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Rajaah

Rajaah

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Ambiturner said:
Vox and Naggy aren't his parents you n00b
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Oh that was just a rumor?

Maul said:
What difference if any will the 64bit version make? Or is it just some straight up bullshit technojargon
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The game is gonna be able to store like 10,000x the data that it's capped at now. Everything should run better, and in theory they can finally add new races/classes. Think the zone size potential will increase as well.
 
Mick

Mick

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Maul said:
What difference if any will the 64bit version make? Or is it just some straight up bullshit technojargon
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32bit programs could only use a max of 4gb of ram. Going 64bit gives them access to more memory.
 
Ambiturner

Ambiturner

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Rajaah said:
Oh that was just a rumor?
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They were imprisoned for trying to create another prismatic dragon, but never actually succeeded.

It's been hinted that Dozekar was the actual father and why he's in the position he's I don't think it was ever 100% confirmed, unless it was somewhat recently.
 
Rajaah

Rajaah

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Ambiturner said:
They were imprisoned for trying to create another prismatic dragon, but never actually succeeded.

It's been hinted that Dozekar was the actual father and why he's in the position he's I don't think it was ever 100% confirmed, unless it was somewhat recently.
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Now that I think back on it, I think you're right about Dozekar. Wonder who the mom was. Also worth noting that Dozekar was originally a blue dragon and they changed him to a rust dragon a few months after Velious launched...no idea why, or if that's part of his lore. The fact that Dozekar is so small is probably part of the curse.

Anyone remember exactly who Melalafen is? Nagafen's father, IIRC? Cause he's one of the few dragons to side with Vulak in the latest expac, wonder if that means anything for Nagafen in future expansions. Probably not.

As I understand it Lord Yelinak is sorta the leader of the COV faction, which is why it's his personal guard (Charayan, Jortreva, etc) who show up to apprehend Kerafyrm at the end of Secrets of Faydwer. Vulak is obviously the most powerful non-Kera dragon by a large margin, in both OG Velious and the new Velious expansions. So it stands to reason that maybe he's the COV faction leader, but I don't think so. I think Vulak is more like the "high priest" of Veeshan, while Yelinak is the actual leader. In the new Velious expansions, it looks like Vulak goes into business for himself without the approval of the rest of COV, since his nuking of Velious also killed a ton of dragons.
 
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Sieger

Sieger

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In the immediate sense the 64 bit client will not likely make any difference whatsoever, we used it for awhile on Beta and it's not anything noticeable. EQ's current performance problem specifically meaning poor handling of lots of players in a zone, poor server performance during raid events (especially during big burns), poor client performance during same, login server performance none of that is improved by going to 64 bit.

Going to 64 bits raises the amount of addressable memory from 2^32 to 2^64 bytes. JChan basically said that one of the most common causes of crash to desktops is an out of memory exception, in theory this is likely caused by some problem in their code and could be resolved without actually needing to change the application architecture--because when running properly EQ doesn't need anything close to its current 2^32 limit, in fact you can get the client down to way way less than that. But anyway, it will mean the people who frequenlty get out of memory crashes for various reasons won't get them as much, probably.

It doesn't immediatley change much of anything else. It does open some new doors for them in a few areas going forward, and lets them push things in the client they may not have done previously.
 
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S

Secrets

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Sieger said:
In the immediate sense the 64 bit client will not likely make any difference whatsoever, we used it for awhile on Beta and it's not anything noticeable. EQ's current performance problem specifically meaning poor handling of lots of players in a zone, poor server performance during raid events (especially during big burns), poor client performance during same, login server performance none of that is improved by going to 64 bit.

Going to 64 bits raises the amount of addressable memory from 2^32 to 2^64 bytes. JChan basically said that one of the most common causes of crash to desktops is an out of memory exception, in theory this is likely caused by some problem in their code and could be resolved without actually needing to change the application architecture--because when running properly EQ doesn't need anything close to its current 2^32 limit, in fact you can get the client down to way way less than that. But anyway, it will mean the people who frequenlty get out of memory crashes for various reasons won't get them as much, probably.

It doesn't immediatley change much of anything else. It does open some new doors for them in a few areas going forward, and lets them push things in the client they may not have done previously.
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Spot on. It was an out of memory GPU exhaustion crash.

