All Posts by Acaeus

People here are focusing on the bad aspects of EQ, and there were indeed many bad things in that game (mostly time sinks). These are the things that WoW improved upon.

However, there were a few things that EQ did that were superior to all MMOs nowadays IMO:

1. Factions: EQ implemented an incredibly complex and deep faction system. You had to understand at least the basics of the faction system in order to know where you could go and what you could do. This feature was key to how immersive EQ was.

2. freedom: EQ was a sandbox game. Some classes had the ability to kill a mob in several different ways, depending on certain factors (location, type of mob,etc). This was obviously an unintended feature as all MMOs nowadays steer clear from it.

3. Related to #1, unique racial towns! This is key for any MMO! WoW did this right(not as well as EQ though) EQ2 f* this up big time with only two original starting cities.

Even though I agree that WoW is the best MMO out there, and it did improve upon what previous MMO did, WoW failed to even match 2 great features that previous MMOs had:

a) Faction system for PvE #1 above.

b) PvP from DAoC (IMO best PvP/RvR system ever implemented and best possible end game)

Originally posted by n25philly

 

Originally posted by Acaeus

 

Originally posted by n25philly

Originally posted by Acaeus

 

Originally posted by LiquidWolf

 

Originally posted by turnipz

"A similar (but a bit more specialized) term to DRM is Trusted Computing. The term is intentionally misleading. It does not try to improve the security of the user, but rather wants to ensure that the user can be “trusted”."

 

 

Interesting stuff with the DRM, im wondering what the vista fanboys here will say about it.

That I guess in the end it won't matter, companies will move to vista, because Microsoft pushes them to, and everyone else will do the same.

 

I think hackers/crackers/pirates will just have to work harder.

But everyone will move to Vista or the next OS. Support for XP will stop sometime. I never really liked clinging to the past just cause I felt things worked, just make your present and future better.

As for performance issues due to DRM, honestly I have not notice any. I read more about hollywood than software, but I figure they are close. Honestly it might use "precious" clock cycles, *GASP* but frankly many people don't care.

 

Agree, people will end up using vista, as I am. however, people here who run MMO clients *should* perhaps care about precious CPU cycles, specially if the new MMOS around the corner do use multiple cores.

lots of information here, many facts:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

He even goes into MS' rebuttal which was pretty much saying that apple OS does it too... BTW, MS does not deny they do DRM in Vista. And no it's NOT done on XP. You can, for example install 3rd party driver in XP! Echo cancellation isn't hindered in XP as it is in Vista (because of DRM).

Don't believe in opinions, read up and make up your own mind. In the end, it may very well be that you couldn't care less about DRM and vista will do great.

 

People have been digging out that link since before Vista was released and it's as big a crock of BS as it was then.  3rd party drivers are allowed because they are the biggest reason for crashes in XP.  Someone here mentioned "trusted platform", yet if anyone did any real research they would know that vista only uses Trusted platform for bitlocker.  People seriously need to stop with conspiracy theories and start living in reality.

You dispute a single point, why 3rd party drivers aren't allowed, giving your personal opinion of why, and then go ahead and claim that the whole huge article with many technical details is "crock of BS."

 

For whoever is interested, this is Microsoft's Official "rebuttal:" http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/20/windows-vista-content-protection-twenty-questions-and-answers.aspx

"Will Windows Vista content protection features increase CPU resource consumption?

Yes.  However, the use of additional CPU cycles is inevitable..."

Note that the question was specific about "content protection features" and the answer was "yes."

 

BTW, what the hell is multithreading in a OS?! Are you referring to that Vista can use multiple cores? So can XP, and every other OS nowadays! Processes are given cpu cyles by the kernel scheduler and if the OS can use multiple cores then so can its scheduler. Multithreading is a single process concept (single program). A game, for example, can be multithreaded or not, depending on design.

If a game (like EQ2) is single-threaded, there is nothing Vista (or nay OS) can do to magically make it multithreaded. The application has to be modified to be made multithreaded.

