[wycca]

Originally Posted by One Tin Soldier [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I've tried to play in the last four tests and most of the time I can't even get into the game. The one time I did get in the lag was so bad I couldn't do anything. Admittedly I'm trying to run it on older PCs (two different ones). A friend of mine has had a similar experience.

Given the low end graphics (which I like so don't take that the wrong way) it seems like you shouldn't need a brand new, high end PC to play it.

I know it's still very early in the testing phase but it seems like something they might want to think about.

It may not matter for me in the long run though. If they stick to making the game as described in their FAQ I will be willing to buy a new PC just for this game. But not yet. After years of disappointment I have developed this nasty suspicious part of my mind that I can't quash entirely and it makes me worry that they might pull some kind of bait and switch trick. They seem like regular, down to earth guys so probably not but that suspicion still lurks in my mind.

Still, the more people who can run the game the more potential customers so, again, it might make sense to think about that.

I agree and performance is on our mind for sure.

It is low poly - yes. Model poly counts range from around P99 EQ up to actually pretty similar to WoW Vanilla. Most of our player models come in at around 800-900ish as a base, with attachments like ears, hair, belt, cloak, pouches, shoulders, backpack, held items, etc pushing them up to around 1100-1400ish, just depending on the mix/items. I think our npc models range from 60 (the wisp) to a special one (dragon) that's around 9000ish (they average closer to player models).

Despite all of that low poly stuff, there's some more modern things going on under the hood. Our textures are mostly authored at 2k (we display at 512). Our player gear visuals and mixing of them is handled on the models by shaders (pushing the limit of the api in fact). Much of the stuff behind the low poly & hand-painted textures is fairly advanced though in terms of lighting/shadows, water, etc. We have pretty much infinite draw distances - which looks great with some of our huge zones and we give you peeks at neighboring zones in our facades - such as a castle on a mountain that is 4 zone lines away. We have technical challenges few games face with some things - 100 lights in a scene may be a ton for many games - we've got to think about 1000 lights. Old EQ zones could handle 200-400 npcs roughly if I recall (depending on expansion in early EQ) - we have around 2500 and counting in a zone. Networking for player counts of a MMO-size is also not something many games have to deal with. Obviously that one is a particular focus right now. So low poly - yes. Low tech everywhere else - not necessarily like many might expect based on the poly count.

Some of the inspiration for our graphical mix described above can be found in some threads on this forum. Starting with some older render images (/wave toddfx), continuing through the various HQ texture packs and now all of those cool Unreal/Unity EQ takes. The team liked the feel of those sort of mixes, and we think it really brings to life the fantastic realism (our term) art style we're trying to capture.

So back to PC specs. Currently, the game is playable on both my ~2017-era laptop with an i5 (7th gen kaby lake) running at like ~3ghz boosted and a Geforce 1060 (75watts) at 1080p. I get around 20-55fps in an empty Night Harbor right now, depending where at in the city. I actually used it during this last weekend to help monitor CSR stuff on one server (I was logged in on multiple servers on different machines). I get 20-35fps on my M1 Macbook Air testbed laptop running the game via Crossover. All fairly low-spec nowadays and playable for a slower MMO. I have also dropped the resolution majorly on my i7 (12th gen) in my other laptop when I test run it on integrated graphics - its decently playable at a lower resolution at around 15-25fps in NH. GPU vram is around 2.6gb for our performance option vs about 3.1gb for our recommended option. Those with 3gb vram on cards are going to see a big drop in performance if they run above 1080p/performance for example.

There's some tweaks you can do to help improve fps right now - I put together a list which I have/can share via our discord. It depends a bit on your system, but basically on older machines, some of the easiest things are a couple of our settings, hiding corpses, watching what is eating cpu in the background, then adjusting resolution, etc. Longer-term, we hope to have more graphics options to help turn some stuff down, but it just isn't a major focus yet as we focus on building the game. We hope to eventually run better on integrated graphics, and even various handhelds (including Android).