EQ on the Road

[Ozadar]

Does anybody know how to run EQ on a flash drive? When I go on the road for my job, I take my business laptop with me. Was wondering if it was possible to load EQ on a flash drive and run it on the laptop. Also, how big the flash drive would have to be.

Thanks!

Ozadar of the 70th Corpse
Erudite Tradeskiller of Zek
Member of 1450 Club

Baking - 264
Brewing - 250
Fletching - 251
Jewelry - 266
Pottery - 249
Smithing - 233
Tailoring - 223
Research - 200
Fishing - 200

(+5-8% to all skills) + Salvage 3

[KyrosKrane]

It would have to be one hell of a huge flash drive. My current EQ folder, excluding logs and custom UI but including maps, is already over 4GB. That will probably go up a couple of hundred megs as I download TSS. So you'd need a flash drive bigger than 4GB, which I don't believe exist on the market yet. (There are micro-sized hard drives which are about 2-3 times the physical size of a flash drive; those may go past 4GB, but I'm not sure.)

Aside from size, a bigger consideration is speed. Flash drives, by and large, are slow. It takes a sizeable amount of time to read information off a flash drive, which means your zoning time will be horrid. It may also affect in-game performance a bit, particularly if you play with log files on.

If you can find a flash drive big enough and fast enough, EQ should work just fine on it. Just copy your entire EQ folder from your desktop to the flash drive.

Another consideration is to make sure your laptop can handle games. Most laptops have some sort of cheap, built-in video card. (The video card is what handles drawing graphics on the screen.) EQ will work with these, but it will be painfully slow. I'd suggest turning off almost all the bells and whistles in this case. If your laptop has a discrete video card built in (like a Radeon-based chipset from ATI or a GeForce based one from nVidia), then you'll get much greater performance.

Finally, you'll want to make sure your laptop has enough CPU horsepower and RAM to handle EQ. Any reasonably modern laptop (from the last year or two) should be fine on CPU power, though of course, the faster the better. For RAM, you should have at least 512MB, and I'd strongly recommend 1GB. EQ will run with less than 512MB, but again, performance will be abysmal.

[Ngreth Thergn]

It would have to be one hell of a huge flash drive. My current EQ folder, excluding logs and custom UI but including maps, is already over 4GB. That will probably go up a couple of hundred megs as I download TSS. So you'd need a flash drive bigger than 4GB, which I don't believe exist on the market yet. (There are micro-sized hard drives which are about 2-3 times the physical size of a flash drive; those may go past 4GB, but I'm not sure.)

Aside from size, a bigger consideration is speed. Flash drives, by and large, are slow. It takes a sizeable amount of time to read information off a flash drive, which means your zoning time will be horrid. It may also affect in-game performance a bit, particularly if you play with log files on.

If you can find a flash drive big enough and fast enough, EQ should work just fine on it. Just copy your entire EQ folder from your desktop to the flash drive.

Another consideration is to make sure your laptop can handle games. Most laptops have some sort of cheap, built-in video card. (The video card is what handles drawing graphics on the screen.) EQ will work with these, but it will be painfully slow. I'd suggest turning off almost all the bells and whistles in this case. If your laptop has a discrete video card built in (like a Radeon-based chipset from ATI or a GeForce based one from nVidia), then you'll get much greater performance.

Finally, you'll want to make sure your laptop has enough CPU horsepower and RAM to handle EQ. Any reasonably modern laptop (from the last year or two) should be fine on CPU power, though of course, the faster the better. For RAM, you should have at least 512MB, and I'd strongly recommend 1GB. EQ will run with less than 512MB, but again, performance will be abysmal.

As for the size... there is something you can do about it.

If you know you are only going to be in certain zones, even just certain expansions...

before you make you copy, start a patch, and in the patching options turn off the updates to expansions. (I am sure there is an ini file for this but I do not know which ti is)

since your HDD probably has more space... copy your whole EQ directory to another folder.

Then... go into the EQ folder ans start deleting files with the extension .eqg that are not in zones you plan to go to. So for example. arcstone.eqg is for wall of arcstone. Sometimes the names may not make a lot of sense. This is often because the name of the zone changed after that file was made.

Do not delete any three character EQG's those are NPC models.

Do not delete any original EQ zones nor zones that are included in "general" distribution, these will just re-patch... it will not be saving you space.

You can significantly save space this way.

Here is the caveat.

If you go to one of the zones you deleted, EQ will crash, and your account will be stuck in EQ for the standard "stuck account" time (5-15 minutes). And then... That character will be stuck and unusable until you get that zone file patched/copied.