1) You post a blog about blue ray and hd-dvd, systems that have DRM requirements in any system that plays them, even things like blue-ray players.

 

 

2) The very next paragraph after the phrase you quoted say that the same protection requirements are in XP

 

3) Vista is multi-threaded and takes full advantage of multiple core cpu's, XP does not.

 

You can twist words all you want, it won't make them true.

Do you have any comment concerning the bit I quoted (from a MS engineer on vistablog) about spending CPU cycles on DRM-related stuff?

#1 google DRM and vista and read (lots of info to whoever is interested)

#2 yes it does. Microsoft has been adding a little bit here and there on every SP. But it's not embedded in the Kernel OS like it is in Vista. That's the whole point of it, that you are paying for (with your hardware) for stuff you don't want (permanent DRM controls embedded in the OS). XP didn't have any problems by allowing installation of 3rd party drivers (which could be used to bypass DRM), or with echo cancellation. You do know that XP has outperformed VISTA on every test for gaming and applications that demand raw performance right? http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/ (google xp vs vista focusing on gaming)

#3 this is my job, I write server software in C++ that depends on multiple cores and multiple threads to achieve the required performance.  Threads are a a facility provided by the OS kernel. Yes, the OS itself can be multithreaded, some'd call them tasks however. Now, I've found a couple of improvements Vista has concerning the scheduler http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc162494.aspx if that is what you referred to, it sounds good, but nothing impressive or that can be called "Vista is multitithreaded." I don't even know what that means?! Is it the kernel that is multithreaded? Is the threading facility provided by the kernel that has been improved (which the article above implies)? That Vista can fully use multi-core machines is pure PR talk to me. THere is no such a thing as Fully use multiple core/cpus. At some point resources need to be shared and tasks will get serialized.

BTW, talking about the links, and twisting words... I'm the only one providing links to back up what I say..

Originally posted by n25philly

Originally posted by Acaeus

 

Originally posted by LiquidWolf

 

Originally posted by turnipz

"A similar (but a bit more specialized) term to DRM is Trusted Computing. The term is intentionally misleading. It does not try to improve the security of the user, but rather wants to ensure that the user can be “trusted”."

 

 

Interesting stuff with the DRM, im wondering what the vista fanboys here will say about it.

That I guess in the end it won't matter, companies will move to vista, because Microsoft pushes them to, and everyone else will do the same.

 

I think hackers/crackers/pirates will just have to work harder.

But everyone will move to Vista or the next OS. Support for XP will stop sometime. I never really liked clinging to the past just cause I felt things worked, just make your present and future better.

As for performance issues due to DRM, honestly I have not notice any. I read more about hollywood than software, but I figure they are close. Honestly it might use "precious" clock cycles, *GASP* but frankly many people don't care.

 

Agree, people will end up using vista, as I am. however, people here who run MMO clients *should* perhaps care about precious CPU cycles, specially if the new MMOS around the corner do use multiple cores.

lots of information here, many facts:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

He even goes into MS' rebuttal which was pretty much saying that apple OS does it too... BTW, MS does not deny they do DRM in Vista. And no it's NOT done on XP. You can, for example install 3rd party driver in XP! Echo cancellation isn't hindered in XP as it is in Vista (because of DRM).

Don't believe in opinions, read up and make up your own mind. In the end, it may very well be that you couldn't care less about DRM and vista will do great.

 

People have been digging out that link since before Vista was released and it's as big a crock of BS as it was then.  3rd party drivers are allowed because they are the biggest reason for crashes in XP.  Someone here mentioned "trusted platform", yet if anyone did any real research they would know that vista only uses Trusted platform for bitlocker.  People seriously need to stop with conspiracy theories and start living in reality.

You dispute a single point, why 3rd party drivers aren't allowed, giving your personal opinion of why, and then go ahead and claim that the whole huge article with many technical details is "crock of BS."

