The post about shrinking the base client to 60MB: http://kriegshauser.blogspot.com/

It is great to hear they are considering this sort of implementation into EQ2, as for how far-reaching it could be in the emulator is hard to say at this point, but it would be cool for server owners who want custom content (as I said if they implement it in a creative way, not locked down to sony content).

This should be a goal of any MMO these days which requires 1GB+ to play, since now we mostly get our games online no one wants to stare at the progress bar when they already have the base files to get going. We don't need the lvl 50 zones yet when we are starting out on lvl 1 content lol

This is very interesting indeed. Eventually would the emulator move in this sort of direction, or is it going to go as far as it can in its current form and stop when they implement streaming?

Nice that delivery times will drop to almost nothing - but not "owning" the assets locally pretty much will halt further progress on gaming emulators, specifically if that content is streamed from the publisher only. Ie., no option to download locally and store everything, even if we want to. However... there are (gasp) gamers who do not have super high-speed connections for such things (imagine Ilythor's situation). How will they feed the limited bandwidth people 500,000 assets every time they want to play the game? That would make no sense.

Far as I am concerned, EQ2Emulator will be more than playable for years to come, even without one more expansion passed TSO. If this is the future of SOE's delivery, so be it. Collecting our full 5 expansions worth of content becomes even that much more critical ASAP.

While it may be cool, they will probably severely limit any new player joining, and maybe even give the old players a reason to stop. This is going to a huge amount of data transfer that happens continuously between client and server. It's monumentally suicidal to the project. I can play MMO's thanks to the fact that all of the data is client side, all I get is locations and information on who is wearing what etc and it just loads that from my end. At least in this current set up its only one huge download, in this new set up it's just an insane amount of data to cope with every month.

That's just my two cents.

To you SoE; I bid you good day!

Well he mentioned the technology already exists in sony's other game Free Realms and seems to work fine there. But just from even looking over the website, I highly doubt as much information needs to be sent as EverQuestII requires. But who knows!

No ilythor is right in his respect since he has a cap which I highly doubt Sony will take that into play. Ofcourse the everyday American doesn't have any problems with this kind of design because we are pretty lucky, almost every other country has daily/weekly/monthly caps. Although most companies have some invisible cap in the US it is much higher than anyone could really reach on a monthly basis (unless you are downloading top speed 24/7 the entire month).

And to think that the 3D world parts of Europe can piggy back off the EU's T3 Landline. Australia's a first world country... mate!

John Adams wrote:Nice that delivery times will drop to almost nothing - but not "owning" the assets locally pretty much will halt further progress on gaming emulators, specifically if that content is streamed from the publisher only. Ie., no option to download locally and store everything, even if we want to. However... there are (gasp) gamers who do not have super high-speed connections for such things (imagine Ilythor's situation). How will they feed the limited bandwidth people 500,000 assets every time they want to play the game? That would make no sense.

Far as I am concerned, EQ2Emulator will be more than playable for years to come, even without one more expansion passed TSO. If this is the future of SOE's delivery, so be it. Collecting our full 5 expansions worth of content becomes even that much more critical ASAP.

This quote from a SOE dev might quell your fear John

From Rothgar's initial post:

"When the streaming client leaves beta we will not be forcing it on any existing players. You will always have the choice of running the existing patcher and downloading all assets prior to entering the game. The streaming client will provide a nice alternative for new installations or for computers that you don't update often. With the streaming client you'll only need to download a resource when its required."

*looks at his 3g dongle and cries*

Glad to hear that Zco, it quelled my fears at least.