Help I'm clueless!

[Caali]

Hi there, so I'm about to give in and try to 2-box for the first time in 5 years. I'm going out to get another copy of EQ (with expansions) and going to make myself a cute lil gnome cleric.

My current setup is as follows:

- P4 2.5G
- 1024 SDRAM (Could buy more if it will help any)
- 256M GeForce FX

Got a couple of questions...

What should I be turning on or off models-wise, sound-wise, etc. to make this a bearable experience.

What programs should I get? I've heard of EQW, EQPlaynice but never used either... Will they help me at all?

[Shambler]

I would use EQwindows if you have any problems useing eq's built in window support.

Seting your options and such not will be something you are going to have to play around with to see what makes you satisfied witht he performance. I would check out what it is like playing both characters on full settings and then make modifications from there untill you like the performance you get.  Here are some things to try, in no particular order.

1)
Make 2 copies of eq, on seperate drives if you have more than one drive. This allows you to turn sound off on one, or degrade options more on one than the other (usualy you do that on the more bot like of the two).

2)
Adjust your clip plane to be low on the character that is not going to be pulling. Your cleric will only need to see people in range..  not from one side of dreadlands to the other :) You can also lower the clip plane of the other guy too.

3)
Turn social animations off. This will help the most in zones like the bazaar where 50 Ogre traders are scratching their butts.

4)
Turn Luclin models off. (I don't like to do this because sometimes the old models look funny to me these days)

5)
turn the 3D sky off

6)
If you lag up when spells are cast, you can turn off spell casting effects (I don't like this because I like to time stuns when spells I don't like are cast. The other option is to lower the particle density of the spellls.

7)
Lower the games resolution.

8.)
use  /viewport (I think this makes your UI a solid boundary and the actual game only renders in the viewport) I haven't used this yet but read about it. ex. runing eq in 1024x768 with a viewport of 800x600.

togle any setting you can and see how it affects things.

I find I zone faster if I only zone one character at a time.

Look for more tips in the thread and on eqwindows forums.

[Caali]

Thanks!

[Zashir Swiftpaw]

May I suggest that you DON'T use EQ's built-in windowing mode?  It's a major resource hog.  Try EQWindows or WinEQ instead.  Also, I suggest that you look for EQPlayNice and pay the subscription fee... it's made a big difference in my performance when I run multiple characters on the same machine.

WinEQ/EQPlayNice - www.lavishsoft.com
EQWindows -- www.eqwindows.com

[danaconda]

Just a small note to number 1 above. You don't need 2 hard drives to set different settings for each account. Since the settings are saved in the EQ directory that you run the exe file from, and you have 2 copies in 2 separate folders, it will save the settings in each folder. Not really a big deal, but just wanted to clarify that.

Two hard drives will, however, allow your instances of EQ to load faster since it won't be pulling files from 2 directories on the same hard drive. At least that's how I think it works  :?  I'm not too technically advanced on the inner workings of hard drives  :P

[Suthia]

I wouldn't pay for a subscription to EQPlayNice yet since Sony has announced their own version of EQPN. I use EQPN lite and haven't noticed a difference in performance from the older versions of EQPN.  I'd recommend using EQW/WinEQ though. I can zone 2 of chars at the same time and still zone as if I were just zoning one most of the time.

[Shambler]

Oh yeah.. I do use eqwindows myself. My mouse locks up in the default one.. at critical moments even :) I haven't set this up yet, but in Eqwindows, how do you set a single key to be the hotkey to cycle through instances of eqwindows? I think that would be helpfull to know.

danaconda, thats what I ment to say.. :) and you are correct. I ment to say use different drives IF you have them.. but re reading my sentence it's not too clear.

[Suthia]

On EQW (versions 2.43+), when you first open the launcher, there is an area where you can input a code for a certain key. You'll need to look in the readme.txt to find the exact code for the key.  Mine is 0x46 which is the scroll lock key. I believe you can code it so you can press 2 or more keys to cycle through EQs but you'd need to look that up in the readme.txt.  One feature I wish EQW had was be able to cycle backwards and forwards like WinEQ's setup (especially useful when 3boxing).

[Kitvear]

I have been two-boxing on a single machine on dial-up.  After reading some of this, I renamed my everquest install directory to Neverquest and then copied it to 2 folders labeled EQ1 and EQ2.  It works fine.  

About using 2 separate drives, depending on your setup it might make some or no difference.  Most drives are 5400RPM though some of the newer ones are 7200RPM  they can pump a LOT of data  into your IDE controller, however, your IDE controller (assuming your not using a different controller) has 2 channels and can handle 2 devices per channel. So even if you have 2 drives it might not make the least bit of difference if they are both on the same channel of your IDE controller.  Then there is the amount of data that you can transfer from your IDE controller to memory, video and to your CPU.  The more modern your machine is the less likely you are to have bandwith limitations on your system bus.

If you have a late model board and have 2 drives on seperate channels then you might just see some benefit from running it on separate drives.

I am running EQ in the windowed mode so I can ALT-TAB tween my two toons.  I'm running a single 80GB ATA100 IDE drive for my OS and programs 768megs of Ram, Ti4600 for video and using a Athalon XP 2000 for my cpu, My dial-up connection is typically around 44Kbps.   If I zone separately then all is fine, but if I  succor with my druid, one or both of me is gonna go ld, but  that's better then dying.

Overall I'm content with my setup but the most obvious limitation i'm facing is my connection bandwith.  I really don't suspect that there is anything out there that can make better use of my connection.  But if anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them.  

Now that i'm on 2 different intall directories, i've tweaked down the druid's settings a tad but will follow the other ideas posted thus far and try out the viewport option.  Am I correct in thinking that the only benefit in adding additional software to my setup will be a reduction in the resources consumed while having two instances of EQ running?

[Caali]

Well I got it working yesterday. EQW+EQPlaynice. Honestly, I don't see any difference with or without EQPlaynice but I use it anyways since it may be doing something I don't understand :). Using one hard drive since that's all I have.

It works like a charm so far. I crashed twice in 10 hours or so but that's not more than I do normally and hardly lag. Thanks for all the help guys.

[danaconda]

I used EQ Play Nice once for my computer. It made a slight difference, definitely noticable. You can also configure it to work even better by lowering the Frames Per Second on the background EQ instances.

My problem when I 2 box my one machine is that I constantly move around and put my cleric on autofollow. Since the frame rate is lower on background EQ the cleric is lagged all to hell and can't follow properly. Also, it seemed to me that switching between the 2 instances didn't change which one was considered the "background" EQ. By this I mean that my cleric was still lagged to hell when I decided to try to run just the beast to the new location, then switch over to cleric.

If I can find a location that I am just going to sit the cleric in and use for heals then it would work fine I think.

[Boku]

The main thing eqplaynice does is frees up the cpu to be able to do multiple tasks. Ever try to go in and mess around with a uifile without eqplaynice running? Will take you forever just to get down to the Ui folder.

With it running it takes only a few seconds. Also helps with opening up a webpage or something as well.