've added... SM3, multicore support, GPU shadows, something with vertex buffers, on and on, it still looks pretty much the same. You just listed a few more bits of work they've been doing.</p><p>So perhaps Naelael was just saying DoV is par for the course, nothing significant has changed, and you're just copy-pasting stuff from other sites to make yourself sound smart (is it working?). I can't help but to notice that 3 of the 6 things you listed aren't actually graphical enhancements (fixing bugs isn't, improving perf isn't, and retouching maps to enable flying isn't either... the OP is looking for upgrades here).</p></blockquote><p>Elizadeth is correct. I was trying to lie, or troll, or anything like that. If you look at my other posts in the forum you will see that I talk about how I like the expansion, have intention of preordering it, and plan on enjoying it. I'm sorry I don't read over each and every series of patch notes anymore... I just don't see the point. Were those things done? Sure. I have read on other message boards that the sun beams, or whatever they are calling them, apparently look pretty good in other zones, though it was pointed out on multiple occasions on the other sites that you have to be using shaders 1.0 in order to really have them look good. Truth is though that I stayed in Velious my entire time in beta and didn't really see much of the sun. That would explain why I didn't notice them. Also, it has been stated on other sites that the ice on Velious is pretty much just a wall of blue, and pales in comparisson to other games... This is also true, but I saw no need to rain on anyone's parade since it still llooks good. I was just simply saying that it looks like the game has always looked, only it looks like it in Velious which quite honestly is enough for me. Again... I am looking forward to it.</p>

[Eveningsong]

<p>Actually, I saw several people asking in beta chat whether there had been graphical upgrades because the graphics simply looked better to them.  Perhaps its just the difference of being in a new zone and not having anything to compare it to, or perhaps slightly different settings than they normally ran on Live, but at least some people did think there was something visibly improved.  Personally, I run at extreme performance so I'm not seeing all the fine details many might see, but things did look pretty good all considered.</p>

[Gungo]

<p><cite>lizadeth wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>feldon30 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>You've been called out as a liar with clear evidence. Just sit there and be wrong.</p></blockquote><p>Well, the guy is right in the sense that you can't really tell anything was done at all... I mean we <em>just</em> got done here saying that despite a lot of the work they've put into it, there haven't been any real noticeable graphical improvements in the game. Of all the junk they've added... SM3, multicore support, GPU shadows, something with vertex buffers, on and on, <strong>it still looks pretty much the same.</strong> You just listed a few more bits of work they've been doing.</p><p>So perhaps Naelael was just saying DoV is par for the course, nothing significant has changed, and you're just copy-pasting stuff from other sites to make yourself sound smart (is it working?). I can't help but to notice that 3 of the 6 things you listed aren't actually graphical enhancements (fixing bugs isn't, improving perf isn't, and retouching maps to enable flying isn't either... the OP is looking for upgrades here).</p></blockquote><p>In the last year alone they added shader 3.0, redid all particle effects, redid flora, redid reflections, added several graphics improvements (sunshafts, ambient occlusion, depth of field, vertex buffers). Even the gpu shadows is just over year old.</p><p>The graphics look completely different. Compare side by side screen shots and the graphics looks completely different. Of course the game itself will still look pretty much the same. If you are expecting WOW, Conan, rift, or a warhammer looking game, techincal updates will never change that. Those are ART and design related.</p><p>The only thing these graphic updates changes add is shadows, textures, shades and reflections to create more realistic looking images, while optomizing them to perform better. And to put this entire post into perspective he is still wrong because the OP of this thread was asking for GODRAYS aka SUNSHAFTS. Which ARE in velious. So his answer to the OP of NO graphical upgrades is WRONG.</p><p>Personally what i would like to see is for them to implement/redo proper and modern hair textures. This should give players a more noticable change to graphics.</p>