Improve graphical settings such as viewable distance?

[Wizardling]

G'day.

Is there any way to improve the viewable distance, and while I'm asking - any other graphical settings, beyond the settings I find inside EverQuest Titanium's Options->Display tab?

I miss seeing everything right to the horizon (assuming fog allows). But I suppose that isn't very classic, and may even be cheating? I don't know. Advice? Is it even possible, regardless?

TIA :-)

[myriverse]

Only what's available in the Options.

[phacemeltar]

would have to write a new client in order to get some of these changes (increased view distance) because of the limitations of 1999 software. tbh, the outdoor zones in this game arent big enough to make good use of a greater view-distance, and i think you would be disappointed.

[Wizardling]

Ok, thanks for the confirmation :-)

[dealicious]

actualy playing with the sky files allow you to make you see a lot further, i know cause ive done it

[myriverse]

Sky doesn't affect sight range. I've tried.

[doacleric]

Max clipping plane is set on the server side on a zone by zone basis. Distance fog was introduced with the DX9 client back in like 2004 and there is no way to really get rid of it.

[Wizardling]

No, I like the fog - I'd hate to return to the stupid state of live where zones like Surefall have giant trees with no top (because the fog hid them, so they never added the tops, in order to reduce complexity). Plus I find it quite atmospheric at times. I just wanted to see further in already clear zones, if possible.

[talian21]

to get max view, change 3 things:

in options|display, the clipping plane slider should be set to max
the LOD bias slider should be set to max
under dispay page|advanced (I think) the actor clip plane slider set to max

that will max range all you can see

[Grimjaw]

uhh sounds like u just need to max out all ur clip planes. U can already see waay to far just buy doing that.

[Brynnag]

why would you want to see more of those horrible looking trees

[Wizardling]

I've a thing for pixelated scenery. What can I say - I'm one sick puppy.

[Wizardling]

uhh sounds like u just need to max out all ur clip planes. U can already see waay to far just buy doing that.

Yeah, like I said - I was curious whether there was a way to extend my view beyond the settings in Options->Display tab.

[Haynar]

Yeah, like I said - I was curious whether there was a way to extend my view beyond the settings in Options->Display tab.
Is it classic to be able to see further? I have been learning to tweak some of that. Might be able to increase range of the clip plane.

H

[a_gnoll_pup]

Can confirm that clip planes work different in DX8/DX7 than they do in DX9.

Basically, Haynar, the clip plane is more akin to a 'fog effect' when sky is set to 0, which is emulated in DX9 already. However, the clip plane also applies to zones that have a zsky != 0 titanium where as in older clients I can find no evidence of this happening.

Basically, if the sky setting in the NewZone_Struct is set to 1 or higher, clip plane should not be shown for geometry settings. It should only be shown if it is 0.

Additionally, the titanium client has something called the 'actor clip plane', which causes NPCs to drop their animation past the clip plane, and beyond double the distance, disappear entirely. The client has an artificial limit that you can hex edit to remove, and have NPCs show up and move at any distance, which is how the functionality is in the EQMac client (in DX7/DX8, the actor clip plane did not exist.)

Hope that clears some stuff up - the first is a server code change, the latter is a client setting.

[Wizardling]

I'd love to alter the actor clip plane most of all, really. I want to see mobs as far off as possible, but the jerkiness when they're close enough to draw, but not to animate is immersion breaking.

[talian21]

Hey gnollpup, could you be more specific with your hexedit pls? It really annoys me the mobs moving w/o animation at range; I'd really like to change that, ruins my immersion to see griffs/sphinx's "flying" around w/o flapping, etc.

[Grimjaw]

I don't know the technical side of it, but what I do know is you could NEVER see this far on live, regardless of all settings cranked, etc, the environment would fade out. on P1999 for example you can stand in the middle of EC, look north and see 1 zone wall, look south and see the opposite zone wall. This NEVER happened on live and made the world feel much larger.,


again, instead of seeing mobs "standing still", we shouldn't even be seeing that far to begin with.

[Haynar]

I have been looking at differences between dx7/8 and dx9. They just flat out changed the range on some params for no logical reason.

Maybe will play with actor clip plan some.

Whats sad, is I understood everything Secrets said.

Dug around in client way too much lately.

H

[phacemeltar]

The client has an artificial limit that you can hex edit to remove

i might win noob of the day here, but what sort of software do i use to check out this code?
it should all be compressed in an s3d file?
so what do most devs use to view the values?

[Zaela]

i might win noob of the day here, but what sort of software do i use to check out this code?
it should all be compressed in an s3d file?
so what do most devs use to view the values?

A disassembler. (OllyDBG is the go-to free one, better ones cost money.)

Would not be in the s3d's/graphics files -- that's just data. Would need to look in the client executable itself, or its graphics DLLs maybe.

If you don't have a general idea of what assembled machine instructions look like, don't bother.

[Haynar]

Some of the disassemblers are very pricey. I like ida pro with hexrays so i can view the pseudo c code too.

H

[Wizardling]

In the meantime I suppose the only thing to be done is to reduce the distance _everything_ is drawn at. I don't understand why they made the maximum actor clip plane less than the maximum overall clip plane setting.

So what were the precise settings in classic for clipping planes? Perhaps it would be more fun to go for a more fully classic experience, than my original goal, which now seems impractical, and annoying with immersion breaking results.

I don't suppose anyone kept their old eqclient.ini files from Kunark/Velious days with max graphical settings enabled, so we could take a look?