[Alasya]

Seagate makes large capacity pocket drives. They are round and about 2" in diameter. I bought a 6GB one for work because I used to have to carry 3 flash drives around for all the crap I need to have accessible (I travel for work). My 6GB one was $89 but now I see they also have an 8GB. Not sure how well it would work for running EQ, but here's the link.

http://www.seagate.com/products/retail/pocket/

[Nolrog]

before you make you copy, start a patch, and in the patching options turn off the updates to expansions. (I am sure there is an ini file for this but I do not know which ti is)

You can go into the advanced section of the patcher, and uncheck the boxes of the expansions you don't want to patch. That will stop them from being updated.

since your HDD probably has more space... copy your whole EQ directory to another folder.

Then... go into the EQ folder ans start deleting files with the extension .eqg that are not in zones you plan to go to.

Might be easier to move just the patcher to a new folder, and then only patch what you intend to use. Either way, you should definitely repatch after you do this, just in case you accidentally deleted one of the critical files.

And then... That character will be stuck and unusable until you get that zone file patched/copied.

You can also wait 6 hours off line, and then use "return home".

N

[Ozadar]

Sounds like the pocket HD is the ticket. For $96, I can get a fairly comparable HD to my own HD, except maybe the transfer speeds. Also, the tip for eliminating EQG files was really good. I've been wanting to clean up that directory anyway, and with a few zones going poof lately, I'm sure those can go.

Hmm, but the video is Intel onboard graphics accelerator. It has 128MB, but might not be up to the task as stated earlier.

Thanks all!

Ozadar of the 70th Corpse
Erudite Tradeskiller of Zek
Member of 1450 Club

Baking - 264
Brewing - 250
Fletching - 251
Jewelry - 266
Pottery - 249
Smithing - 233
Tailoring - 223
Research - 200
Fishing - 200

(+5-8% to all skills) + Salvage 3

[tomojo]

Hmm, but the video is Intel onboard graphics accelerator. It has 128MB, but might not be up to the task as stated earlier.

Actually, the high end on-board video will usually work well if you have enough main memory.

Ad 512 Meg of memory isn't enough, you need at least 768 and preferably 1 Gig.

What happen's is, every 1 MB used by the shared video reduces the memory available by more than 1 MB of memory available to the processor for game execution.

Windows XP needs 256MB just to run within the physical memory, anything less will mean that windows has to do swapping just to run.

Running EQ with all the graphics options set to their highest with a video board that has its own memory makes the memory usage go over 512 MB and it will run with swapping, but you will hardly notice it.

I run EQ on a computer with 1 GB of memory with an ATI shared memory video board set for 256MB video sharing, I have all the video modes on and set for best graphics. When I check memory usage, it is anywhere from 960 MB up to 1.12 GB alocated. Reducing the video share to 128 MB, the physical memory alocation drops to around 780 MB.

I can run through PoK with no lag, and the zone with the worst lag I've seen is Nek Forest after its revamp.

The thing is, shared memory video uses your system ram, which means you need at least that much more system ram over 512 MB just to run cleanly at all. The shared memory won't be as good as a video with its own memory, but it is the disk swapping when the system runs out of system ram that causes the great majority of the slowdown.

I've seen where people have high end processor and video board and do nothing but complain about slow performance of their computer only to see that they went cheap on the memory and only got 256 MB which has a hard time handling Windows XP with Notepad, much less any graphic intensive program.

Kind of sad, really...

[Lillanu]

I can run through PoK with no lag, and the zone with the worst lag I've seen is Nek Forest after its revamp.

Lag also has to do with how good your internet connection is. Top of the line computer with 56k will definately lag in pok o.0.

[mewkus]

Depending on how strict your company is about using their laptop for playing games and other 'things' while traveling, here's what I use to do. I went and bought another 2.5" hard drive and when I got back to the hotel room at the end of the day, I would just swap out the 'work' disk and load my playing disk. I've got a Dell Inspiron and the whole procedure takes about 3 minutes. The only other difficulty is that you have to go through the pains of installing either xp or 2k on the 2nd hard driver. But, this way, there's no trace of having been playing games (or any other 'activities') on their machine.

[munwin]

My biggest suggestion:

Copy your current EQ file to a DVD. Then copy the DVD to your HD on your laptop. will save you 548348.53 hours of downloads when you run EQ for the first time on the new machine.

And i have been playing EQ on my laptop...wife fried my PC while i was away..works just great, actually better than my PC ever did.

Basic hp pavilion ze4900 right off the shelf no modifications.

Munwin