Room for improovement: BASIC server/client foundation. Which first?

[Vermithraxx]

My vote was for the spawning system, since the lack of one makes the game unplayable and will be unappealing to the mass populace imho.

Personally, I'd be happy with a debugging command to force the issue. If I'm hunting <mob>, I get to the location where I *KNOW* they should be, I'd rather issue a command and have everthing pop at once rather than have to wait 5 minutes on the off chance it might spawn.

My second pick: Targetting system.

It's probably my own fault, but I play a dragon in third person. (I play a dragon. OF COURSE I play in third person.) Problem is, this game's "click the target" method leaves a LOT to be desired for harvesting and especially in combat.

My suggestion as a solution: A key that cycles to "next targettable object" just like EQ2's <which is the TAB key>. When you hit TAB in EQ2, you choose a target, be it a harvest node, or a mob. Hit TAB again, and you get the next object... you can cycle thru everything that's in sight, perhaps spotting things you didn't know could be targetted.

3.) Thinking about it, maybe I need a better explanation of how this works... I've been told (in game) that there's something called a 'spawn object' that, when you get close to it, will cause that area to spawn its mobs. IF this is true, another suggestion would be a debug-style command that makes that object visible. Even if it's just a wire frame, glowing spot on the ground, ANYthing that makes it clear what I have to do in order to avoid having to sit around and wait for the game to catch up.

[Hal`cyon Sskyler]

My suggestion as a solution: A key that cycles to "next targettable object" just like EQ2's <which is the TAB key>. When you hit TAB in EQ2, you choose a target, be it a harvest node, or a mob. Hit TAB again, and you get the next object... you can cycle thru everything that's in sight, perhaps spotting things you didn't know could be targetted.

The biggest problem with allowing players to select the nearest resource node is it practically gives you the macro needed to automate crafting. EQ2's resource gathering is fairly different that Horizons' in that the fields in EQ2 are far less populated than in Horizons.

I'm not sure, but I believe there is a point where the client switches from doing selections on a per-poly basis to a more simple bounding box selection. Since dragons have a huge bounding box, you're going to run into problems when not in per-polygon accuracy. I _think_ this depends on how zoomed out you are. Try bringing the camera closer and selecting your nodes.

Basically there is a very good selection algorithm in the game, but for performance's sake it doesn't try to start tracing rays when you're zoomed out.

[gopher65]

I'd be happy if they'd just make the bounding boxes of dragons a bit smaller. They are way too big. Even my with my hatchie I can't select mobs unless I swivel the camera around or zoom way in. When hunting with adults or ancients (or trying to select someone at the Bristugo pad to buff them when there are multiple dragons about) it becomes ridiculous.

OH BABY NOT A SINGLE MISSPELLED WORD IN THAT ENTIRE PARAGRAPH ACCORDING TO MY SPELL CHECKER!!!! I am so leet. I even got ridiculous right.

A bit of irony here. I misspelled misspelled the first time around:P.

[CallakDW]

It's worth taking a look at your display settings. Back on my old PC with only a gig of ram and an old Radeon 9700 Pro I could stay logged in for days at a time without too much buildup. The biggest problem people seem to have is having too many max detail characters set to display. I'm not sure how the adjustments work ever since the direct "Number of max detail characters" slider went away, but dig around in your client_prefs_graphic.def (pulling from memory here) and fiddle with some of the character display settings.

For a while I used to keep two hotkeys handy, one to set the max detail characters to 1 when I was walking through a town (and bombarded by NPCs and players) and another to bump it up to 10-15 when I was out in the wilderness and needed to keep monsters in view. With that setup I kept myself from loading any superfluous character textures (these are huge) and there was less shuffling of memory that kept things running smooth. EDIT: I'd have to dig around in my game files I get home, but you can modify how many remote characters are displayed with a /setpref command

Hmm think I found it. MAXFullCharactors? Was set to 16. Going to try 8.

