2-boxing/running macros on the same comp.

[JimJohnson]

/viewport (start x) (start y) (end x) (end y)

[fearless]

Great explanation of /viewport here

[themowgli]

aweseome, I'm dying to give it a try
With /viewport and AMD Athlon 64 3200+, Radeon x800, 2 gig ram, will there be any lag/bleedthrough w/ running 3 on EQwindows?I also have cable...

only reason I'm not logging on and trying it myself is that my comp is down , so I'm waiting for the new parts to come in...

[fearless]

aweseome, I'm dying to give it a try :D
With /viewport and AMD Athlon 64 3200+, Radeon x800, 2 gig ram, will there be any lag/bleedthrough w/ running 3 on EQwindows?I also have cable...

only reason I'm not logging on and trying it myself is that my comp is down :cry: , so I'm waiting for the new parts to come in...

Well, at the moment it sounds like you have an AMD Athlon 64 0 . . .

sorry, bad joke.

[themowgli]

aweseome, I'm dying to give it a try
With /viewport and AMD Athlon 64 3200+, Radeon x800, 2 gig ram, will there be any lag/bleedthrough w/ running 3 on EQwindows?I also have cable...

only reason I'm not logging on and trying it myself is that my comp is down , so I'm waiting for the new parts to come in...

Well, at the moment it sounds like you have an AMD Athlon 64 0 . . .

sorry, bad joke.

lol, thats what I'm getting, hehe...athlon xp 2000+ is the pos that broke down...

[gimp]

aweseome, I'm dying to give it a try
With /viewport and AMD Athlon 64 3200+, Radeon x800, 2 gig ram, will there be any lag/bleedthrough w/ running 3 on EQwindows?

im 4boxing, sometimes running 5 on a pc not even half that good.

[SiatX]

Tested with viewport now, get 5 up easy, got a commit charge of 2227/3942 with 5 toons, which is less than what I had with 4 when not using viewport on bots.

I luv it.

[evercracker]

Great explanation of /viewport here

This link isnt working for me, can someone put one up for a good description of what exactly /viewport does please

[A_Druid_00]

It resizes the viewable area inside the EQ window, without changing the resolution. It essentially leaves black space on the screen, which you can use to put your UI pieces. I think it's supposed to affect your framerate to some extent too. Just type /viewport in EQ and it will give you the syntax for changing it, it's a native EQ command.

[Digitalxero]

/viewport X Y width height

X is the number of pixles away from the left edge of the monitor you want it to start

Y is the number of pixles down from the top edge of the monitor you want it to start.

The other two are self explanitory.

For my UI which is 1600x1200 I use /viewport 0 0 1600 950 wich leaves the bottom part free for all my chat windows and such.

Using the viewport gives you the same viewable information in a smaller area. If you run at 1600x1200 like I do when I play and typed "/viewport 400 300 800 600" you would have the game world centered in an 800x600 winow, all around it being just blackness. If you put your GUI elements(the various windows) in this blackness you will actualy help speed up the game since it is not having to redraw the elements every frame only when they are updated. Which helps with lag at raids and such. At least thats how I understand it.

NOTE: that any HUD elements you have are restricted to the viewport area size

[fearless]

If you put your GUI elements(the various windows) in this blackness you will actualy help speed up the game since it is not having to redraw the elements every frame only when they are updated.

Viewport doesn't do anything regarding redrawing frames. What it does do is significantly reduce the load on the video card / processor because it doesn't have to draw as large of a screen.

If you are looking for things to reduce frame draw, look at the combination of MQ2FPS and MQ2Clip. FPS has the ability to only draw 1 out of 30 frames, for example, where the computer still processes 30 frames but only displays 1 of them. This again significantly reduces processor usage. Combine this with MQ2Clip where it reduces the clip plane to almost nothing for background sessions (so your computer isn't trying to draw the potime sun dial when you are sitting by POInnovation) and you again have significant processor savings.

These three things combined have cut the processor usage on my 1.8ghz by about half.

[guildleader]

Page is no longer functional, but google has it cached.
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:TT ... =firefox-a
Viewport - Optimize Screen Layout / Performance Guide


This Guide provides some suggestions on how to improve your framerate, and improve the responsiveness of the in-game UI. It also helps if you want more chat windows but don't like to have them all over your view of Norrath.

