EverQuest II

What works

Everything from install to play - including the card game.

 

What does not

Graphics corruption - varies by graphic mode -

fbo - Water and some textures.

pbuffer - picture/picture (minimize, Maximize or change graphic or lighting resolution and not have game crash fixes), paper doll, some textures

backbuffer - paper doll, some textures, some spells (like invisability) can cause the screen to become garbled.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Have not played extensivly with graphic setting in game under all graphic modes.  

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Some graphic settings like Atmospheric Bloom and Hear Shimmer get rid of a strange problem with graphics. The best graphics for me seems to be pbuffer when I can get the picture and picture to fix. Since it crashes about 80% of time time when I try to fix it I tend to use fbo. pbuffer seems to crash less often for me but fbo has some graphic glitches with certain spells that make the game difficult to play. I am running a Quad Core with 2Gigs of RAM and an nVidia 8800GT Running on a reiserfs partition.

Suggested Registry Settings:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER

    Software
        Wine
           Direct3D

DirectDrawRenderer -> opengl

OffScreenRenderingMode -> fbo (with newer video cards)

PixelShaderMode -> enabled

RenderTargetLockMode -> texdraw

1. Requirements: Please make sure your system meets these specs.
   
   • MUST have wine > 0.9.49. Everquest 2 will not work with earlier wine versions.
     
   • Runs slowly, if at all with 512MB RAM. 2GB+ recommended.
   • Graphics cards that support pixel shaders 3.0 are known to work: refs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_shader
     
   • GeForce series 6+
   • Intel GMA 950+
   • Radeon R520+ (X1300+)
   • Todo: test SiS Mirage 4
   • glxinfo | grep direct # should say yes. If not, check your distro's docs for setting up accelerated video drivers.
     
2. Install, or copy working game folder from windows partition. If anyone can confirm that it installs ok post below.
   
3. Add r_font_ft 0 to eq2.ini
4. wine_gecko crashes the patcher screen (no BITS support in wine yet. See bug 6253) so if you want to run patcher, rename the HKCU/wine/MSHTML that should disable Gecko. or You can not install wine_gecko.
   
5. Run the patcher you should be able to launch the game from the patcher

Download here for new players:

http://download.station.sony.com/patch/download/eq2/EQ2trialinstaller.exe

or here for existing players:

http://download.station.sony.com/patch/download/eq2/eq2-us.zip

I recommend downloading PyEQ2MAP:

http://www.eq2interface.com/downloads/info4863-PyEQ2MAPUpdaterUNOFFICIALforLinux.html

If you would rather use the old perl script posted by Stefan Klein you might be able to get it working by following the next steps, but I'm not making any promises:

1) Change the $basefile = "extra_file.xml" to $basefile = "file_list.xml";
2) Add the following directories to your UI ($eq2mapdir) folder if they don't exist:
* POI
* eq2map2
* images
* images/maps
* images/icons
3) Run the script
4) If you're experiencing problems in the game you might need to delete the file 'eq2ui_mainhud_map.xml' in your UI folder.

**OLD SCRIPT by Stefan Klein on Monday December 10th 2007, 14:37
Hacked a small perl script to update EQ2MAP.
Edit $eq2mapdir to the full path of your installation, fix http in $baseurl.
use at own risk. **

--------------------------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/perl

use XML::Simple;

$eq2mapdir = ".. PATH TO WINEDIR .. drive_c/Program Files/Sony/EverQuest\ II/UI/EQ2MAP/";


$baseurl = "h t t p : / / maps.eq2interface.com/POI_files/";
$basefile = "extrafile_list.xml";

my $mainfile = `wget -q -O - $baseurl$basefile`;

my $ref = XMLin($mainfile, SuppressEmpty =>'');

foreach my $file (@{$ref->{'Extra'}}) {
if (-e $eq2mapdir . $file->{LocalPath} . $file->{FileName}) {
($md5, $filename) = split(/ /,`md5sum \"$eq2mapdir$file->{LocalPath}$file->{FileName}\"`);
if ("$file->{MD5}" eq "$md5" ) {
next;
}
}

print "downloading $file->{FileName}: \t ";

`wget -q -O \"$eq2mapdir$file->{LocalPath}$file->{FileName}\" \"$baseurl$file->{ServerPath}$file->{FileName}\"`;

print " finished\n";
}

PLEASE DO NOT POST "Sentinel's Fate" test results under the "Shadow Odyssey"!
You may select the Sentinel's Fate version of EQ2 by scrolling to the top of your screen, clicking on EverQuest 2 in the game hierarchy, and then, at the next page, clicking Sentinel's Fate.

Note From Maintainer djdunn,

Remember that many of the graphical options in everquest2 even on Windows are themselves buggy.  Many of them don't work right if at all on windows.  On top of this Many of the Windows API calls are far from well designed and many of the Devs problems with this project is trying to recreate broken API calls to perform and have exactly the same bugs as the original windows API.  On top of this understand that Wine has been developed for over 15 years and you may not be able to get this game to work on your hardware.  Compared to Everquest, or WoW or even Guildwars, Everquest2 takes a lot more resources.

Please remember a few months ago this game didn't work at all.   I as a maintainer do give this game a silver rating, but also with an application so graphical and hardware intensive you have to have your Linux in really good shape.  without much clutter, without a lot of running background processes. And the processes you are running have to be configured well to do what you need and configured to not do what you dont need them to do.

My biggest suggestion is that if you don't have your linux box configured the way you like, or your not getting the performance you would like off of you linux box and you don't like the performance you get from trying to play EQ2 on Linux.  This is probably not the way to go, I would really suggest sticking with Windows.

Note From Maintainer John Beaulieu, 

Please do not edit your eq2_recent.ini. There has been some confusion over this. This file should never be edited and if you do it will be overwritten by eq2 at some point. It is not a static file. The file that you may edit is eq2.ini. If you don't have the file when you need to edit it just create it.

This version should probably be deleted. I'm fairly certain people are posting test data here that belongs on Sentinel's Fate. I'm not the only maintainer now, so I'm not going to just delete it, but that would be my inclination if I was still the only maintainer. +1 ... -cww

The station launcher is no longer supported by SOE. Launchpad 4 is now the default launcher. Using any other will cause it to upgrade itself to Launchpad 4. It can be downloaded directly from:

http://launch.soe.com/eq2//

The game requires you to run the newest version of the game, so nobody uses an older version. Because of this, the only "versions" we maintain are the full install client and the streaming install client. Please place all test results in the proper one.

 EverQuest II Extended has been merged with the Live game. The Steam version is a wrapper around the Full Install Client and still uses Launchpad.