[Fratricide]

I'd be happy if they'd just make the bounding boxes of dragons a bit smaller. They are way too big. Even my with my hatchie I can't select mobs unless I swivel the camera around or zoom way in. When hunting with adults or ancients (or trying to select someone at the Bristugo pad to buff them when there are multiple dragons about) it becomes ridiculous.

OH BABY NOT A SINGLE MISSPELLED WORD IN THAT ENTIRE PARAGRAPH ACCORDING TO MY SPELL CHECKER!!!! I am so leet. I even got ridiculous right.

A bit of irony here. I misspelled misspelled the first time around:P.

to select a specific character you can always do that "/select <charactername>" command in the chat window.... works for me every time.

[Steelclaw]

Yeah, you have to zoom your third person camera -in- to swich over from box to poly select. The threshold could be uncomfortably close for adult and ancient dragons.

I usually spin the camera using the numeric keypad and hope to find a better angle.

[Starmind]

Third person for travel, just go to first person for fighting and ya have no problem seeing and targeting

[Flindar]

Sorry... but i gotta ask...

Is this where Vista fix falls in?

Basic server/Client foundations?

umm If it is... .IT!!!!! should be priority
Damnit.... I wanna play again

[CallakDW]

Sorry... but i gotta ask...

Is this where Vista fix falls in?

Basic server/Client foundations?

umm If it is... .IT!!!!! should be priority
Damnit.... I wanna play again

I agree this should be the top priority, but more of a hot fix thing. Considering that there seems to be a work around (or two?)- (Yes, I use Vista, and I've gotten the game to work, just check out my posts in the appropriate threads/forums). I don't see why they can't duplicate the solution that is working for some people, figure out why it's working for them and come up with a global solution fairly quickly.

Regardless of that, immediate issues isn't really the purpose of this poll, it was intended to look at the long standing state of the game and figure out what long standing basic issues it has had and hopefully give the devs some idea what we players think is the worst part and give them a push in the right direction.

[Sihera]

4) Lack of fall damage.

This one is not such a big deal, I rather have them fix the over all game mechanics first so its actually more enjoyable.


3) Monster collision detection.

I can not stand this one either.


1) The spawning system.

This one is top in my books. Even with my computer this is a major issue. I dont think the game handles awesome computers very well.
2 Gig of ram dual channel, Cpu 3.4 gig Pent. D, 7900 Nvida 256 Meg DDR3 Ram Viedo Card running Xp 64 Pro Os.

2) The frame rate.

This is another one top of my list. Even with tweaking everything its still very chunky.

Other

[Henry Redacre]

As far as I know, the game actually makes very little use of your video card's strength. What it stresses most is CPU, memory, and with all the file-swapping, Hard Drive. Having a high end vid card seems to have little to zero effect on running the game, in my experience, and in a few reports i've heard from others over the years.

[Xanthia]

Register spawning PLEASE!!! arg so frustrating to have 50 dudes just "appear" around you..

Then framerate... oi i'd love a decent frame rate.

Ah what you talking about, without that pictures like this wouldn't exist

(Incase you were wondering.... I died so fast the game didn't even realize it)

[CallakDW]

As far as I know, the game actually makes very little use of your video card's strength. What it stresses most is CPU, memory, and with all the file-swapping, Hard Drive. Having a high end vid card seems to have little to zero effect on running the game, in my experience, and in a few reports i've heard from others over the years.

Well the game doesn't stress my CPU, my processors are never maxed while playing. Memory usage is the biggest issue affecting frame rate, as I said in a earlier post, video card memory is used so heavily that it overflows into standard memory, which is slower and thus causes a reduction in framerate. And I have enough memory to prevent any major file swapping and I still have frame rate issues.

[gopher65]

Upgrading from a GeForce 3 TI200 64meg card to a GeForceFX5700LE 256meg card gave me about 5FPS more. The only thing upgrading to a 6600GT did was make it possible to use AA and and AF, which makes the game look better. After I hit the 5700 though there was no direct increase in performance from a better card.

