Feldon Believe it or not, the hard work of bolting Shaders 3 onto the antiquated EQ2 engine is done.
What remains is polish and cleanup. With all the combinations of armor, weapons, and with as many zones as there are in EQ2, this final bug sweep must take place with the help of the player.
Players have been diligently posting screen shots and even videos demonstrating the numerous areas of the game including guild halls, armor sets, etc. where Shaders 3 stumbles — it’s too dark, it’s washed out, there are halos on objects, or the colors are just plain wrong.
Imago-Quem needs your help now to finish the last mile of the race so he can move onto upgrading other things in EQ2. Don’t give up or just accept that items and armor you worked hard to get won’t look right with Shaders 3 enabled, bug it, or post screenshots on the EQ2 Forums.
The one, and only, EQ2 Shader 3.0 developer here,
What I’m hearing from most of you is things are too dark, wrong colors, too shiny, blacked out, too slow, and crashing for some of you. These are exactly the things I am working on right now to make Shader 3 your preferred choice. The more of you I can make happy, the happier I am.
Right now I’m cleaning up the armor sets and environments that we missed in the months of testing (the game is HUGE). That means fixing the colors, the darkness, and the shininess on hundreds of objects and armor sets.
Based on all this feedback I’ll be sure to adjust the overall brightness of Shader 3 so you can see your game more clearly without adjusting the gamma and brightness (which in my opinion bleeds out the vibrancy I worked so hard to add).
I’m also working on a performance enhancement for Shader 3 that is looking nicely so far but it has to pass QA and run on Test for a bit before we are confident enough to ship it to Live.
For those of you who are getting crashes, please /bug your issue. We need to know your zone and location (/loc), hardware setup, game settings, character name and server so we can reproduce and fix these crashes. Right now I have ZERO crash bugs listed in my queue to fix, so send those in!
In addition to these updates I’ve submitted a fix for the driver forced AA feature using the r_aa_blit command. A fix is running through QA right now. Hopefully it passes and we can send it out to you Live shortly.
Please give Shader 3.0 a chance to mature just a little while longer. The game is massively huge and running it for months through our QA team and the Test servers just wasn’t enough to expose a few hundred corner cases out of hundreds of thousands of complex scenes full of differing weather conditions, armor sets, skins, visual settings, special effects, materials, and lighting effects throughout the game.
We are working hard to bring you a better experience and a continually improving game. Thank you all for your support.
Must be difficult sorting between all the Shaders 3.0 feedback they care about and all the complaints about the shitty Season 1 BG armor with no upgrade path that they choose to ignore.
Really though.. you should write an article about the massive amount of people complaining about Season 1 armor not costing Season 0 armor + some tokens. An article about how people who were the Battleground guinea pigs got screwed over.
I thought it was funny that last night … to a man … our whole raid force said they looked at the cliffs in Stonebrunt, thought that they looked like they were made out of shiny plastic, and all disabled Shaders 3.0 prior to raiding. The stone reminded me of my nephews plastic JI Joe playset.
Just have to say Imago-Quem seems to be one of the best Devs for working with players to get things fixed. It is this kind of dev that makes you want to work with them to get stuff fixed becuase you know the read your feedback, and respond. I have no problem dealing with some the issues and bugs becasue i know they are being activly worked on and feedback give will at lest be listion to.
This is what Dev commaaction and support should be.
WTB SC item for give that DEV a rais
Dunce i’m not faulting you in any way, glad you feel that your personal time spent debugging the game is worth it.
Myself, I’m really getting tired of all these problems, and they haven’t been little ones. I really wonder where all the money we pay them is going? It doesn’t feel as if it’s going to staff EQ2.
Battlegrounds mentioned above, now shaders, the last expansion (especially) and the one before that as well, it’s the same story over and over, help us debug the game. No we pay to play.
My personal time isn’t going to be spent helping take away a jobs, SOE should be paying people to do this. I’m not contributing to this anymore.
Honestly, the test server doesn’t have enough population to truly .. test. A large percentage of the bugs that roll over to Live are ones of scale – lag caused by # of players in a zone or the number of different services conflicting with others.
My solution: A limited number of FREE accounts that can ONLY access Test. They get people who wouldn’t normally play the game to play, and get testers… some of them might actually report bugs since that is where they’re playing, and not just logging in to check out the newest zones and mechanics to have a jump on the rest when it goes live.
Be upfront that customer support would be limited – don’t drain GM resources on free players, but accept some heavier load in order to reap the benefits of a smooth roll out of new material to the live servers – and keep the paying customers happier.
The work of Shader 3.0 is not even remotely done. It shouldn’t have been released live yet. The number of glitches, and crashes it causes even with brand hardware thats nearly the best on the market, means it is NOT ready.
I have no problem with SOE or the EQ2 Dev-team asking for my help as a player. You may say… Gawd why would you? I say its the only way Things get done right, and faster. Think about it for a second. Would you rather tell them what the problems are and let their skill and abilities to fix the problems, or wait for a smaller group/ population to do the fixes that you suffer years later?
As for the comment on the free account on Test. That’s a good idea, and should be looked into further by saying they should allow free transfers to test from other populated servers.