Feldon If there’s one thing that SmokeJumper wants us to know about the EQ2 team right now, it’s that they are more motivated and focused than they have been for some time now.
There are some truly ambitious plans (public and rumored) to bring us new raid and group content in the next two major Game Updates. If they launch in a solid condition it could go a long way to working on the sustainability of the playerbase who have traditionally moved on to other things a few months after each expansion, only to return when raids are added, for holiday events, or for the subsequent expansion.
In any programming, scope creep will kill ya, and as we’ve discussed in the past the original plan for Shaders (a graphical bump for high-end cards) evolved into something entirely different (a rewrite of the entire shader pipeline to revamp Shader 1 AND add Shader 3). It did not help that art assets continued to be turned in long after Shaders 3 had been adopted which were only Shader 1-ready, leading to hours of chasing bugs and very public hotfixes. Time that could have been spent polishing up Shaders 3 in older zones, including numerous house items which displayed poorly. Shader 3 has many advantages when it works well, but there are just too many problems for it to be a realistic option for many players.
From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:
The passion to develop this game and make it even better is at an all-time high right now and SOE is supporting this game strongly. We have one of the largest dev teams in the company, and our product slate for the year is going to be tremendous. I know it’s easy to be negative, because that way you can never be disappointed, but sheesh folks, really. You’ve got a really solid dev team here and every single one of us wants the game to get better and better.
Regarding Shader 3.0, we’re shifting some resources around to start tackling it again, but there are many issues still left to address. It’s going to take some time. Just a warning that it won’t get fixed tomorrow or anything.
take your time I don’t mind running this game on the lowest settings possible I just know that I’ll be buying a much more powerful comp really meant for my 3D modeling (Maya, Rhino3D etc.) but take your time I won’t be able to get a new comp that will be able to possibly run this game at better settings till GU61 or around that time I believe so having to wait for something good is fine by me.
And many players want better systems for this game and there are a lot of other MMO’s out there but I just love this game from time to time I do have frustrations but I always keep sticking with the game.
I’ll be looking forward to seeing these awesome new additions to the game whatever they may be just make sure y’all take your time so it’ll be worth the wait!
Shaders 3 in it’s current state is ridiculous on Radeon cards, dirt paths look like waxed floors. Pillars of Flame isn’t intended to look like a waxed roller rink with polished walls. I haven’t complained though, it seems minor compared to other things that need attention.
SJ came in with EQ2X and I pegged him as the axe man coming in to streamline things and cut expenses regardless of subscriber cost so they could fund their next project. He’s been sounding more and more like a reasonable producer trying to be helpful though, so we’ll have to see what happens.
A few things to comment, firstly I believe Smokejumper is a great producer when it comes to managing the team, his team have delivered a lot of content/changes which is a hallmark of a well run developer team, so when he says he will move onto it in future I believe him.
Secondly though I think shader 3.0 is critical to the future of EQ2’s graphical engine. Every development they make to it both increases the graphical quality (attracting new players/refreshing the game for current players) and graphical speed.
The plan has to be to ditch 1.0 and move to 3.0 somepoint, because no hardware has been produced for 1.0 for ~9 years now.
So I believe Smokejumper when he says he will move resources to the problem, but I just wish that higher up in SOE they reformed their thinking of their MMO’s in general and swapped from a business model that generates a series of one off MMO’s to the longterm brand style view that WoW and Eve have taken with their games where Eve is probably on Eve 3 of the game now, but with all the original players kept on.
Essentially I think shader 3.0 isn’t a 100 person problem to solve, nor is it a 1 man project (which seems to have especially happened under Brenlo).
Perhaps SOE can start moving their GPU specialists onto the problem after all these new MMO’s have launched, especially since the PS3 based MMO’s will have no graphical improvements possible to them since they’re running on 4 year old unchanging hardware.
Meanwhile I’m looking forward to seeing what they are cooking up with the lighting improvements, there have been rumours of big performance improvements. But I do hope this isn’t another system that relies on the old shader 1.0 architecture.
“issues left to address” translation: SoE took my staff?