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

Dregor Thule · 01-13-2003, 08:12 PM

It's been brought up before, but this zone surpasses all measures of being "bad" that it deserves reiteration. Some of you might be wonder which zone I'm thinking of exactly... those that have been there know only too well what zone it could only be. Plane of Water. From concept to execution, this zone was doomed to fail, and it has, quite gloriously. Ignoring the horrendous bugs that seem to cripple the zone for now, just the very nature of underwater fighting was a big warning sign for a very high end zone. I'm just beside myself with how stupid this is. I would honestly rather be kicked in the head I think. Trying to fight for the most part tiny mobs in the thick of 30+ bodies all swimming around, bumping you, getting in your face, annoying you, while trying to cast the same spell 5 times before you finally get it off. Reaction times are down to nill because of sight and movement issues.

And of course... the bugs. Framerate is absolutely HORRIBLE in this waste of space. It's not even a bug that makes sense, because you can't get rid of it by looking at a wall or the floor, you can't help it by getting a super machine. Nothing helps. It's just plain LAGGED.

I was initially eager to see Plane of Water. I kind of thought they would have, ohh, I don't know.. LEARNED from past mistakes and not made it so entirely underwater. Watery tunnels leading to chambers that are in pockets of air sounded much more feasible. Adding in an ice area would have been nice to represent the E'ci aspect of the zone. Some dry caves filled with steaming guysers for the Povar aspect. I love some of the mobs, the reruga especially, but christ, underwater it's just a waste.

I'd like to be an optimist and hope some kind of overhaul could be done... but sadly I'm also a realist. I need to vent some frustrations now.

Lefazz · 01-13-2003, 08:38 PM

Runs fine for me. Perhaps you need to upgrade that Pentium II and TNT2 card?

Alderian Stormguard · 01-13-2003, 08:53 PM

Someone in another thread indicated that the lag issue had been pretty much resolved in a recent patch. Just thought you should know.

Dregor Thule · 01-13-2003, 09:01 PM

I assure both of you twits it is not fixed. For anyone, with any machine.

Strikan · 01-13-2003, 09:17 PM

Once you get a little ways inside FPS goes to total shit.

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

I even went to window mode to check CPU and it's pinging one cpu and using like 20-30% of the second cpu (probably on system level threads and not eq on second cpu).

I seriously doubt ANY computer could handle it as it is now.

Furor Planedefiler · 01-13-2003, 10:03 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Lefazz
Runs fine for me. Perhaps you need to upgrade that Pentium II and TNT2 card?

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.

Qhue · 01-13-2003, 10:31 PM

PoP seems to be chock full of zones where the clipping planes were either not implemented at all, or were implemented poorly such that you have to get creative with the clipping slider to make the zones render properly.

Tactics, for instance, when the clipping plane is working at all maxes out the viewable area with a 25% far-clipping plane. After that the machine still renders larger and larger chunks of the zone but the opacity on the "fog" effect renders them utterly obscured.

Often the clipping plane will not function at all, and once you get a suitable distance from a zone-edge the engine just collapses under the strain of trying to render thousands and thousands of poorly textured polygons that you cant even see because a featureless wall 2 feet from your avatar's face obscures the view. You can't turn to face the wall or the floor and solve the problem because the engine doesnt do a proper pre-render pass to notice "ahh fully opaque object totally obscures view...dont bother rendering anything past it" and in a very 3D dungeon like Water no mater what direction you look in there will be lots of fine detail along the line of sight.

I think most of the PoP zones just need to have someone who is more familiar with the EQ rendering engine go in and adjust the values that engine reads in from the zonefile for the clipping plane allowed min/max. There should always be a minimum value so that even if you cant see 2 feet in front of your face you can still move and issue commands completely lag free on a minimal configured machine.

Destinae · 01-13-2003, 10:38 PM

Water has nothing to do with clip plane, well atleast it's nothign that you can adjust. Certain areas (read: 75% of the zone, places which you cannot avoid fighting in) grind any machine to a halt with 50 person raid.

Slysx · 01-13-2003, 10:42 PM

No offence to the currant Developers.
This would be like taking the original Doom engine and modding it to the point somehow by an act of god it would run and look like Unreal Tournament., You can't do half the stuff they try and do with current code. IE faulty ring events, Death, buffs/Curse bugs, and Zones not rendering. When they realize they can only do so much with this antiquated code, and leave out the Ohhh's and Ahhhh's we "might" ,and I use this loosely, have a game we can play to the 9’S.

elrich · 01-13-2003, 10:44 PM

well, unless i read qhue wrong (which is very possible, his reply wasnt worded very well) he wasnt referring to clip plane problems in a sense of saying "turn your clip plane down morons!".

what i got out of that was that some zones, even when you minimize your clip plane, and can see the fog, the engine is still rendering past your sight. if this is the case, whoever designed the zone needs beaten severely. though, it seems thats already in line for whoever did PoWater...

certain zones have pre-set max clip planes (think gfay, ponightmare, etc). maybe PoWater has a non existant value for this entry, and its interfering with clip plane adjustment, and no matter what you adjust, its not only rendering out to what the standard max is, but the actual entire zone on every refresh.