If you have a Dual Processor G5 with a Velium or Acrylia-Studded Graphics Card in it, you probably don't need to read on. People using slower machines may find some of this useful though.

Please note, I have taken the unusual step of including screenshots in this guide. I decided to do this because the guide is very much a technical one, but it is best demonstrated with screenshots. Please don't eat me, Zitta [:)] (I have compressed the screenshots down anyway)

Technical Intro


I'll try and keep this simple, actually.

There are actually TWO interfaces in Everquest. The first of these can be referred to as the 'viewport'. It is the 3d texture-mapped interface that lets you, the player, 'see' the world of Norrath. Trees, buildings, mobs, other PCs, all get presented to you through the viewport. The second interface is the user-interaction interface. The part of the interface that lets you interact with the game, and with other players and NPCs. It consists of a whole number of windows, include group windows, chat windows, inventory, containers, etc. It's the bit that vanishes if you hit F10.

These two interfaces are pictured below - first the viewport, and then the windowed UI, just so as you know what I'm harping on about.




Click Images To Enlarge

In normal gameplay, the two interfaces are blended together, using the alpha-channel (the transparency, effectively) of the user interaction windows to show them on top of the viewport.

Rendering the viewport is what loads your graphics card and CPU the most. Rendering the UI windows alone, is a 'peasy low-power task, as it is all 2D, contains much less entropy, and updates much slower (except when everyone is groaning at one of Raz's jokes and flooding the guild chat window). However, alpha-blending the areas where the two interfaces overlap is also somewhat demanding on your hardware.
The Problem

Now, we have all experienced laggy gameplay, slow screen framerates, slow response of the UI when typing, and so forth. I'm not talking about the very serious LAG bug (that usually forces one to log), I'm talking about the general slowdown you see in some zones (PoK or Hollowshade, for example). The slower your hardware, the more zones you will experience this in. The solution most people adopt is to reduce the resolution they play at, say, dropping from 1024x768 to 800x600. This puts less stress on their graphics card, but leaves them with less space for extra chat windows and so forth.

Another part of the problem is that one of the biggest slowdowns on the graphics engine is the alpha-blending of the two layers. Hit F10 and run around a bit, then hit it again, and you'll see for yourself.

The Solution

The solution is actually dead simple. Keep your monitor at a high resolution, but reduce the size of the viewport. Then you can do two things. First, you reduce the area of hardcore texture mapping that makes your graphics card sweat, and second, you can move many of your interface windows to a part of the screen so that they do NOT overlap the viewport and do not cause all that alpha-blending.

The results are (imho) quite impressive, especially on slower machines. If you're interested, read on.

You achieve this using the /viewport command.

This re-sizes the viewport part of the interfaces, and re-positions it on the screen.

The command takes four numbers as parameters: x, y width, height. The x and y parameters tell Everquest how far from the top left corner of the screen you want the viewport to be offset. X is the horizontal distance, Y is the vertical distance. The width and height tell everquest how big you want the overall viewport to be.

By far the best way to illustrate this is with examples. But first, if you've read this far, I guess you're interested. So try typing:

/viewport 100 100 600 400

Regardless of the screen res you're running at, you will find you now have a 600x400 viewport, offset from the top left of your screen by 100 pixels on each axis. You will also find that your chat windows, buff windows, etc. can be moved outside of the viewport if you so choose.

You can go back to a full screen viewport at any time using:

/viewport reset

Make a social macro for the reset now, and stick it on an unused hotkey pad (I use pad 8, key 0).

For the following examples, I launched Everquest on a 15inch TiBook. The default screen resolution is 1280 x 854. I use four chat windows. I send Guild chat and tells to one window, combat-spam and other tosh to another, important spell and damage updates to a third, and skill-related info to a fourth. This way, I don't lose important info and tells amongst the spam. Blending those four chat windows doesn't help the performance any though, and the TiBook struggles anyhow with places like PoK and The Bazaar.

This first screenshot shows the default setup with a full screen viewport (it is just the two UIs above blended together. You should all be familiar with this appearance!).


