EQ Never

Thought Dave left and is at different company all together now?

Steve Klug, Rosie Rappaport and Terry Michaels are definitely still there.

Dave Georgeson and Jeff Butler are definitely gone.

Emily Taylor was pulled back onto EQ2 afaik, but she still makes an appearance on the Landmark forums so maybe she hops between projects.

Supposedly Darrin McPherson has been updating his LinkedIn resume and has new recommendations from EQN team members.. so, he could go soon?

Other people still on the team: Dexella (Community Manager), Josh Augustine (Game Designer), Allen Lapadis (sp?) (Lead Artist)

When they stopped doing the community Landmark builds I was 100% sure EQNext was dead, but if they are moving away from voxel tech that would explain their silence. We'll see, I guess.. They'll need to show something really good once the break the news to the existing community. "BTW all the stuff you've been making for EQNext isn't gonna be used. LOL"

The funny thing is, the EQ fanbase (dwindling relic that it is) will probably get something closer to what they originally imagined when EQ:3 was announced. The voxels stuff was a dumb idea outside of specifically using it for landmark content creation to port over. Though the completely modable/changeable class stuff might still be in, because FFXIV/FFXI certainly were able to pull it off years ago, and it seems like that was their original design implementation anyway.

Either way, I think there's a bit of a misconception of just how big the audience following every drip of information about the game is. There's not a -lot- of people with some interest. There's -some- people with a lot of interest. Pretty big difference imo, and it's based entirely on the length of time between the property being relevant and now. It's been a decade. New people are probably not following it, especially with very little actual information or in-game assets revealed. People who fondly remember EQ (again, an ever shrinking demographic) are clicking on it, and people bored by WoW/etc might be. But when they start releasing info that they are most likely going to be substantially less SANDBOX! than originally represented, I would imagine that the "not-WoW" crowd will be quite a bit less interested.

Anyway, this is just conjecture, like always. Either way, while I don't think it's vapor ware yet, I also don't think Daybreak is going to keep shoveling resources into something that isn't going anywhere quickly. Otherwise why trim down the departments and realign the management? Those are clear "lets get this back on track" type movements, while also minimizing potential losses if it never makes it.

On the topic of voxels, the Voxel Farm people recently posted a video on their work on occlusion tech for the Voxel Farm engine, and for the video they used some Qeynos buildings that were made in Landmark. So I'm guessing Voxel Farm is still actively working with Daybreak, and EQN is sticking with voxels.

Randin_sl said:

On the topic of voxels, the Voxel Farm people recently posted a video on their work on occlusion tech for the Voxel Farm engine, and for the video they used some Qeynos buildings that were made in Landmark. So I'm guessing Voxel Farm is still actively working with Daybreak, and EQN is sticking with voxels.

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Thanks for the link...

Convo_sl said:

B/C all the recognizable names are gone. regardless of why they left, they are still gone. I think it's just Micheal's at this point? Maybe that's a good thing but the so-called "visionary's" of the project are no longer working on it.

I guess some of these people are still on it.

Director of Development: Dave Georgeson
Technical Director: Steven Klug
Senior Programmer: Greg Spence
Senior Producer: Terry Michaels
Producer: Emily Taylor
Senior Art Director: Rosie Rappaport
Lead Game Designer: Darrin McPherson
Creative Director: Jeffrey Butler

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Did you just wake up out of a coma? WTH?

Elidroth_sl said:

Any contacts at DBG would be stupid to reveal info.. If it came out somehow, they'd be fired.

There's no way DBG will cancel EQN.. It's too important to them. It's going to have to be the cornerstone game once H1Z1 starts to wane. Frankly, the longer they take, the better. The longer it takes, the less chance they're shoving something out the door unfinished.

The real issue with the destructible world is pathing. You can do it in a single-player game, but it's just not possible when you have to send out that constantly regenerated pathing data to every client in a zone. It becomes a gigantic bandwidth and latency nightmare.

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Were you part of EQN or just a SOE employee?

Mughal_sl said:

Were you part of EQN or just a SOE employee?

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fluffer

Randin_sl said:

On the topic of voxels, the Voxel Farm people recently posted a video on their work on occlusion tech for the Voxel Farm engine, and for the video they used some Qeynos buildings that were made in Landmark. So I'm guessing Voxel Farm is still actively working with Daybreak, and EQN is sticking with voxels.

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Oh as a construction setup for development, sure. But they can't be thinking destructible environments actively used in game on that level, even partially. The netcode requirements for worlds to look the same to each player as stuff is randomly altered works when you have 100-200 people in your game. Sending that update to 1000s of players sounds like a hassle and a half.

I should have specified that I don't think creating the world from voxels in general was a bad idea, but the concept that players could alter it in-game to any reasonable degree has always smacked of either misinformation or simply being unrealistic with any of the goals they were aiming for. Kind of like when Smed started tweeting about permadeath and a developer came in to say "nope, not that kind of permadeath!" right away.

