Wednesday, February 06, 2008

GU42 is now live!

GU42 went live today, and epic quests are creating a huge buzz. It's really cool to see so many people working together to try to figure it out. I'm anxious to work on the epic for my Guardian as well! But don't worry, I have no inside information and I'll be looking for the same spoilers online as everyone else. :) EQ2I 4tw!

I'll be interested to hear what people think of the Connection Stats window and the new Mannequins. There has been a bit of discontent on the forums about the mannequins already. I know that many people were hoping that the mannequins would actually store the item like a bank vault, but it doesn't work that way. I really do feel like the way we implemented mannequins is for the best for everyone. Solving the storage problem is a completely separate issue.

Since we introduced appearance items, people are starting to save old armor sets so they can wear them later on. This is creating a storage issue. I'd love to see some kind of wardrobe in your house that would allow you to store several armor sets by name and easily allow you to swap it with your existing appearance gear. This would make changing clothes a snap, and hopefully alleviate some of the storage problem. I've pitched the idea, but whether or not it happens is up to people above me. Sometimes ideas like these can lead to other solutions, so as I've mentioned before, there are no promises about any of this. But hopefully in the future we'll see some solution that will help with this issue.

On another note, I found an optimization a couple of days ago that will decrease the amount of database space we're using to save items and equipment. This obviously won't have any affect on players, but it feels good to find things like that. And any changes we can make to reduce disk usage or increase speed always helps.

7 comments:

Nick McLaren said...

Well done on the optimization thing! It does feel good to increase performance, even if only marginally. Coming from working in a performance DB company, I can tell you that those little tweaks really do add up! =)

Cheers,

Nick

Anonymous said...

I am wondering if you at SOE is going to do a major optimisation of EverQuest II soon? The game takes up way too much performance for what it looks like.

Greg Spence said...

We try to make optimizations at every opportunity. Performance is very important to us. In fact Autenil has been working during the past week to track down memory leaks in our servers. As far as a large revamp to the game client and rendering engine, nothing is planned at the moment.

Nick McLaren said...

You know, I feel the need to ask, since it seems you would be one of the right people to be able to answer.

Along the lines of optimization.. Is the EQ2 client yet taking advantage of Dual/Quad core CPUs at this point? Certainly you must be with the server components anyways.

With their becoming more and more prevailant, I would think this would be big scalability issue. I know originally the engine was built for maximum scalability, but that was at a time when CPUs had a single core and Moore's law was being applied to clock speed primarily in the PC CPU realm.

Since then clock speed has tapered off in favor of additional cores and 64-bit computing.

I also agree with Gabe Newell of VALVe software's recent statements that he believes that he believes the PC will begin moving towards a more homogeneous architecture with video rendering moving closer and closer to the main CPU vs. being a separate card altogether.

..forgive me if I ramble. I'm a somewhat verbose geek at times =)

Greg Spence said...

A dual core machine will certainly give a performance improvement over single core if only for the fact that the O/S will manage the load better. However, the resource manager in the client will make use of another thread for loading assets from the disk. I don't think we have plans for more at the moment. With EQ2 having started development over 4-5 years ago, it wasn't really designed with this in mind. So, retrofitting the client to make use of multiple cores is a time-consuming and risky prospect. This doesn't mean we might not find more ways to make use of it in the future though.

Anonymous said...

(( Hiyas Greg, Great work so far, Ive been reading through your blog and noticed that the lastest awesome changes have been your doing!!!

Great work on the ping window and other nice stuff!

I had a question about the GU42, regarding PvP... did you work on that coding at all for the pvp writs? Or is that a different group of programmers? o.O

Thanks in advance if you can satiate my curiosities hehe.

Have a great day and take care,

-S

Greg Spence said...

Thanks for the nice comments!

The PVP writs were probably created by one of our designers, but I'm not sure who unfortunately.