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Everquest 2: Lag vs. Quality and Collision ala Moorgard
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Over on the EQ2 Official Forums, Steve "Moorgard" Danuser jumps into a thread discussing Lag vs. Quality to say that graphical quality in the game was not nerfed. Here is what he had to say:
[font size="2" color="#FFFF00"]Nothing about the detail in our graphics engine has been lowered. Remember that there are a myriad of display options. When we take shots on the team, we have our options cranked up to give the highest level of detail. The actual game engine is used, not some mocked-up dev version.
Some of the screens you're going to be seeing in the coming weeks were taken by fansite folks at the recent event. Not everybody played on top-of-the-line hardware; many mid-level machines were used to give people a genuine feel for what the game played like on various hardware configurations. Some machines had lower detail settings to match their display hardware, just as you'll find when the game is actually installed on your computer. As a result, you'll see some shots with various options turned down, especially lighting.
Also keep in mind that we use an LOD (level of detail) system. The more powerful your machine, the farther out you can see the highest-detail models. Minimum spec machines will see the lower-detail models draw closer in to increase their performance. All these settings are configurable, of course.
In short, the graphics were not nerfed[/font]
Check out the entire thread HERE.
On another thread Moorgard talks about Collision confirming that there WILL be collision with PC's and NPC's.
[font size="2" color="#FFFF00"]There is collision. When PCs or NPCs walk toward each other and reach a point where they would collide, one gets bumped out of the way. They don't simply pass through each other as if they were ghosts.
However, collision isn't an absolute. Models have collisions spheres around them that define at what point they get moved out of the way of something else. You obviously don't want a badger to have the same collision sphere as a dragon. Additionally, there are limitations in place so that griefing and exploiting are avoided as much as possible.
What we don't use is every-point-on-your-body collision. Is it technically possibe? Sure. But that would put an immense load on the server, because it would have to be calculating that on thousands of entities all at once. The performance hit would be incredible.
As I've said before, there are weapon collisions that take place as part of the battle animations. That is, two people fighting with a sword will have clashes, parries, hits, etc. But we're not calculating every point on the sword to see if it collides with any other surface in the game world every single moment.
So if you take frames out of a combat sequence, for example, you're going to see imperfections. Body parts will seem to pass through other body parts on occasion, especially when opponents are right next to each other. When you're actually playing, you don't see those individual frames but instead see combat as a whole, which I personally think looks amazing.[/font]
Check out the entire thread HERE.
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