Not sure though, all speculation.

Quote:

Runs fine for me. Perhaps you need to upgrade that Pentium II and TNT2 card?

id bet $50 that this person has only seen PoWater through an emulator. and yah, i bet it did run fine for him. ive been in powater on the emulator before and it does run just as smooth as any other zone.

however, on the emulator they do NOT have the values set for zone specific clip planes (that i mentioned earlier) and i believe it is set to default every zone to 'standard' ie. max clip plane exists where the end of the clip plane bar can move to. this does make me think that there is some kind of erroneous value for that field in PoWater thats foricng the entire zone to render. If thats the case, its an easy as fix, and shouldve been noticed a long ass time ago, but hey! Beta testing, and even in house testing owns.

Alumriel · 01-14-2003, 12:53 AM

I have had some guildmates mention the framerate problems, but at the time they had them, my framerate seemed to stay relatively the same. They mentioned problems around the point where you drop down a long tunnel where right afterward you can't CoH. Is this about the spot people are having trouble? I've been all the way to Hydrotha's room and haven't had the framerate problems others are having. Wierd.

2.4 p4, 512mb ram, geforce3 (v41.09), WinXP pro, all luclin models on, high res textures, spell particles off... if anyone is curious.

I'm not getting 60fps or anything like that, just the normal 30ish at most times, with more chop when the raid is in full view. No idea why its fine for me when others in the raid have problems. One of those wierd things I guess.

Lin · 01-14-2003, 01:07 AM

The bug trees in PoS are like that too. For some it's a complete and total slideshow inside the trees where you can see practically nothing, and if anything better out among the leaves where there are tons of polygons. For others it's completely smooth. It seemed to have nothing to do with how powerful the system was.

Karae · 01-14-2003, 01:12 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Lefazz
Runs fine for me. Perhaps you need to upgrade that Pentium II and TNT2 card?

Perhaps you need to venture a bit deeper than the zone in.

Sean · 01-14-2003, 01:14 AM

Deeper in... it gets far, far worse than the tunnel before Hydrotha. Not even a comparison. Even people with monster machines lag. The zone is that horribly put together.

Whoever made this zone fucking sucks.

EllessarBard · 01-14-2003, 02:01 AM

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.

(As opposed to prior to the patch getting a 0.5 fps)

01-13-2003, 08:12 PM	#1 (permalink)
Dregor Thule Registered User Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Canada, eh? Posts: 28 -1 Internets	Comicbook guy tells you, 'Worst. Zone. Ever.' It's been brought up before, but this zone surpasses all measures of being "bad" that it deserves reiteration. Some of you might be wonder which zone I'm thinking of exactly... those that have been there know only too well what zone it could only be. Plane of Water. From concept to execution, this zone was doomed to fail, and it has, quite gloriously. Ignoring the horrendous bugs that seem to cripple the zone for now, just the very nature of underwater fighting was a big warning sign for a very high end zone. I'm just beside myself with how stupid this is. I would honestly rather be kicked in the head I think. Trying to fight for the most part tiny mobs in the thick of 30+ bodies all swimming around, bumping you, getting in your face, annoying you, while trying to cast the same spell 5 times before you finally get it off. Reaction times are down to nill because of sight and movement issues. And of course... the bugs. Framerate is absolutely HORRIBLE in this waste of space. It's not even a bug that makes sense, because you can't get rid of it by looking at a wall or the floor, you can't help it by getting a super machine. Nothing helps. It's just plain LAGGED. I was initially eager to see Plane of Water. I kind of thought they would have, ohh, I don't know.. LEARNED from past mistakes and not made it so entirely underwater. Watery tunnels leading to chambers that are in pockets of air sounded much more feasible. Adding in an ice area would have been nice to represent the E'ci aspect of the zone. Some dry caves filled with steaming guysers for the Povar aspect. I love some of the mobs, the reruga especially, but christ, underwater it's just a waste. I'd like to be an optimist and hope some kind of overhaul could be done... but sadly I'm also a realist. I need to vent some frustrations now.