For whoever is interested, this is Microsoft's Official "rebuttal:" http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/20/windows-vista-content-protection-twenty-questions-and-answers.aspx

"Will Windows Vista content protection features increase CPU resource consumption?

Yes.  However, the use of additional CPU cycles is inevitable..."

Note that the question was specific about "content protection features" and the answer was "yes."

BTW, what the hell is multithreading in a OS?! Are you referring to that Vista can use multiple cores? So can XP, and every other OS nowadays! Processes are given cpu cyles by the kernel scheduler and if the OS can use multiple cores then so can its scheduler. Multithreading is a single process concept (single program). A game, for example, can be multithreaded or not, depending on design.

If a game (like EQ2) is single-threaded, there is nothing Vista (or nay OS) can do to magically make it multithreaded. The application has to be modified to be made multithreaded.

Originally posted by LiquidWolf

 

Originally posted by turnipz

"A similar (but a bit more specialized) term to DRM is Trusted Computing. The term is intentionally misleading. It does not try to improve the security of the user, but rather wants to ensure that the user can be “trusted”."

 

 

Interesting stuff with the DRM, im wondering what the vista fanboys here will say about it.

That I guess in the end it won't matter, companies will move to vista, because Microsoft pushes them to, and everyone else will do the same.

 

I think hackers/crackers/pirates will just have to work harder.

But everyone will move to Vista or the next OS. Support for XP will stop sometime. I never really liked clinging to the past just cause I felt things worked, just make your present and future better.

As for performance issues due to DRM, honestly I have not notice any. I read more about hollywood than software, but I figure they are close. Honestly it might use "precious" clock cycles, *GASP* but frankly many people don't care.

Agree, people will end up using vista, as I am. however, people here who run MMO clients *should* perhaps care about precious CPU cycles, specially if the new MMOS around the corner do use multiple cores.

lots of information here, many facts:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

He even goes into MS' rebuttal which was pretty much saying that apple OS does it too... BTW, MS does not deny they do DRM in Vista. And no it's NOT done on XP. You can, for example install 3rd party driver in XP! Echo cancellation isn't hindered in XP as it is in Vista (because of DRM).

Don't believe in opinions, read up and make up your own mind. In the end, it may very well be that you couldn't care less about DRM and vista will do great.

Originally posted by Fadedbomb

 

Originally posted by Acaeus

I am running Vista 64 on a Q6600 with 4gb of RAM just because I had to buy a second windows and didn't want to buy another XP. My wife has to run XP on her (originally loaded with Vista) notebook so it got our XP copy. It's not bad OS and does a few things better than XP (mostly GUI related).

Now, I hear a lot of clueless people saying that Vista is going through what XP went through when it first came out. That is not the case!

Vista wastes resources (as in CPU/MEM) by doing a LOT of DRM-related  things which are, of course, not in the users' best interest. In other words, Vista wastes CPU cycles to watch what you are doing!

If you want details, or proof, go ahead and google vista DRM. You will find lots of links. Microsoft response to this is, if you you ignore the PR gibberish, "apple does it too."

How one feels about DRM and piracy is irrelevant IMO. What this is about is Vista wasting your hardware resources 9that you paid for) by constantly checking on DRM-related things. This is why Vista just cannot ever be faster than XP.

I have DRM disabled, along with 20 other background vista processes that a home user has ZERO use for, that is otherwise ALWAYS running. Nearly everything is able to be disabled and customized by the user if they have minimal information about it.

 

I built a self-help computer noob-friendly help forum, however apparently it's not been very popular :D. Somehow people have "more helpful" websites to help them, yet I continue to see ignorance around vista and software/computer components on a daily basis yet they claim these other websites that are disorganized to hell help them with ALL they need.

You must be talking about something else, DRM cannot be disabled. It's an intrinsic part of Vista (in the Kernel) and the ability to disable it would make the whole concept of DRM a moot point.

There is no DRM process! It's not a process. It's built in in the kernel, and watches many tasks. DRM is, for example, why Vista will NOT accept 3rd party drivers for hardware it doesn't "support." Because, theoretically, this hardware could be used to bypass DRM.