Click to enlarge

Now, for this next screenshot, I used:

/viewport 0 0 1280 700


Click to enlarge

This keeps the viewport in the top left of the screen, and keeps it using the full width of the screen. But it leaves 154 pixels at the bottom of the screen, for three of my four chat windows.

I get better graphics performance in this mode.

I also keep a hotkey set up to just shrink the viewport in slower zones. For example, say you have a laptop that can run at 1024x768, but you play EQ at 800x600 so the slow zones don't really hurt. Well, I suggest you try playing EQ at 1024x768, but keep a macro like this on a hotkey:

/viewport 112 84 800 600

If you hit that hotkey, your viewport will shrink down to the same res you used to have, giving the same performance, but you still have the whole 1024x768 for your windows. You can use that hotkey when you enter a slow zone, or any other time you need to boost response and framerate (like on a raid with loads of folk about taxing your hardware)

The maths is quite straightforward. When you want to center but reduce your viewport, just subtract the size of the viewport from the full screen rez, and divide those numbers in two. Use those for X and Y.

So, 1024 - 800 = 224, divided by two = 112
768 - 600 = 168, divided by two = 84

The next screenshot shown for my TiBook in this mode used a command of:

/viewport 140 50 1000 600


Click to enlarge

Note how with this viewport config., almost all UI overlap (and therefore alpha-blending) is now avoided.

Now, you can of course have a number of these, each one reducing the viewport a little more. If you reduce the size of your viewport by 10% in each direction, you reduce the load on your graphics card by almost 20%. So, you can have several hotkeys. You can quickly work out which settings are best for different zones.

And, a final tip for all you tradeskillers out there. You know when you're trying to do 120 combines, and your mouse is jolting about the screen and you get slow responses to your clicks and so forth? Darn annoying isn't it?

Well, assuming you're somewhere safe where what is going on in the viewport doesn't matter (like, peering into a Forge in PoK), try this:

/viewport 0 0 200 200


Click to enlarge

That really takes the load off your graphics card big time, and you'll be amazed how much more responsive your window interface is while you do your combines.

So, to recap, the macros you need are:

/viewport reset --- to go back to full screen

/viewport 0 0 200 200 ---- for trade skilling etc.

And then, some of these (I've done the basic maths for you):

For EQ screen res of: try parameters of:
1600x1200 (KEI Graphics Card or wot?) 160 88 1280 1024
1280x1024 128 128 1024 768 and 240 212 800 600
1024x768 112 84 800 600 and 152 114 720 540

Enjoy. Get the most out of your screen and graphics card.!

For discussion on this guide, please Click Here

-TigerTugger

[qwkhyena]

OMFG...

I was getting ready to post a question on how to reduce my hardware setup at home and I happened upon this thread! I've been using 4 SEPARATE computers for my 4 accounts! Had I only known!!!11!1one...(Now I can set the p0rn server back up! My electricity bill thanks you all!)


However, now I have another question, since EQ now plays a bit better w/ alt+tab & mouse, should I try EQW/wineq or stick it out w/ just EQ? Also, any major preferences/differences between EQW and wineq?

<wrings hands evilly>
Now I'll need to build a super computer! Yes yes! A dual CPU bohemoth w/ 2 PCI-E slots running 2 video cards in SLI mode! It will need 4GB of ram and 2-10k sata drives running in RAID 0. It will need a dualhead monitor configuration...now..for a name...
</wrings hands evilly>

[A_Druid_00]

I prefer WinEQ pro for the separation of the eqclient ini files so I can run EQ from the same directory on all 4 instances of my PC. I also like the built in tiling of windows so I can see all 4 sessions at the same time.

[qwkhyena]

Very nice. I'll need to try all four on one box tiled. I'd like to setup an extra monitor and have 3 accounts on one running macros w/ my tank on the main display. I'm still in a state of shock and kicking myself. I can't wait to get home and try it out! I've been using 4 separate computers/monitors/keyboards/mice for a couple years now. Course now that monks can mitigate damage I can probably just ditch the dru/clr accounts and run him w/ the shm (dru & clr formed a nice CH chain )


UPDATE: Got WinEQ 2, paid for pro subscription, and I'm one happy camper! Very nice software!