01-13-2003, 09:17 PM	#5 (permalink)
Strikan Registered User Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 14 -1 Internets	Once you get a little ways inside FPS goes to total shit. Dual athlon 1.6ghz here with a geforce 3 and get like 10fps once we get deeper into the zone. I even went to window mode to check CPU and it's pinging one cpu and using like 20-30% of the second cpu (probably on system level threads and not eq on second cpu). I seriously doubt ANY computer could handle it as it is now. __________________ Gratzer Feen < Fires of Heaven > 65 Feral Lord

01-13-2003, 10:31 PM	#7 (permalink)
Qhue Tunare's most surly gnome Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Sunny Upstate NY Posts: 905 +3 Internets	Clipping plane isnt it? PoP seems to be chock full of zones where the clipping planes were either not implemented at all, or were implemented poorly such that you have to get creative with the clipping slider to make the zones render properly. Tactics, for instance, when the clipping plane is working at all maxes out the viewable area with a 25% far-clipping plane. After that the machine still renders larger and larger chunks of the zone but the opacity on the "fog" effect renders them utterly obscured. Often the clipping plane will not function at all, and once you get a suitable distance from a zone-edge the engine just collapses under the strain of trying to render thousands and thousands of poorly textured polygons that you cant even see because a featureless wall 2 feet from your avatar's face obscures the view. You can't turn to face the wall or the floor and solve the problem because the engine doesnt do a proper pre-render pass to notice "ahh fully opaque object totally obscures view...dont bother rendering anything past it" and in a very 3D dungeon like Water no mater what direction you look in there will be lots of fine detail along the line of sight. I think most of the PoP zones just need to have someone who is more familiar with the EQ rendering engine go in and adjust the values that engine reads in from the zonefile for the clipping plane allowed min/max. There should always be a minimum value so that even if you cant see 2 feet in front of your face you can still move and issue commands completely lag free on a minimal configured machine. Last edited by Qhue : 01-13-2003 at 10:36 PM.

01-13-2003, 10:42 PM	#9 (permalink)
Slysx Registered User Join Date: Apr 2002 Posts: 46 -1 Internets	Heh No offence to the currant Developers. This would be like taking the original Doom engine and modding it to the point somehow by an act of god it would run and look like Unreal Tournament., You can't do half the stuff they try and do with current code. IE faulty ring events, Death, buffs/Curse bugs, and Zones not rendering. When they realize they can only do so much with this antiquated code, and leave out the Ohhh's and Ahhhh's we "might" ,and I use this loosely, have a game we can play to the 9’S.

01-14-2003, 12:53 AM	#11 (permalink)
Alumriel Registered User Join Date: Dec 2002 Posts: 27 -1 Internets	Confused I have had some guildmates mention the framerate problems, but at the time they had them, my framerate seemed to stay relatively the same. They mentioned problems around the point where you drop down a long tunnel where right afterward you can't CoH. Is this about the spot people are having trouble? I've been all the way to Hydrotha's room and haven't had the framerate problems others are having. Wierd. 2.4 p4, 512mb ram, geforce3 (v41.09), WinXP pro, all luclin models on, high res textures, spell particles off... if anyone is curious. I'm not getting 60fps or anything like that, just the normal 30ish at most times, with more chop when the raid is in full view. No idea why its fine for me when others in the raid have problems. One of those wierd things I guess. __________________ Alumriel 65 Maestro Bristlebane Server I'm a loot whore

01-13-2003, 08:38 PM	#2 (permalink)
Lefazz Registered User Join Date: Aug 2002 Posts: 1,105	Runs fine for me. Perhaps you need to upgrade that Pentium II and TNT2 card?

01-13-2003, 08:53 PM	#3 (permalink)
Alderian Stormguard Registered User Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 32 -1 Internets	Someone in another thread indicated that the lag issue had been pretty much resolved in a recent patch. Just thought you should know.

01-13-2003, 09:01 PM	#4 (permalink)
Dregor Thule Registered User Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Canada, eh? Posts: 28 -1 Internets	I assure both of you twits it is not fixed. For anyone, with any machine.

01-13-2003, 10:38 PM	#8 (permalink)
Destinae Fires of Heaven Officer Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 248 +0 Internets	Water has nothing to do with clip plane, well atleast it's nothign that you can adjust. Certain areas (read: 75% of the zone, places which you cannot avoid fighting in) grind any machine to a halt with 50 person raid.

01-14-2003, 01:07 AM	#12 (permalink)
Lin Registered User Join Date: Aug 2002 Posts: 876 -1 Internets	The bug trees in PoS are like that too. For some it's a complete and total slideshow inside the trees where you can see practically nothing, and if anything better out among the leaves where there are tons of polygons. For others it's completely smooth. It seemed to have nothing to do with how powerful the system was.

01-14-2003, 01:14 AM	#14 (permalink)
Sean Fires of Heaven Officer Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Washington Posts: 5,108 +17 Internets	Deeper in... it gets far, far worse than the tunnel before Hydrotha. Not even a comparison. Even people with monster machines lag. The zone is that horribly put together. Whoever made this zone fucking sucks. __________________

01-14-2003, 02:01 AM	#15 (permalink)
EllessarBard Registered User Join Date: Jan 2003 Posts: 69 -1 Internets	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. (As opposed to prior to the patch getting a 0.5 fps)

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