Game Update 53 – Shaders Update

Rothgar brings us an update on Game Update 53. The EQ2 Team wants to get Gu53 on the test server soon, to allow 1 full month of testing. However Shaders 3.0 won’t be ready within the next few days. As a result, Shaders 3.0 are slipping to Gu54 expected in November.

If you attended our last Fan Faire or have been following the forums you’ve probably heard about a major overhaul to the EverQuest II rendering engine where we are upgrading all of our existing shaders from version 1.x to version 3.0.

This upgrade will result in a performance gain for many of you with a Shader 3.0 compliant graphics card.  In addition, you’ll notice a visual improvement in just about everything from zone geometry to character armor.

This is an enormous undertaking that Ryan “Imago-Quem” Favale has been devoting nearly all of his time to for the past several months.  Ryan has shown an amazing level of commitment to this feature and has spent countless nights and weekends working his way through the shader system.  Not only does this upgrade involve the conversion of thousands and thousands of shader files, but we’ve had to modify existing art tools, create new tools and maintain backwards compatibility with the old system.  In addition, each shader must be individually tested by our QA department.

At Fan Faire we announced that this upgrade would go live with Game Update 53 which is just around the corner.  Unfortunately I’m here to let you know that we will be pushing this upgrade back to Game Update 54.  We always hate to push a feature back after we’ve announced it but we feel that this is the best thing for the game overall.  We are making a new commitment to quality and want this feature to be everything that we’ve promised.  Simply put, we need a little more time to complete the conversion and make sure that its as bug-free as possible.  The work is almost completed and we’re very excited about it.

On another note, Game Update 53 is still packed with lots of great content and features that I’m sure you’ll love.  We have a new raid zone coming, auto-mentoring, the new achievement system and so much more.

We’re also aware that some of you are still experiencing client crashes.  The latest version of the client will be delivered to the Test Server within a few days and we expect that some of these issues should be resolved.  Game Update 53 will be available on the Test Server almost a full month before it’s scheduled to go live.  We’ll be listening to your feedback very closely and making sure any new issues are looked into right away.

Again, I’m sorry to have to ask you to wait a little longer on the Shader 3.0 upgrade.  We feel strongly that something of this magnitude should get the time and attention it deserves to be perfect.

Thanks for your understanding and most of all thanks for continuing to play EQII!