UI's take away from the game's performance we all desperately need!

[Lightbearer]

If you ask anyone, people want there game to run smoother, at the higher settings, hell some in the not so high settings have these problems. I for one, bought a nice rig and mainly for EQ2, and for the future in gaming all together.

I like to run things maxed out, high resolution, in widescreen w/ all the eyecandy showing.

Its been bothering me as of lately, that the game gets such a huge performance increase w/ simply hitting F10 twice, and hiding all of the UI interface.

1. Is there a UI out there that is simple, and does not take away from the performance gain we all deserately seek? (I know there are SIMPLE UI's, but I still see a huge increase w/ simply just turning the UI off, which obviously the game cant be played in that mode conveniently)

2. Is there any plans to improve the way the UI is rendering / taking away from the systems performance pool, so we can play the game even smoother, and possibly w/ higher graphics in the raiding department instead of staring at 24 smeared characters?

The game has so much potential , and its graphics are simply AMAZING. I'd love to be able to actually see all the hard work people put into this game , w/ their raiding zones for example, instead of just solo, or in a 6person group situation.


One has hope..

[Zonx]

It might help if you stated what UI you were using.

Even the most graphically simple UI will still require more system resources than no UI. Updating numbers, progress bars, icons, etc. has an impact no mater how optimized the windows are. Still, there are a few things that can be done to reduce the processing of the UI graphics.

FetishNightfall was devloped specifically to have a small footprint and does try to avoid those UI options that might drag down game performance. Many users have commented that their game runs smoother with the Fetish UI than with the Default. EQ2Maps and Infocenter do have an impact but are considered by most users to be well worth the sacrifice.

[Lightbearer]

Thanks for that!

I didnt mention a UI, because it was a generic situation I was requesting information for - any UI takes away, im looking for the best UI or someone to make one that is very easy on performance.

Incase you wanted to know for curiosity sake, I was using Profit, then tried Penta 2.0 , which I really like , it has some unique features. Definitely not good on the performance tho when you have a 4/8th of the screen covered in UI. heeh.

Ill try fetish out I guess.

[gm9]

For testing purposes, I had tried to load a UI with most xml's removed. It didn't make much of a difference, there was still a noticable performance increase when hitting F10 twice. But then my system is rather now end, so differences might be seen on high end machines.

The EQ2 engine seems to have a problem with overlaying the UI over the game graphics, and this doesn't seem to depend very much on what is actually shown in the UI. For example, putting up a black background via the widescreen overlay setting doesn't change performance at all on my system (those black bars are just another UI window).

On a side note, I was recently forced so switch a number of fonts from true type fonts to bitmap fonts. I'm still trying to figure out whether this increases or decreases performance. Since the smooth fonts is a considerable performance hit, I'd expect the use of bitmap fonts to even help performance, although they might take more memory.

[Lightbearer]

That definitely is interesting. I tried out Fetish today, and havent been able to try it in the raiding situation, but it did seem to run smoother for some reason. Thanks for the tip, and great job on an awesome UI Zonx.

I did have a wierd issue when I logged in for the first time w/ fetish enabled, my gameplay screen was a dark brown, and I had to change the reso to 1280x1024, then back to 1280x900 to get my current resolution working properly w/ the game. I didnt get to camp and reload the game, so im not sure if that will happen again, but just a heads up, as Ive never seen that happen before.

[Zonx]

The largest performance hits associated with the UI that I've found are:

1) Massive tileling - Can't be completely avoided as frames are prety much required to accomodate variable sized windows, but minimizing use of frames is helpfull.

2) Massive numbers of resource files - the default UI is horible about this. UI graphics are spread across a rediculious number of files. In theory the client only loads images slices as needed but in practice having all the slices come from a small number of DDS files helps.

3) Complex Alphas - Another thing the default UI is bad about. No transparency images are not only smaller in memory but take less processing to overlay atop the game environment. The default UI is particularly bad in that it uses the most pigish format for virtually everything. 1 bit alphas aren't much of an issue, but multi-bit alphas can have a noticable impact.

At one point I developed a fancy version of the Knowledge window that made use of a tiled background with a complex alpha channel. Opening that one window noticebly lagged the game for about 30 seconds and performance suffered while it was open. I replaced the tiling frame with a presized opaque image and the lag vanished.

Smaller viewscreen size does improve performance, you just might not notice the difference if your lag stems from other rendering issues. Ideally, all your UI windows would be place outside the game area. Realistically that's not gonna happen, but you can place most of the "Always on" windows off the game area.