Great work.
Whats the benefit of switching to a newer client?
Here is a list off the top of my head in no particular order:
1. Platinum no longer adds weight to your character.
2. Groups can now see each other's Mana and Endurance in the group window.
3. You can now see the buffs that other players have on them in the target buff window.
4. Most UIs from 2009 to now work with SoD with little to no extra changes needed.
5. You can now copy the UI setup from one character to another from in-game. This means you set 1 character up perfectly, and all of your other chars can just copy it
6. You can set the frame rate of EQ windows running in the background, which makes boxing performance considerably nicer depending on how you set it.
7. You can re-size your window size to any size by stretching it like SoF, but in SoD, you can also lock the size so you don't accidentally re-size it.
8. SoD has multi-core support and works very well with modern PC hardware. It sets your first instance of EQ to only use 1 CPU core, and if you start a second instance of EQ, it sets it to the next available CPU core and so on, so it helps balance CPU load when multiboxing.
9. WinEQ is obsolete in SoD
10. SoD is the most stable client I have seen by far, even more stable than Titanium. It has never crashed for me other than when I caused crashes while doing dev work on it. And I have been logged in 24X7 since I first got it working.
11. I haven't done too much testing with it yet, but I hear SoD is amazing for people who multi-box.
12. SoD has lighting that is much better than Titanium, so you will instantly notice that everything just looks better.
13. Facial features while using illusions works perfectly, where previous clients have minor issues with them.
14. Zoning time is generally noticeably faster.
15. Levitate no longer causes you to bob up and down and instead you just float there.
16. Holding down left click can now be used to rotate around your character while in 3rd person view, just like most current MMOs allow.
Here is a more complete list of changes between SoF to SoD in relation to the client itself, directly from the SOE patch notes:
http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showpost.php?p=185786&postcount=45Plus, all of the new features available in SoF that aren't available in Titanium are also in SoD, so that adds a ton of new stuff there as well that I am not even counting here.
Not to mention that it includes all of the SoF content, which is a huge amount of content for server admins to be able to make use of as well as the SoD content, which itself includes:
1. 20 completely new zones, and some revamps of old zones that are really cool.
2. 40 new NPC races including multiple mounts
3. Many new Global Races, including some older ones that are nice to have loaded globally.
4. Dozens of new weapon models. I haven't even counted them yet, but I assume there are quite a few.
5. Dozens of new Item Icons.
Really, considering the short amount of time we have been working on SoD so far, it is very far along and fully playable. There are still a few minor issues remaining, but we are knocking them all out very quickly. I think it is already the best client EQEmu has had yet, and it will only continue to get better. Even if you are playing on a server that might not make use of the SoF or SoD content, the SoD client has clear benefits that make it worth upgrading to. It is just an all-around-great client.
