GU56: Shaders 3.0 are Here!

Upgrading a 9 year old game engine to support a feature it was never designed for is a daunting task. No-one knows that better than Ryan “Imago-Quem” who has been busting his butt since before Fan Faire 2009 to revamp the graphical pipeline of EverQuest 2 to support Shaders 3.0.

Why so late?

Months after Shaders 3.0 was announced and screen shots were demonstrated, a backlash of sorts occurred. Players had been clamoring not so much for better-looking graphics, but for more graphical bang-for-buck on existing hardware.

Most players must turn their graphics down to very basic settings just to group or raid. This is partly due to the inefficient Shaders 1.0 pipeline which was originally intended for powerful CPUs and weak graphics cards, and partly due to the even more inefficient Particles engine used by EQ2.

So mid-stream, the project was redefined to have two forks. One, an improvement in the graphical pipeline so that players who continue to use Shaders 1.0 would see smoother graphics. And two, players with high end graphics cards would be able to switch on Shaders 3.0 and see a marked improvement in existing and new surfaces throughout the game.

The appearance of the “nVidia – The way it’s meant to be played” branding did not go unnoticed in Game Update 55 (the expansion). Rumor is, nVidia were brought in to help test some unique issues presented by the antiquated EQ2 engine.

So as a result of this scope redefinition, Shaders 3.0 was pushed back from Game Update 53 to GU54, and then to the expansion (GU55), and finally to tomorrow’s Game Update 56.

The Right Tools

But a huge part of the work of getting this update online has been adding Shaders 3.0-compatible code to every single textured surface in existing worlds. And sometimes, it hasn’t been obvious problems like a missing texture (resulting in a wireframe or flat white or black shape) but more subtle differences, such as certain torch colors producing unexpected colors or effects.

It has been a tremendous undertaking and hopefully will all be worth it as all players see benefits, either in better performance, or richer graphics. Even with all this extra time, I would expect there to be cosmetic glitches here and there as those textures which have been missed get /bugged and fixed.

I still remember those iconic screen snapshots from Fan Faire, which showed the stark contrast between the bland, pea soup grey Nektulos Forest we have now, to the dark, foreboding inky blackness of a twisted forest, pierced by the light of a lone torch-bearing adventurer possible with Shaders 3.0. While not every zone will be a revelation with Shaders 3 switched on, I’m very excited to see just how Norrath looks with this fresh coat of paint.

EQ2’s artists and animators were given the necessary tools to build graphics for EQ2 that take advantage of both Shaders 1.0 and Shaders 3.0 prior to the expansion. so one can assume that Destiny of Velious will be designed to take full advantage of Shaders 3.0, and then backported to Shaders 1.0.

What’s Next?

Imago-Quem has been very open on the forums about what he hopes to do in the future for the EQ2 engine. Hopefully he has not lost any enthusiasm based on his experiences so far!

Ryan has shared many of his ideas with us, but the most likely seem to be a revamp of the aforementioned Particles, followed by a revamp of Skyboxes.

Particles is more complicated than it seems because apparently, particles are bound to the character and NPC models, rather than separate geometry. As a result, it is my understanding that to revamp particles will require rebuilding spell animations. That very rebuild was hinted as a feature of the Sentinel’s Fate expansion, but it was later revealed that this was a “we’d like to” rather than “it’s scheduled” situation.

Skyboxes are those swirling smudges of pixels that are supposed to look like a sky, clouds, etc. This is an area where EQ2 has been pretty much left in the dust by other games.

You can read more about Shaders 3.0 in Imago-Quem‘s Shaders 3.0 2010 FAQ.