Server capacity AO vs EQ?

[Xephydes]

I'll admit right away, that knowledge about server bandwidth, capacity and such isn't my strongest field, but here we go:

I have never played EverQuest myself, but only seen a friend play. I was stunned when he was doing a raid with his guildies, "only" (as he said) 45 at that one moment... 45? Last time I saw 45 people in a zone in AO I thought "Hello Slideshow! Oh, LD again".

What's the main difference, does anyone know? Is this something impossible to implement for Funcom, or is it an investment of several millions to get the proper hardware? Just curious...

Xeph

[________Blue Kominto]

I'm not a hardware guru but I don't think this is fundementally a hardware issue. First of all, you have to understand that EQ is organized differently from AO. In EQ, the game consists of discreet zones arranged tile-like next to each other. You can only move from one zone to a neighboring one at specified points. The AO environment is much more "free form", you can move between several adjacent areas without zoning. For that reason when you do a list of players in AO it isn't necessarily covering the same amount of area as a typical EQ zone.

Second, the population of EQ zones can vary drastically. While it is not uncommon to see 50 or 60 people in the most popular zones, there are MANY zones in the game that rarely have more than about of half dozen people in them, and most of them are just passing through. Players in EQ typically gain most of their experience by hunting in outdoor zones, and most of them gravitate to a relatively small number of popular zones to do so. In contrast, at any given time a significant portion of the players on an AO server are doing missions, and hence not even part of the main game environment.

Having 45 people in a zone may sound like a good idea, but in practice it is often a pain because there are only a finite number of good camping / pulling locations in any given zone, and in the popular ones players are falling over each other trying to claim them. Also, there are only so many mobs to go around, and the competition to get them can get pretty intense. One of the biggest sources of arguments in EQ is one group complaining that another group "stole" their pull. On balance I personally think I prefer the AO method.

[Toxinator]

This is a large problem in NW ... Major lag at any battle... it makes the game unplayable

[________________Cado]

Actually, I think the main differences is that AO uses the overdraw methos of rendering the players and environment, whereas EQ only renders what is seen.

This gives AO an edge in how good things look, but also takes more rendering power.

Also, in EverQuest you have a fewer number of unique armor types / weapon models than in AO which makes for a smaller amount of textures / Models to be used.

Also, when you zone into a zone in EQ, ALL of the graphics / Textures is preloaded into RAM. And their zones are often smaller than AO zones.

So basically, since AO uses Overdraw and Texture Load on Demand methods, we gain much larger environments, but at a loss to rendering speed.

And that's where we have most of our lag.
Framerate Lag.



Also, a lot of EQ people run with old character models, which are much, much simpler than the new ones and do not take a lot of power to render.
They also turn off spell effects and dynamic lightning and stuffs.

I should know, because that's what I did myself when I was on EQ raids.

[Hierus]

Good point on graphic lag , but ...

3 types of lag can happen, graphic , network and serverside.

Problem is in missions we get alot of serverlags, what is simple shames funcom, and noone else. In EQ server lag way more rare thing, and EQ servers basically can load more players, 70-80 w/o much lag. Mobs warping in AO, cant cast nano in few circumstances, etc. FC cant guarantee at the moment a stabil, always working, predicatble playing environment.

FC should work hadrly on lag solving, and not bringing (weakly tested) new contents.