[Ayeshala]

I spent some time outside the SoE booth today and got to chat with Bill Fisher.

First before I say anything, keep in mind that _every_ company out there demos their stuff on high-end hardware. So it's reasonable to expect the computers running the game were "high end" - at least, high end as of mid Mai 2006, that's going to change before release.

I noticed two real slow downs during the demo. Once was after a starting the game while the area around the character was being populated; it took a second or two for the ground texture to appear, etc. Standard stuff and I've seen much worse in other games. The other was when at some point a door was opened and the character was made to step outside a building, you had second or so there were frame rate dropped.

During the rest of the demo the frame rate stayed at a good 25-30 FPS.

They just got their interior world lighting tech in and from what Bill was saying it makes a pretty big difference. At some point one of the demoer was inside a circular room with a pool in the middle, some fire particle effects going on on top of the pool, a sort of ball levitating near the ceiling, a "snow" effect showing flakes swirling in a circle around the room and the demoer's character fighting two MOBs; frame rate stayed around 25-30 FPS.

I saw a group fight a bunch of undead MOBs outside what looked like the elven starting city and again frame rate stayed solid, including when spells were cast.

Again keep in mind that every company demoing PC games will use whatever is "top end". So assume that what I saw was running on (currently) expensive hardware. However also be aware that the graphics sliders seemed to be near the max settings: I did'nt pay enough attentions to the graphics to say if they were identical to what we're seeing in screenshots, but everything looked pretty good. At some point I asked them about the new weather system; they could'nt get the rain and snow to start but did they manage to manipulate the speed of the wind. At some point you had a pretty strong storm going on (minus the rain which they could'nt get to work), trees started swaying heavily because of the wind and the world lighting changed to a dark, overcast effect; FPS did'nt seem to be affected at all by the change.

Anyway, that's enough rambling for now. I'll probably go back to their booth before the show ends friday and report more. I'll try to get the specs on the demo PCs.