Bumping up from 512 megs of ram to 1.5gigs of ram was a huge help (especially because now I can stay logged in all day without crashing from out of memory errors). Total I need 3 gigs of memory (1.5 gigs of ram, 1.5 gig pagefile) to prevent myself from eventually running out of memory.

Bumping up my CPU from a 1.8P4 to a 2.8P4 gave me ~7-8 FPS extra.

Putting my OS and Pagefile on one harddrive and HZ a second drive helped loading times. Placing HZ on its own partition on that second drive eliminated fragmentation problems.

[Henry Redacre]

i'm interested to see how HZ would run on some of the newer Solid State drives, what with all the little tiny files it needs to read constantly..

[Vermithraxx]

i'm interested to see how HZ would run on some of the newer Solid State drives, what with all the little tiny files it needs to read constantly..

No better.

I-Ram card, 4 gig solid state drive. I put HZ on it... no improvements.

Mind you, I'm running a Quad core cpu and dual 8800 GTXs. Processing and graphics capabilities are way beyond what this game's designed to take advantage of.

Even with the game running on the card, I still sit and stare at a black screen at portals for up to 2 minutes, no mobs spawn, engaging a crafting machine can take a minute or two, etc.

[Henry Redacre]

No better.

I-Ram card, 4 gig solid state drive. I put HZ on it... no improvements.

Really?

Wow, I really thought there would have been some improvement. Considerable improvement, in fact, is what I was expecting. I suppose I was under the assumption (now showing evidence to be false) that one of the major bottlenecks here was the constant seek/read process for all the small def files in game.

Interesting indeed.

Well, back to the drawing board for me I guess.

Thank you very much for that info. It puts a lot of my curiosity to rest.

EDIT:

Well, out of further curiosity, what sort of performance do you get? How would you describe your play experience with things like framerates, view distances, frame hitching while running around the world? How well does the game operate if you disable the loading screen during ports?

By the way, I haven't used a loading screen since a few months after release. I can port anywhere in the world, regardless of whether a world cache exists on my machine for my chosen destination, and it only takes a matter of 5-10 seconds, *maximum*.

I know the loading screen stays up until all things in an area have loaded, so I'm wondering what, in particular, is holding up your loading screen. What element of the game is taking so long to load? Hmm. In my experience, with my ports, I seldom see anything that is blatantly missing at my destination for more than a few seconds, so I'm unable to identify any one element that takes so long to load.

Have you tried disabling your loading screen as an experiment/test?

Again, this is all just curiosity. I really don't have any direction here. hehehe

[Steelclaw]

I still sit and stare at a black screen at portals for up to 2 minutes, no mobs spawn, engaging a crafting machine can take a minute or two, etc.

Your network connection (latency and packet loss) will play a major role in those aspects, as will the load on the server handling your character.

How's the load performance otherwise? (Like when you wander into an area with lots of models and textures to load) Do they just pop up, or do you hitch?

[AA0]

I never thought HZ would do well on solid state, they are severely limited on the read/write actions, which HZ abuses more than anything else. Maybe when that is overcome

[Hal`cyon Sskyler]

I-Ram card, 4 gig solid state drive. I put HZ on it... no improvements.

RAM disk != Solid State Drive (Flash)

Your CPU is what's holding up the game. Judging by the amount of money required for a dual 8800 rig and a 4GB ramdrive I'd say you probably have a nice dual or quad core CPU sitting in that machine.

Like most game engines outside of the more recent releases, Horizons is a single-threaded application. There's a lot of old, sloppy code hanging around that will peg out one of your cores and slow everything else down when doing things like loading new terrain chunks, processing new player models, etc. There's no good way around this. CPUs aren't getting that much faster on a per-core basis, and throwing more cores at the problem isn't going to do much for games without easily parallelizable aspects like heavy physics or AI calculations.

Also sounds like you have a pretty lame internet connection judging by port times. When I was on satellite (2-3000% higher latency than land-based broadband) I never had problems with machines activating or really too horrible port times as long as the area was in my world cache.