I am running Vista 64 on a Q6600 with 4gb of RAM just because I had to buy a second windows and didn't want to buy another XP. My wife has to run XP on her (originally loaded with Vista) notebook so it got our XP copy. It's not bad OS and does a few things better than XP (mostly GUI related).

Now, I hear a lot of clueless people saying that Vista is going through what XP went through when it first came out. That is not the case!

Vista wastes resources (as in CPU/MEM) by doing a LOT of DRM-related  things which are, of course, not in the users' best interest. In other words, Vista wastes CPU cycles to watch what you are doing!

If you want details, or proof, go ahead and google vista DRM. You will find lots of links. Microsoft response to this is, if you you ignore the PR gibberish, "apple does it too."

How one feels about DRM and piracy is irrelevant IMO. What this is about is Vista wasting your hardware resources 9that you paid for) by constantly checking on DRM-related things. This is why Vista just cannot ever be faster than XP.

30 is the new 20.

In other words, what you describe is what I felt when my Warlock hit 30s. Man! The difference in the rate of progression from the 10s, to the 20's, and then finally to the 30's is so dramatic it's not even funny.

That's why WoW is the popular game (no, I don't play WoW).

however, the most annoying thing IMO about EQ2 is the questing system. In WoW (to put it in perspective) you've got long, but fewer quests that give you meaningful rewards (specially exp wise). In EQ2, you've got many quests that give you little reward (specially exp wise). In the end, I end up not even following the lore of the quests.

BTW, I'm not playing any MMO at the moment (as my EQ2 subscription ended yesterday).

Our code (that I mentioned previously) here was (before my recent work) always multithreaded, in the same mold as EQ2 is. The heavy lifting was being done on a single thread while lesser independent tasks were being handled by different threads. This is not very optimal nowadays and claiming multithreading support in this case is, hmm, pushing. I see very little usage of the other cores on my box when running EQ2.

But, yes, the OS will utilize the other cores even if the app doesn't. Although, usually the OS binds the networking (and interrupts) to the same core the app is running, to avoid heavy context switching.

Nadia, then I stand corrected and it could indeed be one of the "features" or method that is causing problems. However, the fact that it appears it isn't something EQ2 dev team can fix, isn't really a good thing. They can complain, they can ask NVIDIA to look at it, but in the end it's a dependency.

BTW, I can play EQ2 fine regardless of settings (high Quality) without any performance problems. After 30-45 though, the stuttering starts and once it does, game over.

You guys are thinking now, but aren't thinking about a few months from now.

Multi-threading and multi-core are the future of computing, by necessity rather than desire. We've been hit here the same way, our (networking) code was single-threaded and I've been working on a MT version of it for the past well several months.

I have a quad (Q6600 g0 $230) OCed to 3ghz at home and it runs all games just fine. Plus, I know that it is as "future proof" as you can get with computers. In fact, I decided to invest on the CPU more so than on the GPU (got a budget 8600GTS) cause I think GPUs degrade in value more quickly and should be upgraded more often. Anyway, new games will be heavily multithreaded, instead of using a single main loop, they will use several main loops (worker thread design), or separate tasks in different threads. THere are several design options.

Back to the topic, perhaps we should have a disclaimer here saying that EQ2 DOES NOT work with the NVIDIA 8xxx cards! It's a piece of information I certainly could've used before buying the game. In fact, this "we hope nvidia fixes it" bit I heard lately isn't that great. It just creates a dependency. And even if it is NVIDIA's fault, perhaps EQ2 is doing something unorthodox that other games aren't doing.

This whole this isn't so much a performance issue.

I went budget on the GPU (didn't like 8800 prices then) and got a quad OCed to 3ghz. The 8600GTS, despite of what I've read, works great with current games which includes EQ2.

