Hey Funcom....I really like this game. Alot....really I do. Which I why I'm still playing it.
Because to tell you the truth, if EQ, AC or DAoC had this much LAG I would have quit them without a word.
So I've been tearing apart your technical forum...trying to find a cure...and everything I've tried yields no results.
Your RECOMMENDED system specs are as follows:
Pentium II 450 256 Mb RAM 3D card with 32MB RAM, DirectX 8X CD-ROM drive 1GB free hard drive space Internet connection, 56K Modem
My current system specs are as follows
Pentium III 550 512 Mb of RAM, Nvidia Geforce 3 Ti 64MB RAM, Direct X 9, 52X DVD-ROM, and roughly 60gb free hard drive space, with a Wireless Broadband connection
Now, while my processor is by no means a super computer, it seems to exceed your games RECOMMENDED requirements by a whole VERSION of processor architecture and 150 mhz of processor capability.
I've even tried this game with clean installs of Win989SE and fresh installs of all the latest drivers for my hardware AND DX9.
And every time I play (and I play on Rimor too...I could barely MOVE on Atlantean) I lag...and its not internet lag...its not packet loss. Its hardware based.
I've met -one- person in AO that claims they never see any lag. This person has the good fortune to own a 2.0 ghz Pentium 4 computer with 1ghz of PC233 DDR RAM, and a Geforce 4 128 MB RAM video card.
Now, I don't mind a bit of lag here and there. I can stand low fps if the situation warrants it. But I walk around a corner in Rome Blue an if theres 3 people standing there....the whole game stutters and freezes for about 10 milliseconds while all the "lauded" armor skinning loads.
If I zone into a zone with alot of signs....I stutter and freeze for a random amount of time until all the visible textures load.
If I come out of a store, I freeze for 20 - 30 milliseconds while the WHOLE city reloads around me.
And GOD FORBID I might need to go to Omni-1 Trade. I might as well step into the Whompah...and then go make a sandwich. That zone takes at the LEAST 4 minutes to load every time I go into it. And then due to the density of the people at the Trade statue...even on Rimor...I stutter and freeze for another four minutes while everything "lauded" loads up.
Now. Color me stupid here if you like. Since I don't know your file formats...but after some investigation of the AO folder it seemed to me that theres absolutely NO folder with zones in it. Like I said, I don't know enough about your file structure, so its entirely possible that you've got 20 or 30 files in there with script information to let my computer build the geometry and then your server supplies the textures.
But to me...it seems like a MASSIVE bite could be taken out of the lag in the game if you allowed for texture caching.
That seems to be the biggest cause of hardware based lag in AO that I can identify, because every time I stutter and freeze, its because I've stepped out of a mission...or a sparsely populated store, and the game seems to be loading everything around me from scratch even though I was just in that area within at least an hour. And its always the worst in the cities...where the close buildings are cutting off MASSIVE parts of my view and should be REDUCING my video cards GPU processing load because it only has to draw what it can see.
I don't really understand this lag at all. Yes its alot better than the Open Beta was...because I gave that a shot and was horribly dissapointed when I did (cause back then AO really looked good). And lately, having grown tired of my EQ and DAoC accounts, I came back and found the game to be massively improved....but still plagued with this one annoying issue.
I bought this software, I didn't download it. As I said earlier, color me stupid...but I felt it was worth the risk. I've -never- had this kind of hardware based lag with any game I've bought that my system specs were in excess of its recommended specs.
And sure...I'll eventually upgrade my computer. But I shouldn't have to have a 2.0ghz processor to run a game thats supposedly best run on a 6 year old system spec. What I've got right now should handle it.
And this box ran Everquest just FINE...even after the Luclin expansion which was a major engine upgrade that alot of people couldn't use fully until about 18 patches later.
Not saying "FIX THIS NOW OR I QUIT", just saying there are some very well established ways of reducing these kind of performance hits and texture caching is the easiest way to do it. Yeah the first few times I hit zones it might be slow...but after I've been to them once...their loading times loading in, and just moving around in them will be alot easier because the textures will be resident locally out of memory...which at this time does not seem to be the case.