EverQuest uses binary space partition for its zones. It divides up the geometry into regions as does the Quake engine. What you are left with is geometry with far more polygons than when it was viewed in the editor. The EQ engine ran on old hardware and handled these extra polygons with small regions, a PVS pretty small clip planes. When you are looking at the zone BSP, you are looking at it post division. By importing it into Unity and Unreal, you are using models that are far more complex than they need to be. Simple faces are often subdivided into dozens of polygons. This makes it a really bad candidate for BSP based engines as they will often subdivide the level again when they are compiled.
I played around with importing the maps into the Unreal engine and got it working fine but you end up with something that is not as optimized as it could be. Sure, newer engines and machines can take the brunt and still manage reasonable frames but the joy of writing your own engine for me is that I can run Greater Faydark at 2500+ frames per second without any of the unnecessary overhead.
Couple all of this with the fact that when you extract/modify/distribute any of the files within the S3D archives, you are playing a very dangerous game. Sony hasn't been shy about having their legal team deal with copyright infringement. EQEmulator doesn't distribute any copyrighted files and I think we can credit it as part of the reason they have remained relatively undisturbed. A few posts above this is a link to extracted copyrighted files. I realize it's on another forum but again, that really is a game you don't want to play. And yes, I have been down that road.
In answer to your question, if after all this, you still insist on importing assets into an engine, make sure you are using a format that is supported. There are plenty of guides about importing static meshes that have been made in any of the big professional modeling programs and there are a few posts on extracting the zone geometry.
Cheers
|