I want to give some short overview for the recent year, to keep people outside the Auditor Test or IRC/Discord in the loop regarding the project. Most of the time was spent updating the build and dependency system for EQC. Previously, there was the original Windows Only Visual Studio build and later on a coexisting CMake build just for creating Linux Packages. The crux was that no recent C++ language features could be used because some dependencies just for Windows were hardcoded, even though the Auditor Server already runs for years on Debian - Development however used mostly Windows.



Using more convenient and lightweight API's which were available for Linux couldn't be used without breaking the Windows build, which was still using the compiler and language features from Visual Studio 2010. This has been massively improved by unifying the CMake build and solution configuration also for Windows and using the direct support from Visual Studio 2019 for managing CMake based projects. It is now much simpler to update 3rd party libs like Lua or Boost.



Next up, a few months were invested in improving the EQCLauncher. EQCLauncher for those unaware is the projects own Launch System for the game client, which provides many enhancements like custom resolutions and proper hor+ widescreen support (something that even EQLive isn't able to do last I checked) or enhanced audio playback, login data saving and much more. While the major feature isn't yet fully completed, it will be very exciting when it's done. While I don't want to spoil anything about that, I can at least detail the specific quality of life improvements that have been finished. First up is in-game screenshots can now be created in PNG format and in a dedicated folder with good file naming and timestamp. The reason for this improvement was, that vanilla EQ and even the trilogy client - which created BMP screenshots - were just naming the resulting screenshots by an index, e.g. EQ000000.bmp, EQ000001.bmp and so on. How did EQ know what to name the next Screenshot filename? By looking through all screenshot files in the EQ dir. You might guess where I'm getting at. When you have 100 screenshots, it would on every PrintScreen go through each of these 100 screenshots, and check what is the highest number in the filename. This resulted in the game freezing for a couple of seconds or longer depending on how many screenshots were already there. Instead of just fixing this by using a unique name using a timestamp, I went ahead and used smaller, easily shareable screenshots in PNG format instead of BMP.



Next up on the list is initial WINE support for the EQCLauncher, there were WINE specific bugs (like, they create Win32 controls differently than genuine Windows does) that would lead to crashes upon starting the Launcher. This has been fixed and since WINE 4.21 Widescreen should work fine too (see comments below this post for 4k Screenshots from WINE)! I have high hopes that with the Linux Subsystem in Windows 10, WINE will be tightly integrated too. There are WinD3D libs for Windows which allow running the client however there is no performance improvement! On native Linux, WINE provides the full (locked) 60FPS while Win10 requires a DX7toDX9 proxy to achieve 60FPS. This is not an issue on previous Windows Versions.



Finally for the EQCLauncher, for those on Win10 with higher resolution and font scaling enabled - automatic DPI Scaling is now set in the Launcher so that the Screen is displayed correctly without manually trying to overwrite Windows specific settings.



Apart from a few bug fixes, not much time has been spent on the actual codebase. However, the Auditor playground has been continuously increased with content. For reference, the following zones and starting races are currently available on the Auditor Server:



Antonica Reachable by Boat, Travel Agent, Only "Good" Races and Zones

[ img ]



Faydwer Reachable by Boat, Travel Agent, All New Characters

[ img ]



Odus Reachable by Boat only, Only "Good" Erudin New Characters!

[ img ]



I want to finish this report by wishing everyone Happy Holidays and giving a small sneak peek at the recent progress of our former EQC Developer Wizzel. The Lantern project is busy figuring out anything related to how the old client read zone data or graphical assets, how the shaders, clouds or fog were generated and how to exactly mimic this behaviour in more recent frameworks.



Recently a breakthrough was achieved by cracking the animation data from the EQ Clients assets and made it possible to show animated NPCs in Lantern Game Client:



https://imgur.com/a/JRuboNy



https://imgur.com/D8LJBr1



If you want to be more in the loop about things that are happening that are not officially posted or like to communicate with testers, feel free to join our official IRC Server (http://eqclassic.de/cgi-bin/cgiirc/irc.cgi ) or the unofficial discord server moderated by a forum member (viewtopic.php?f=47&t=4185 ).