HOWEVER, EQ2 has an issue with 8xxx NVIDIA cards. NO MATTER WHAT THE SETTINGS ARE (I can run the game fine on high), after 45min or so playing, the stuttering starts. They are little freezes, every second or so, more often during combat. The game pretty much gets into a slide show. When that happens, the only thing that will fix it is to exit to the desktop and run the game again (selection char screen won't fix it) . Once the stuttering starts, lowering the settings won't make a difference either.

This can either be an NVIDIA driver problem (unlikely since EQ2 is the only game with problems), or an EQ2 bug/design issue with NVIDIA 8xxx drivers (very likely). it could even be a multi-core issue with the drivers or even a leak here and there that eventually hits a threshold  (which would explain why it only happens after the game is running for a while). * All guesswork on my part as I have no idea about the code or its design.

Originally posted by Teiman

Hello Acaeus

1. We don't know what kind of settings each screenshot/video was using. WoW uses a VERY simple graphics engine that doesn't scale well with better GPU. In other words, if you run a 8600gts or a 8800gts, the game would look about the same in WoW. Perhaps the performance and max res won't be the same, but the game will look the same. There are many effects that certain GPUs allow that must be detected and used by the GX engine. most engines don't do that cause it'd be writing several engines (work wise).

If a engine not scale, is a bug. If your engine spawn more particles at 60 FPS than at 30FPS, is a bug.  No?  And theres the OpenGL stuff to autodetect extensions. Most engines don't autodetect extensiones?
 

It's not so much about detecting them, it's about properly using them. To use them, the software, the game engine, must be written in a way to do the same things in many different ways, depending on the extensions (as you call them) detected. That's a lot more work to developers, which means increased costs. My point being, some may be OK with those costs others may not. Don't know how Mythic/EA stands on this.

Sweeney (below) mentions, simplistically, GPU power only, but it isn't just the FPSes that the card can put out (as some may believe).

Part of an interview of Unreal creator Tim Sweeney:

TG Daily: You have to admit, the margin is obviously there.

Sweeney: Agreed. But it is very important not to leave the masses behind. This is unfortunate, because PCs are more popular than ever. Everyone has a PC. Even those who did not have a PC in the past are now able to afford one and they use it for Facebook, MySpace, pirating music or whatever. Yesterday’s PCs were for people that were working and later playing games. Even if those games were lower-end ones, there will always be a market for casual games and online games like World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft has DirectX 7-class graphics and can run on any computer. But at the end of the day, consoles have definitely left PC games behind.

TG Daily: In other words: Too big?

Sweeney: Yes, that is huge difference. If we go back 10 years ago, the difference between the high end and the lowest end may have been a factor of 10. We could have scaled games between those two. For example, with the first version of Unreal, a resolution of 320x200 was good for software rendering and we were able to scale that up to 1024x768, if you had the GPU power. There is no way we can scale down a game down by a factor of 100, we would just have to design two completely different games. One for low-end and one for high-end.
That is actually happening on PCs: You have really low-end games with little hardware requirements, like Maple Story. That is a $100 million-a-year business. Kids are addicted to those games, they pay real money to buy [virtual] items within the game and the game.


TG Daily: Broken down, that means today’s mainstream PCs aren’t suitable for gaming?

Sweeney: Exactly. PCs are good for anything, just not games.

More here: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36390/118/

I have no opinions about WAR graphics right now because of a few reasons:

1. We don't know what kind of settings each screenshot/video was using. WoW uses a VERY simple graphics engine that doesn't scale well with better GPU. In other words, if you run a 8600gts or a 8800gts, the game would look about the same in WoW. Perhaps the performance and max res won't be the same, but the game will look the same. There are many effects that certain GPUs allow that must be detected and used by the GX engine. most engines don't do that cause it'd be writing several engines (work wise).

however, certain graphics' engines may scale up better with better GPU. So, if GPU is pixel shader capable, or T&L in hardware, the game could look and feel entirely different. Even animation would be affected if some of the rendering is offloaded to the GPU... Do we know which kind of GFX engine WAR uses? Does it scale up well and uses specific GPU capabilities?

