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Unread 08-11-2007, 09:04 AM
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Othesus Othesus is offline
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Default Default chat window with chat outline removed

This window is a result of this thread on the EQ2 forums:
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/p...opic_id=376406

You can test the affect of having no outline on the chat window text. This window has a small button in the top right that will toggle the chat text outline on and off. By default the outline is off. If you use something like FRAPS or ATI Tray Tools you can see the difference in frame rate between having an outline and not having an outline.

Here are some screenshots.

If you use the normal black background there isn't any reason to have a black outline because the text looks exactly the same without it.


If you ever use your chat window with a transparent background the chat text would be harder to read without an outline.


A black outline makes the text more legible if it's in front of a light color. But, this outline requires 6 times as many triangles to render.



My video card is so low-end that the difference in frame rate doesn't seem to be very much, even for a window of text stretched from the bottom to the top of the screen. I'm curious to see how much difference it makes in other people's frame rates though. If the difference is significant maybe SOE could make the outline optional or have no outline by default.
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File Type: zip Othesus chat window 2007-08-10.zip (2.1 KB, 1051 views)
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Last edited by Othesus : 08-11-2007 at 09:12 AM.
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Unread 08-11-2007, 12:12 PM
gm9 gm9 is offline
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Just looking at a wall I get a max difference of 4 fps if I turn the shadow style off (2560x1024 res, in windowed mode on a 8800 GTX, using one chat window (my own though, not yours) with a size of 700x200, filled with text).
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Unread 08-11-2007, 05:37 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by gm9 View Post
Just looking at a wall I get a max difference of 4 fps if I turn the shadow style off (2560x1024 res, in windowed mode on a 8800 GTX, using one chat window (my own though, not yours) with a size of 700x200, filled with text).
Hmm, what were the actual FPS numbers? My FPS is normally in the 20s or so and the difference was something like 2 FPS, maybe less.

Kenman on the EQ2 forums saw a change from 43 to 55 FPS when hiding the chat text shadow.
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Unread 08-11-2007, 07:27 PM
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FPS went from 60 to 64 (looking at a wall, mind you, I'm not getting that during normal play).
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Unread 08-11-2007, 07:58 PM
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Alright, opening 4 filled chat windows, socials, guild, persona, community and inventory windows, I go from 34 to 47 fps when disabling shadows globally for the entire UI.

Btw, do you now the best performance booster? Right-clicking. Closing the additional windows I go from 79 to 150 fps looking at the floor. As soon as you touch the right mouse button your fps start to go up, without any difference in visuals.
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Unread 09-20-2007, 07:18 PM
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neat idea.

Will this work with other modded chat windows - or just the default.
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Unread 09-20-2007, 09:48 PM
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The attached xml file is the same as the default chat window except for that button. The same type of thing could be added to any other window if you wanted to.
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Unread 09-20-2007, 11:04 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Othesus View Post
The attached xml file is the same as the default chat window except for that button. The same type of thing could be added to any other window if you wanted to.
http://www.eq2interface.com/download...crolltabs.html

could you add it to this window? If so that would be awesome -thanks.
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Unread 05-15-2008, 09:36 AM
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The old official forum thread linked by Othesus on the first post is picking up speed again. Eventually Rothgar worked some of his magic for GU46:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rothgar
Today I made some optimizations to our shadow styles reducing the number of passes that are made. Visibly you shouldn't notice any changes, but it should give a slight performance increase. This will affect third-party UI's as long as they are using the default shadow styles. It won't increase performance as much as completely disabling text shadows, but should help.

These changes should go out with the next game update.
Let's hope that the slight performance increase will be more substantial for users of slower systems (apparently Rothgar's dev machine was getting him 90 fps before the optimizations).
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