So What Do We Know About The DirectX Changes?Follow

Alright. Tunare, (the name of the EQ Engine) Was a DirectX 5 Rendering
engine From EQ Classic To Velious. Sony purchased a Renderman Middleman
renderer ( www.renderman.com ), and Combined it with the existing
Everquest engine to Make Tunare 2.0, a DirectX 8 Rendering engine with
support for more Detailed Models, Textures, and Zones.
Unfortunately, there were some drawbacks. Everquest's Models are Vertex
Animated, Meaning that Each polygon is moved indepenently, Which Is
INCREDIBLY Memory-intensive, Hence the 512 Meg Minimum, and incredibly
long Zone times for players on lower-end systems with Luclin models on.
Textures are also uncompressed, which is basically saying that every
time you load a texture, instead of loading like, a 200k JPEG file of a
wall texture, it loads an Uncompressed, 2 MEGABYTE Wall texture! (EQ's
Current Texture compression system if you check it in the options, is
only RGB8A8, also an inneficient system)
Tunare 2.0 is INCREDIBLY inneficient, But was slowly upgraded with every
expansion. (notice LDoN zone times are tiny compared to Luclin zone
times?)

GoD Fixes all this, and More.

Tunare 3.0, is, from what i've been able to gather a DirectX 9.0B Engine
Built from the GROUND UP by SoE that Focuses on pure, unadulterated
EFFICIENCY. Textures are now Compressed using DXTC, Reducing Texture
memory usage by almost 40-70% in most cases, while still maintaining
Incredible quality (look at UT2k3, They use DXTC compression for
example, as do many other games these days). Also, The Model animation
system is changed, Switching to a Bone/Inverse Kinematics System, Which
could Allow for Dynamic physics and possibly Ragdoll effects (imagine!
Whack an arrow into a goblin's head, and his head jerk's back and he
stumbles, revealing an Opening for the Warrior's New Reactionary Melee
system!) Further down the road.

All the Funky DX9 Bells and whistles will be supported (Bump mapping in
Kromrif Belts! Shadowed men looking like Shadowed frinkin men with the
new shaders!), And apparently Character Shadows (!!) Will be added to
All creatures, and a new animated Dynamic lighting system will also be
added, meaning torch light will actually Flicker and waver.. oooh.


All in all, Tunare 3.0 focuses on efficiency, and quality. with the
reduced memory requirement, Textures will now be More detailed, Higher
resolution, and will most probably have Multitexturing/bump/Environment
mapping applied to them, old world zones will look much better due to
this, and as always, all the advanced shaders will be able to be turned
off, so you can have EQ look like before in old world with High texture
quality with one third the Memory cost.


Everyone will get the Engine upgrade on GoD launch day, so be prepared
for a 20-50 Megabyte Patch on the 10th.


To sum up? After GoD launch day, Me with the Geforce 2 will be able to
run all of the Advanced models, and High Texture resolution without any
performance hit at all from what I currently use (low texture quality,
only iksar and vah shir on cause they're so damn sexy :P)

You guys with the Stupidly fast computers and your Radeon 9800XTs will
log onto EQ, and simply say.. "Whoa."