2. When the code is in beta, the code is running in debug mode, with ASSERTs enabled. This means, that the focus is to catch corner cases, crashes, and/or invalid data in certain points in the code and provide good information about them when thay happen. This doesn't come for free, which means the code in debug mode will run a lot slower which in turn does affect performance, and specifically animation.

3. Due to #2, textures used in beta may not be final. Besides, a lot of optimizations and final touches will be done before launch.

Originally posted by ciryx2k

My wife and I played EQ2 right when it came out.  We had some issues with it and left for WoW.  Well, time has passed, I haven't played WoW in a year (and my wife only played it for 2 months, she hates WoW).  We've tried other MMO's but nothing's really caught our interest.  We're considering trying EQ2 again, but have some questions.

 

Can you solo from start to cap?  This is a big thing for us, we don't have much time to play and really can't afford to stand around looking for a group.

How quickly can you progress through levels with a small amount of play (10 hours or so per week)?  Like I said, we don't have much time between work and kids, but we'd like to feel like we're accomplishing something.

Do you accumulate "rest" xp like in WoW.  I think I remember it doing so from back in '05, but that's 3 years ago and I can't remember.

Is travel any easier now?  I remember that going from zone to zone could be a bit of a time-sync.

How is the economy?  Are things affordable for someone of a level that would use them, or has it gotten like WoW (You'll be 15 levels past an item before you can afford it on the AH).  Since we don't get much time to play, we can't spend a lot of time grinding just for coin.

Can you quest your way through most of the levels?  We both HATE mindless level grinding.

 

Thank you in advance for any help or answers you can give.

Others can better talk about leveling as my *very* casual warlock is only 28 now... :) I reroll a lot (picky about char names), btw.

I will prob be the diff opinion here concerning quests. I thought questing in WoW was a lot better. Fewer quests with better rewards (exp and items) while in EQ2, you've got a lot more quests for worse rewards (most of the time i don't even bother with the lore).

Traveling is as bad as before, zone layout doesn't help much here. perhaps the expansions help a bit (I'm still debating whether to get them or not), but certain zones are blatant time sinks. As in, there are "natural" (even though they feel artificial) barriers that make you go this or that way, or track back a lot.

Griffons towers are located in odd places, like middle of the zones, far from the entrances.

IMO traveling is much better in WoW.

Leveling and soloing is greatly improved, that's why I play EQ2 (and the diversity in classes, races, etc).

Originally posted by openedge1

 

 

Example...not only is the ram important, but CPU speed as well. Do not trust your CPU's stated Ghz unless you physically see it, thanks to the new dual Core model speed ratings. Example..I have an E6600...which is rated for 2.8 Ghz...all well and good...but, each CORE was running at only 1.9Ghz...seems some FSB issue was causing problems. As well, a 3 Ghz core is the best speed for the game...so if possible, make sure what you buy is running that PER CORE...

I also have an 8800GT...but, there are noted issues with hitching and stalling gameplay after it has been run several times. Requires a reboot to get it back to running normal..

So, research, and tweaking is sorely needed...and we can only hope they will make some engine adjustments down the road

Thanks

That is incorrect! A 3ghz dual core CPU is 3ghz on both cores equally. There is no splitting of power (there is some sharing of other thinggs which is beyond our scope here).

Uh...correct?

 

Note my highlighted sentence...lol

Yes...the FSB issues were speed step issues. Come to find out, I needed to change FSB speed, multiplier and turn OFF C2E and EIST to get my CPU recognized properly...probably the motherboards problem (a 680i chipset)...not sure...

I am sorry that you thought I was saying that the CPU is marked incorrectly...

Thanks

If you are not stressing your CPU (not being used) you do want the clock speed and multiplier to be lowered. It saves power and lowers CPU and overall temps. Just make sure when you look (run CPU core software) you have something running to stress your CPU - such as prime software that can stress all cores.