Everquest Options

WinEQ 2.0 Lite discussion

Moderators: Lavish Software Team, Moderators

Post Reply
Zeiram
Non-Subscriber
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Apr 27, 2006 1:33 am

Everquest Options

Post by Zeiram » Mon Jul 09, 2007 5:39 pm

Is there any way to have different graphic settings for two instances of everquest? I want to have all the shinies turned on for my main profile and have the second account running with minimal memory requirements. Aside from having two installations of everquest is this set up possible?

fearless
Non-Subscriber
Posts: 345
Joined: Mon Jul 19, 2004 5:27 pm

Post by fearless » Mon Jul 09, 2007 8:23 pm

Different eqclient.ini's. You can have a different ini specified per profile.

Right click the tray icon, Options, Preferences.
Everquest
Profiles
Pick your profile
EQClient.ini --> .\eqclient.ini <-- change to different file with appropriate graphic options.

Keep in mind you will need to copy the ini in the eq game directory also.

Zeiram
Non-Subscriber
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Apr 27, 2006 1:33 am

Post by Zeiram » Mon Jul 09, 2007 10:12 pm

Thanks a ton!

JoeyRats
Non-Subscriber
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon May 02, 2005 4:07 pm

Post by JoeyRats » Wed Dec 26, 2007 3:05 am

I had some problems getting this feature to work right (in EQ 1) but I think I figured out what my problem is: multiple eqclient.ini files are properly supported, but when you run EQ and try and make changes to settings using the Options Editor (click on Options before logging on to a server) it always saves these settings to the default eqclient file in the default directory. I think the only option that isn't available in game now is turning on/off using the more detailed "Luclin" model for each class/race, so I guess that needs to be done by editing the file or copying over the default before you make other changes, other than that it works great.

Lax
Owner
Posts: 6634
Joined: Fri Jun 18, 2004 6:08 pm

Post by Lax » Wed Dec 26, 2007 2:39 pm

Thanks for the note about that, I'll check on the options editor issue when I get a chance after I'm back home from holidays

toad
Non-Subscriber
Posts: 23
Joined: Thu Jul 15, 2004 9:28 am

Post by toad » Tue Jan 15, 2008 7:44 pm

Have different everquest folders for your different accounts and you won't have to worry about it writing over the wrong eqclient.ini file

Lax
Owner
Posts: 6634
Joined: Fri Jun 18, 2004 6:08 pm

Post by Lax » Wed Jan 16, 2008 10:03 am

Never, ever listen to anyone who suggests you have different EQ folders. It's a waste of space, and will drain performance. Instead, avoid using the options editor, which has never been particularly good.

toad
Non-Subscriber
Posts: 23
Joined: Thu Jul 15, 2004 9:28 am

Post by toad » Wed Jan 16, 2008 10:00 pm

Interesting that i found much better performance using different folders than using the same folder. HD space is cheap, "wasting space" isn't a problem

Lax
Owner
Posts: 6634
Joined: Fri Jun 18, 2004 6:08 pm

Post by Lax » Thu Jan 17, 2008 1:55 pm

You can always find anecdotal evidence to support any theory you want. Your qualitative data (e.g. "I found much better performance") does not stand up to quantitative data (e.g. "I found zoning time to Plane of Knowledge from Greater Faydark with 2 sessions at the same time to be 1.234 seconds when using one folder, as compared to 2.345 seconds when using two folders on the same hard drive"). While it may be true that you observed better performance, it doesn't prove or disprove anything other than you observing better performance, and must take human error into account. For example, it may simply be that you felt there was better performance, but in reality the performance was so close to being the same, that being a human and without a precise measuring tool, you could not have recognized a difference at all. Or, for example, you could have been measuring data that is unrelated to having one folder or two, such as your framerate while standing still or network response times, and your qualitative statement does not specify what measurements were made, or the basis for your statement that performance was better.

What I can tell you is that reading the same data from a hard drive multiple times can take advantage of caching mechanisms on both the hard drive (i.e. "2mb cache"), and in the operating system.

From the WinEQ 2 FAQ item 2.1 "Should I use the same folder for each session of my game, or separate folders?"
http://www.lavishsoft.com/wineq2/faq.php#2.1
A relatively simple concept in computer science says that hard drive accesses are slow, and memory accesses are fast -- about 10 milliseconds for hard drive access, and under 100 nanoseconds for memory access (as low as about 5ns depending on if the memory is stored on the CPU or if it is system RAM, etc), a ratio of 10 to 10,000,000. That's a pretty big difference. The point of explaining this is modern computer systems employ several "cache" systems to reduce the amount of file accesses as well as file access times by reusing unchanged data directly from memory, or by predicting the next data to be retrieved (for an easy to understand example, if you read the first half of a file, you can be expected to also read the second half). By using a separate folder, these cache systems cannot recognize that the data being read is actually the same. This means that instead of 10,000,010 nanoseconds for loading time for two sessions, it will probably be 20,000,000 nanoseconds because the entire data must be read twice. In terms of loading time, you have absolutely nothing to lose by using a single folder on a single hard drive, and can reasonably expect it to be faster than using multiple folders, regardless of whether it is on another physical hard drive. Note that it may be possible in some cases to see performance increases by using a separate hard drive, but the hard drives MUST be on a separate IDE channel, or they are competing for the same resources anyway (or use SATA, etc), and it is still unlikely that this will show improvement over a single folder.
And yes, I would never waste my oh-so-cheap-but-never-enough storage space by having several copies of EverQuest eating several GB that I could use for something else, on the hope that it would increase performance.

If you would like to continue the debate and perhaps prove me wrong, I'm all for it and would be happy to revise the FAQ, but it would require numbers.

Post Reply