Rezz_sl said:

Oh as a construction setup for development, sure. But they can't be thinking destructible environments actively used in game on that level, even partially. The netcode requirements for worlds to look the same to each player as stuff is randomly altered works when you have 100-200 people in your game. Sending that update to 1000s of players sounds like a hassle and a half.

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To be fair, that's not how it should be working. Voxel modifications only need to be sent to the people near the modification. If a random player out in the woods digs a hole, they should only have to send that data to that player and any players that might stumble on that hole before it heals up (which is probably no more than 30 minutes).

Also, I highly doubt EQNext will have building out in the wilderness so the amount of voxel data being sent/received should only be for destruction and combat related abilities like freezing/building/breaking terrain.

The core game of EQNext will have pre-calculated voxel structures, as well, that will improve performance significantly. Earlier in Landmark dev, they described a way of authoring voxel creations to allow for vastly better performance, LOD meshes, and smaller size. That's not in Landmark, but likely something that will be done for all EQNext content.

Laerazi_sl said:

To be fair, that's not how it should be working. Voxel modifications only need to be sent to the people near the modification.

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Of my god why didn't anyone ever think of that someone batphone DBG holy fuck guys.

It'sprobablynot that simple.

Lenas_sl said:

Of my god why didn't anyone ever think of that someone batphone DBG holy fuck guys.

It'sprobablynot that simple.

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It's really not a new or complex concept.. it's been used in MMOs since EverQuest. You think when you kill an enemy it broadcasts to all clients connected to the server? Optimized server code should only communicate actions to clients in range.

MMO Concept | Exit Games

Eh, I don't think it's a new idea, it's a local broadcast. Of the position of the various particles of semi-randomish terrain elements. That's the part that I think is going to end up causing issues. Particle effects/non-voxel related stuff just relays the x/y/z of a focal point, the type of animation (maybe 5 characters?) and then possibly a facing or a ray to location deal. A couple of elements, not a ton. If you can somehow modify the terrain enough that it has to send redrawing instructions, it's going to have a substantially larger amount of information that needs to be conveyed and processed. So while 200 people in an entire game might have to have 20-40 at any time aware of an instantaneous change, a game with 1000 people would have anywhere from 100-200 people immediately needing information sent and processed by them.

I don't know the exact specifics of how they are working their engine or netcode, so this is of course speculation. But the idea that they are sending quite lot more data to local participants in a given area isn't that outlandish. Unless the effects are cosmetic in which case see the idea of non-voxel related stuff above. Which wouldn't be what they were talking about in regards to having destructible terrain. If it's actually modifying the area that npcs/pcs can stand on, that's -way- more information being sent than anything in a normal game.

Hey, maybe they're brilliant and have that worked out to minimal information transfer needed to convey effects. It's possible. But given what they've shown, I'm not sure it's "likely," in my opinion. That's a lot of technical wizardry that the EQ team has never really evinced from an outsider's point of view. Maybe the guys working on that stuff are a lot smarter and the problems much easier than even Elidroth mentioned.

It just seems like a lot of information to convey, even after reading several descriptions of the technology.

Yep, zones like Vex Thal were god damn insane looking at them with MySEQ turned on if i remember right.

Rezz_sl said:

The funny thing is, the EQ fanbase (dwindling relic that it is) will probably get something closer to what they originally imagined when EQ:3 was announced. The voxels stuff was a dumb idea outside of specifically using it for landmark content creation to port over. Though the completely modable/changeable class stuff might still be in, because FFXIV/FFXI certainly were able to pull it off years ago, and it seems like that was their original design implementation anyway.

Either way, I think there's a bit of a misconception of just how big the audience following every drip of information about the game is. There's not a -lot- of people with some interest. There's -some- people with a lot of interest. Pretty big difference imo, and it's based entirely on the length of time between the property being relevant and now. It's been a decade. New people are probably not following it, especially with very little actual information or in-game assets revealed. People who fondly remember EQ (again, an ever shrinking demographic) are clicking on it, and people bored by WoW/etc might be. But when they start releasing info that they are most likely going to be substantially less SANDBOX! than originally represented, I would imagine that the "not-WoW" crowd will be quite a bit less interested.

Anyway, this is just conjecture, like always. Either way, while I don't think it's vapor ware yet, I also don't think Daybreak is going to keep shoveling resources into something that isn't going anywhere quickly. Otherwise why trim down the departments and realign the management? Those are clear "lets get this back on track" type movements, while also minimizing potential losses if it never makes it.

Click to expand...

The kids don't even know what EQ is and the die hards are old... and will be dying off soon.

There is still a market for EQ just like there is a market for any mmorpg. People still play them even if they don't innovate. But the name has very little value as a IP brand at this point, the powers that be really missed the boat on that. So they might as well just call it Everquest and drop the "Next" or "3".