Neefwindle

Does anyone know if they are going to ever redo the hairstyles and make some adjustments to the character models to improve their looks? Some characters look nice, yet others look pretty bad...

Something else I thought was odd.... it seems like games such as Half Life 2 ( came out around the same time as eq2) have better graphics in some cases, and make excellent use of shaders/reflections yet that game plays as smooth as silk... I wish I could get that kind of performance out of eq2 as it is a good game at the core... anyways thanks for listening to my blathering and ramblings!

Neef

Diknak

They have made comments about the hair styles and they said that they had no plans to redo them or add more, but who knows if that will ever change. I could see them adding styles that you can purchase through station cash. HL2 is an excellent example of a very efficient game engine. The difference is that they saw the trends of hardware coming and they developed around that. SOE failed to see the changes and assumed that CPU processing would continue to dominate over the GPU. The EQ2 engine is close to 10 years old and while they are making minor efficiency modifications, I doubt it will ever be as efficient as HL2. I don't think that they will ever make any changes to character models. It would not be received well if people logged into a character they have grown to know over 4 years and it suddenly looked completely different.

Sulan

You really can't fairly compare an MMO type game with a FPS type of game in terms of performance. They are completely different beasts. A FPS level is a much more controlled environment. That being said, EQ2's performance is still way behind where it should be on most machines, entirely due to poor early design decisions.

Incidentally, Vanguard runs off of a FPS game engine and utilizes SpeedTree, which was used in Oblivion among many others, and still manages to run like ass.

gungo

Hair textures are on the engine devs short list of things to add. So if it comes out well enough I am sure it will incorporate into the playdoh hair textures.

Ariilia

Playdoh textures period pretty much :p

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kanolth

So I just watched the new shader 3.0 video. Looks like they're going around revamping the old world art, that or the old world art already had all the data to work with and all they needed to do was create the new/modify the old shaders for it all.

Either way, it makes Nek look pretty spectacular.

Diknak

Yeah, it looks pretty badass. It is a combo of both actually. They are changing the shader system but several textures are being modified to use the system to its full capacity.