There’s a news about DAoC giving out for free the last upgrade to the graphical engine that was included in the paid expansion released the past December: Catacombs.
But is this true? The slashdotted news comes from Vodoo Extreme and the author manifests some perplexity:
In a somewhat confusing way, Mythic has released the Catacombs engine client as a free upgrade to people running the Dark Age of Camelot Trials of Atlantis or Shrouded Islands.
Then follows the actual quote from Sanya, stating (in an “edit”) that the patch contains the newest client along with the town art patch.
But I’m not sure it’s true and this is also the reason why I believe they’ve been “silent” about this freebie. My suspects aren’t an “absolute truth”, I do not have access to the game right now but I know decently the story of the game. My suspect is that this patch doesn’t contain the Catacombs engine for a simple reason: Catacombs doesn’t have a new engine. It’s a fake.
Why I say so? DAoC had three engines that I know of. Mythic never developed the graphic engine from zero, instead they bought the licence from another company (something that is becoming more and more frequent in the industry). This engine was called “Netimmerse”, built by NDL and used by decent games like Morrowind. When you buy a licence you probably get full access to the source code so you can then reprogram parts of the client so that they fit better your project. But considering that you buy a licence to focus on other elements of the game you can imagine that the modifications to the client aren’t that frequent. And you also don’t have a very deep knowledge of what is going on at the low level. This is the reason why DAoC always lacked on this aspect. The game always had an infinite list of minor (non-gamestoppers but still annoying) problems and incompatibilities, sometimes even rather “heavy”. For example everyone who played when the game was launched remembers the “memory leak”. This leak had the result to make the performance of the client slow progressively. After playing a couple of hours and moving to different zones the client started to crawl and stutter, bringing finally to graphical corruption and crashes. On a game strongly based on large-scale battles this was obviously one of the most serious problems but Mythic never figured out a solution.
This brings to the first transition. One of the major selling points of DAoC’s first expansion (“Shrouded Isles”, the most successful and appreciated) was the deploy of a new version of the Netimmerse engine that, beside other improvements (shaders on the water, shadows, high-res textures, better spell effects, trilinear filtering and more), finally removed the awful memory leak. This brought the marketing department of Mythic to strongly exploit this “feature”, publicizing how faster the new engine was and how better it was able to handle the large-scale battles. Of course this was false. Any simple test with FRAPS could demonstrate that the new engine looked nicer (even if introduced many incompatibilities and graphical glitches) but was also more taxing on the hardware, around 15-20% slower. Instead it was true that the leak was gone and this meant that at least the performance was stable while the previous client was completely unplayable after about two hours. This was already enough for the players to appreciate the progress and finally have a more reliable client.
Second transition. The companies developing the graphic engines need to keep working on their code to add new features and possibilities, this in order to sell more of “the same” to the game companies that already own and use the previous versions of the engine. This brings to some sort of “joined effort”. Mythic didn’t have the competence to delve into the code and fix, improve and develop the client but they could still rely on NDL and their continuated effort on their engine. Each year, Mythic could buy a new version and plan the content of their yearly expansions around these new features. With the ill-fated “Trials of Atlantis” (the expansion with the most potential but wrecked by horrible design habits and wrong planning) it was the case of the underwater environments along with a brand new engine working “on-top” of Netimmerse (which with this version becomes “Gamebryo”): IDV’s SpeedTree. This “double” engine basically coexisted with Gamebryo and was able to render realistic trees in the game without messing with the older clients. This expansion offered many improvements by joining the new features of the Gamebryo (multi-layered textures for the terrain, the underwater effects, a complete new UI, a new version of the pixel shader code for the water and more) and SpeedTree but, again, it had a relevant impact on the performance of the client and reintroduced a minor memory leak that still made the performance progressively worse along with other minor problems like stutters, unbalanced use of CPU power, sound glitches, input lag and so on. For me this became a major issue because all these problems joined together made the daily use rather tiring and annoying, in particular after Mythic released “New Frontiers”, bringing to the game some masterpieces of art, the new keeps. (parenthesis: go see how “HRose” contributed to the hype at that time) A problem because these wonderful structures were also another strain on a too bugged client. Despite some efforts to balance the load, like limiting the use of AoE spells and some other superficial optimizations, the performance went down again, making the memory leak and the day-to-day gameplay worse than ever.
Third transition. Here we are about a year ago, the third transition doesn’t come with “New Frontier” because there are no changes to the client itself aside more graphical-intense environments. Instead this third transition was supposed to be with “Catacombs”, but does it exist? For what I’m able to remember (here for something slightly more on-topic) it doesn’t. I’m not aware of any new purchase of another version of Gamebryo. Mithic never talked about it and it was rather obvious at that time that they were only going to add the EMotion FX 2 SuperLeet Engine (the official site vanished, by the way). This engine doesn’t replace Gamebryo, instead it’s another layer, exactly like SpeedTree, so existing on top of the ToA version of Gamebryo, one year old. This is, in fact, what Mythic delivered this December with Catacombs. There’s NOT a new “global” graphical engine, there’s instead the addition of the brand new models for all the characters that are used with the new engine.
Now. The patch they released this week is about 50Mb. I really do not believe that it includes all these new character models and this is why by applying it you’ll find that only the towns have the improved art, while the new characters models are still disabled. What does it mean? It’s simple. This is nowhere a “new” client because no new client was released with Catacombs. The EMotion engine that was the real major selling point of the expansion is NOT included or, if it is, it is kept disabled. Instead the players probably just had access to the slightly modified version of Gamebryo that Mythic is currently using and that is basically identic in features and performance (and problems) to the awful “Trials of Atlantis” version. The last that they bought from NDL.
So a “fake” along with a more than good reason about why Mythic was careful to not publicize it too much blatantly.
EDIT: On the Vault I commented Jeff Hickman promotion by posting his AWFUL quote. Then I gave a glance also at the source and I found this funny quote that completes perfectly the article I’ve written here:
Catacombs runs on the Trials of Atlantis engine.