Comicbook guy tells you, 'Worst. Zone. Ever.'

[Concrete]

That's one memorable quote from the Simpsons, one of my favorites.

Comic-book guy: "Last night's 'Itchy & Scratchy' was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured that I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world. As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me."

Bart: "What? They've given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them."

Comic-book guy: "Worst episode ever."

[aakla]

Havnt been there with a full raid just messing around with like 20 people. Hydroth thats the large squid right? been there didnt notice any lag. seems alot better then the zone in of PoA.

but we only had 20 people so I cant honestly say anything will we go with a bunch.

[Grongl]

Sounds kinda like the old fps bug in Guk. They finally tied it to a bad alligator model. Probably some fish swimmin around with 500x the poly count he's supposed to have.

[Frozboz]

Fighting way deep in (read: near Corinav) as a wizard it was borderline unplayable the FPS was so bad. And that's considering all I had to do was stare at the floor and press two buttons. I absolutely can't imagine what playing a melee would be like in that shithole of a zone.. You guys must have been pulling your hair out.

[Jaytee Bushwacker]

Gotta agree with froz there, you melee must be going nuts. Destinae cracked me up with that "Any caster type wanna trade accounts for a week or so" comment.

As for this:

That's one memorable quote from the Simpsons, one of my favorites.

Comic-book guy: "Last night's 'Itchy & Scratchy' was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured that I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world. As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me."

Bart: "What? They've given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them."

Comic-book guy: "Worst episode ever."

I infer your trying to tell us in a round about way that Sony has provided us with thousands of hours of "fun" and if anything we OWE THEM.

Well thats pure bullshit, every single one of us pays them per month to play. So they ALWAYS owe us a playable product. And that zone sir, is not playable.

[Concrete]

Well actually Jaytee, I wasn't really trying to make an underlying statement in my post... I'm just a Simpsons fan.

[Opivy]

The screen lag seemed a lot better since last weeks patch; been down there twice now since then and with my crummy P-III 450mHz machine and crummy cideo card wasn't all that bad.

I am pretty sure dregor means past hydrotha.

[Dregor Thule]

While it gets laggy before Hydrotha, yes, this is primarily past it, at the "meat" of the zone. And Furor's right, I could have been much harsher... I'm trying to cut back on the h8

As for Plane of Air lag, that's easy to fix, at least it was for me. ALT-O, Display, turn the "Other Particles" to disabled. Also a great help in Fire with all the flameheads. Seems that clipping plane, line of sight, etc, isn't taken into account when the graphic engine accounts for those other particles. Shame, looks so much nicer with those on.

[Lefazz]

Dual athlon 1.6ghz here with a geforce 3 and get like 10fps once we get deeper into the zone.

Stupid dumb ass, dual processor platforms have no affect on EverQuest. Applications must be written to take advance of two processors. So basically you are running EQ on a single Athlon 1600 which, by the way, sucks.

And Furor, you have Luclin models on. That right there will make your framerate turn to crap oh and it also has the nasty effect of making your character look and animate like a retard.

Turn that shit off.

[Durew]

Just to comment on the clipping plane issue someone brought up earlier..

If you compare the clipping plane options, say, with PoKnowledge and PoStorms.. its out of whack.

What I would think clipping plane should be is already implemented in PoStorms, allowing you to turn that shit down quite a lot. Then you zone to PoKnowledge, try to max/min your clip plane and hardly see shit all for a difference.. its quite dumb imo

[Zurren]

Originally posted by Furor Planedefiler


When you actually manage to finish gloating over your Razorfin kill and actually get a fucking full on raid deep into this shitpile of a zone, GET BACK TO ME MOTHER FUCKER.

OK?

Dregor expressed 1/10th of my disgust and anger with this zone - it's just so much fucking worse than what he described.

Been deep into the zone on raids, liked it.. Never had the FPS problem your describing and I got a medicore system at best

P4 1.7, 512 megs ram and a GeForce2MX 400 64meg video card, not stellar by todays standards.

[Jaytee Bushwacker]

I had moments down there where everyone would disappear and my lag cleared up 100%. And no I was not going LD. Then I would move or turn and everyone poped back up and went right back to lagging horrendously.

[Qhue]

I wasn't clear enough before.

