EQ2 UI questions

[Man0warr]

When I played EQ2 I really liked the Fetish Nightfall UI mod, although I only use ATi cards so I've never noticed any of the issues discussed here.

[Aegdaien]

I'll second Profit UI.

Very easy to use and I don't see any drastic performance decreases due to it. Like someone else said, a lot of the problem is when you're running a lower end computer you see it more. I'll try to adjust a few parts of the UI and see if I can find any framerate differences.

[Tsabrae]

It's puzzling how few maintained UIs there are.

Vert Reborn is the cleanest I've used, both in terms of resources and appearance.

[Abalieno]

Originally Posted by leane

Its more a problem if your running a weaker computer or are having bottlenecks, They did say they were focusing towards what whould be higher end years down the road.

No, it's not. I don't know if it's a Nvidia vs Ati issue but the UI simply eats a lot of resources. I use the standard EQ2 UI + maps here and I can be in a zone with 30+ FPS or another with 15 or so, the UI still eats up significantly processing power.

Arguably WoW has the most powerful and flexible UI out there, but where it really shinies is in the fact that it takes nearly zero resources. I can have the barely needed on display or I can open hundreds of buttons, windows, features and energy bars and the game maintains roughly the same amount of frames per second.

It's obvious that it's a matter of how the UI in EQ2 and WoW are engineered at a basic level and rendered on screen. It's surely not a matter of "optimizations".

The point is that in other games the UI really does not impact the framerate. In EQ2 it does sensibly. Now it could even get optimized but the fact is that it takes resources will hardly change if it's not recoded at a very basic level, I suspect.

And don't bring up the "focus to support hardware for the years ahead". Slowing down the game just because people have more powerful hardware is not an argument. If I'm buying new hardware it's because I want new possibilities supported, not so that I can swallow horrible engines.

If your hardware requirements are high, then the game better demonstrate that the slowdown is worth it. Instead of just an excuse for a crappy engine.

[Wizerud]

Yes it's totally normal for almost every MMO or any game which overlays the main play screen with a UI of some kind to lose framerate with the UI on.

The other thing about the WoW vs EQ2 UI comparison is that far more people are at or close to such a framerate in WoW where even if they actually lost, say 10fps, they wouldn't notice because the human eye cannot detect past a certain refresh rate point anyway. I'm not sure whether that point is 30fps or 60fps or whatever but you get my point. If you're at 70fps and you lose 10fps you're not gonna notice hardly anything. Not so if you start out at 30fps. Don't put it all down to the slickness of the UI although that may play a noticeable part.