They have so many types of materials and data loading on the fly compared to before. DX9 doesn't handle that level of swapping well - at all - and will only use free spaces of memory that it is aware of. If you run out of room by using allocations of various sizes (and trust me, EQ has a *lot* of varying size allocations), you'll get a crash as the application cannot recover from not having addressable memory past a certain point in runtime.

These crashes are likely common on live where more people have cosmetic armor and are willing to spend on it.

They could, of course, fix the code path that's responsible - but they'd have to spend engineering time they likely don't have on graphics engine / rendering work. This is an easy workaround that is innocent enough. At most, you might have to close the game once every day.

That's not to say it's a bad upgrade. They can now add higher quality stuff to the game without being subject to limitations on fidelity within reason.

The biggest upgrades they could do are all in the gameplay loop, and that work is architecture independent.
 
Kharzette

Kharzette

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Vulkan lets you manage your own video memory. I haven't been able to do that since the days of 3dfx glide :D

Pain in the ass to use otherwise though.
 
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Secrets

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Kharzette said:
Vulkan lets you manage your own video memory. I haven't been able to do that since the days of 3dfx glide :D

Pain in the ass to use otherwise though.
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DX9's particularly bad as it manages its own resources automatically unless otherwise specified. Debugging it is nigh impossible unless you use managed texture pools.

docs.microsoft.com

Automatic Texture Management (Direct3D 9) - Win32 apps

Texture management is the process of determining which textures are needed for rendering at a given time and ensuring that those textures are loaded into video memory.
docs.microsoft.com

Ideally, you'd replace the contents of textures and manage your own pool / ring buffer / atlas. DX10 and above have systems for dealing with this scenario and heavily encourage doing so.

Good read. This is from the DX10 release era:
 
Kharzette

Kharzette

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I kind of halfway remember the 9 era. That was back when if you wanted some feature, you had to ask the card if it could do it, then make sure it wasn't lying. ATI cards would heavily lie about multisampling capability they didn't have. 11 just had a feature level to check. If the card says it can do 11.3, you know the full set of functionality is there, and there's no big chain of error checking, it is done at device creation.

I kinda skipped 10 and went straight to 11, but I didn't know about the staging thing. The great thing about vulkan is you can do similar stuff on another thread. I've heard you can do resource related stuff on threads in 12 too but I haven't looked at anything in 12 as I only very recently updated to windows 10 (and I don't like it).

I like the section where they say "Create all resources up front if possible" haha. There are so few games left where you can do that. The very root of the problem for poor old Vanguard.
 
Sieger

Sieger

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I had actually forgotten that EQ even uses DX9, it's shocking sometimes so we still play this game and how it was maintained (or rather ill-maintained) for years, I can kinda excuse it a TAD under Daybreak/DPG because the money isn't what it once was (although they were making way more money than I thought as per the EG7 data that came out); but under SOE they really did have the resources to have cleaned a lot of issues up way better than they did, they just chose not to do so.
 
Kirun

Kirun

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Sieger said:
I had actually forgotten that EQ even uses DX9, it's shocking sometimes so we still play this game and how it was maintained (or rather ill-maintained) for years, I can kinda excuse it a TAD under Daybreak/DPG because the money isn't what it once was (although they were making way more money than I thought as per the EG7 data that came out); but under SOE they really did have the resources to have cleaned a lot of issues up way better than they did, they just chose not to do so.
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Most of the people working on the actual game wanted that money to be reinvested back into EQ. It's the "money men" at SOE that used EQ as a cash cow to fund all their other projects.
 
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Ikkan

Ikkan

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vGrade said:
Please let this game die
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Tuco

Tuco

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Maul said:
Hows the new expansion? I boxed a group in ToV and hadmt played since gates of discord and had an insane amount of fun
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It's fine. EQ has settled into a paradigm where they release an expansion every year. Every other year that expansion increases the level cap. From what I can tell, they have to spend so much effort increasing the level cap that there isn't much content in the expansions and they apparently tune those expansions to the previous expansion's difficulty. So they are often thin and easy.

I'm going to buy the next expansion and play it at release, but will probably skip the next level increase expansion. If I had my way they would rarely increase the levels. It's a huge hassle for boxers to get new spells and provides basically nothing of interest to me because everything is a new set of names and +1 stats.
 
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