There are two seperate notions of clipping plane here. One is the standard notion in ANY 3D rendering of near and far clipping planes that define the volume of 3D space that is rendered. The other is the slider-bar that exists in the EQ user interface which allows the user to adjust the value of the far clipping plane that the EQ rendering engine uses.

In a game like EQ the near clipping plane is set arbitrarily to be very close to the camera point. If its set too close then you have problems with a troll's nose or its helmet obscuring the view because the engine happily tries to render it. If the near clipping plane is set too far out then you dont get to see your own arms swing. The new particle engine has a pulldown selector for Near Clipping Plane with respect to where it renders particle effects. You can set it so that no particle effects are rendered at all in a wide circle aroundyour character..but stil allow for partile effects to show up on distant objects/mobs. (I often use this so I can see exactly which mob I mezzed/lulled at max range when I cant be certain precisely which one in a cluster I have targeted...but still avoid particle spasms in close combat)

The problem with Water and also to a lesser degree Tactics, Torment, Storms and others is that Verant has hosed the FAR clipping plane in these zones. No matter what value you try and set the far clipping plane to be in these zones the engine will still try and render everything in the direction you are facing. It also seems to utterly ignore the z-axis in determining what to clip...thus even with a very small clipping plane in force if you are in a zone where there is significant 3-D structure (above and below you) then the engine will work on rendering that stuff as well.

Verant licensed software when Luclin was released that was supposed to take care of this problem by doing a pre-render pass that evaluated what really needed to be rendered and what didnt. For whatever reason this isnt working or has somehow been disabled in the current release version of the EQ graphics engine.


Here's an example :

You are sitting in your office in the middle of downtown manhattan. If you look out the window then you see all the myriad buildings and people for miles and miles. Were your life a computer game like EQ then all those buildings, people, etc would have to be rendered individually and displayed several times a second. With the clipping plane set to maximum (its a clear day) you can see VERY far and so there is a tremendous ammount of junk to be rendered. You would notice significant video lag looking out that window. Turning the far clipping plane down is like a very thick fog rolling in that cuts down on what needs to be rendered. This is why most early 3D games were in confined spaces or very foggy outdoor areas... the far clipping plane had to be fairly close to the camera and so to avoid objects suddenly POPPING out of no where (as they came within the boundaries of the area that your machine rendered) they were always around a corner, or obscured by fog etc...

If you turned away from the window to stare at your essentially featureless cream-colored wall and steel framed wooden door. Well it doesnt take many polygons at all to render THAT scene because you can't see very far. Everyone knows that you can minimize the problems with video lag in EQ by staring at a wall or the floor in most zones because that cuts down on what needs to be rendered considerably. The problem is that for some insane reason the current PoP-EQ engine instead of just happily rendering your simple wall and door is actually rendering the WHOLE of manhattan that exists past your wall and your door and then as the very last pass after rendering every building, tree and person in the city in the direction you are facing, it renders your wall and door. Thus you experience incredible bone crushing video lag when all you can really see is a featureless wall.

Water combines both the clipping plane problem AND significant z-axis structure to result in something that nothing on this planet can render well when you are in the middle of the zone. There is no possible direction to "look" that you arent trying to render thousands of highly (albeit rahter boring) textured polygons even though the overall final view that you see on your monitor isnt that impressive. You'd have the exact same performance I suspect if they made every wall in Water semi-transparent only then it would be more obvious what was causing the problem.

[Lleauaric~EW]

Melees hate Water.. bottom line..

But me.. being a wizard..

Occasionally casting a 3200damage 480mana nuke.. checking out the scenary.. watching the nice schools of fish swim by..

I like it.. >shrug< And yes Ive been deep.. deep enough to die against Cornbeef (Corniv or whatever word VI invented) a couple times...

Now Air.. FUCK AIR.. I HATE AIR... FUCK YOU AUTO WIPE BULLSHIT DONKEY FUCKING MONKEY SHIT EATING PILE OF RAT JISM

[Fender]

Water doesn't even make sense with the lore behind it.

The triumvirate of water is just that....THREE different states, water ice and vapor. But PoWater is just a big fish tank? Fighting tarew marr or whatever underwater makes sense if they fixed the water problems...but e'ci and povar should exist in an area consistent with their state of water.

Sounds like this is just another pre-req PITA before the 5th tier.