Improving Performances

During the event For The Realm that took place on the weekend of the 12-13-14th of January 2024, many people experienced the limits of DAoC's client. A lot of solutions have been thrown around Discord and in game, so I've tried to gather them all here to help everyone.

Understanding the problem

While you could imagine a game from 2001 would run easily on a modern computer, it isn't so simple.

When the game engine was created, CPUs didn't have multiple cores.

When the game engine was created, GPUs were a new thing.

When the game engine was created, Windows was running in 32-bits, limiting its ability to handle bigger resources like RAM over 2 GB.

Because of all this, the performances of the client are severely limited, even on the most high end of computer. Your 4090 graphic card that can run Cyberpunk 2077 with full on RTX doesn't matter when the game barely recognises it as existing. Your 64 GB RAM that can load massive training AI models doesn't matter when the game cannot count above 2 GB. Your 24-core CPU doesn't matter if the game only sees 1.

Faster Loading Times

The Eden Staff made a post about this in the discord server. You can find it here.

Connection Issues

Because of the server's location in Germany, a lot of players in North America are having lag and LD's. This is honestly because US providers are awful, there's no way to avoid that... but there's a few things that could help.

Use 1.1.1.1's Warp

Cloudflare has a DNS service called 1.1.1.1 that is designed to be faster than any regular DNS. Setting it as your main DNS does help for many things, but usually will do nothing for your DAOC problems.

However, they also have a service called Warp, which is free and super easy to install and turn on. Many people have reported that this simple tool helped them tremendously.

Use a VPN

VPNs are powerful tools, creating a tunnel between you and a set destination. In a general sense, this usually throttles your internet, but for specific uses, it helps. In our case, this allows you to bypass the bad routing between you and your ISP. There are free VPNs out there, but most proper gaming VPNs might cost you a few bucks a month or year.

Favoured destinations are in France or Northern Europe. Direct VPNs to Germany have been reported to fail often.

In Game Options

These are tips you can apply back and forth while playing, even make macros for, to adapt your performances to your current situation.

Turning Off Nameplates

The amount of nameplates shown by your game impact surprisingly much your performances.
While in game, in your options, you can uncheck multiple options easily.

I usually run with only Enemy Players, Groupmates and because I like it fancy, Guildmates. You probably want to have Monsters/NPCs displayed, but when there are many pets around, it's also a problem.

Lowering the amount of effects displayed

DAOC has a surprisingly large amount of spell effects compared to other MMOs, and while they do give a lot of information about what's going on (Mezzes, bombs, stuns...), deactivating them will help your performances.

/effects have two options, all or none. This is a default DAOC command. Turning everything off certainly helps, but limits what you can understand from the game.
/spelleffects has many options, and is a workaround added by Eden. Simply type it in game to see the various levels available. For example, you could try /spelleffects group to limit the effects to only your groups, /spelleffects self for only your character...

Turning Floating Messages Off

While floating messages are awesome, some have reported it can impact very heavily the performances of your game and crash it.
In situations with a lot of players, I encourage you to do /float off. You can always /float on as needed.

Turning off cloaks

Cloaks are cool. Everyone having their guild emblem out is cool. Unfortunately, loading 600 emblems at the same time is a lot of load for everyone's computer.

NEW as of 15/01: The devs have added a new command to the game: /cloak off|on will hide/show cloaks from everyone!

Unfortunately you can't turn off other people's cloaks, only your own. For everyone's sake, I would recommend as many players as possible to turn off their cloaks using /cloak to reduce the load on everyone's screens.

Character Selection Options

There are many graphical options that are available in the options in the character selection screen. These are very impactful and can really help your performances.

Water Options

This is the most resource intensive that I've found. You want to set this to Classic Water, especially if you've noticed your game lagging every time your camera turns even slightly toward any water in game. Yes, the water will be pretty dull looking, but it doesn't hinder your gameplay (I actually find it easier to see players in the water like this) and completely removes this "looking at water" lag for me.

Clip Plane Distance

The clip distance is the distance at which your game displays models (trees, buildings, players, etc) and not just terrain.
Reducing the clip distance will always improve your performances, as this mechanically means less things are displayed on your screen.

Unfortunately, this can have pretty big gameplay consequences, as you can imagine.

However, I would heavily recommend using that in TOA zones, as high distance rendering of the water there can cause huge FPS drops.

Everything Else

The impact isn't as impressive in my experience, but you can test these parameters:

Deactivate Dynamic Shadows
Deactivate Atlantis Trees and Atlantis Terrain
In the Configure Figure Versions... menu, switch everything from Catacombs models (newer, higher resolution), to Classic (older, lower resolution).

Outside of the game

There are a couple of 'hacks' that can be tested out of game. These are the most "dangerous" to try as they affect your computer's settings, and they're certainly more complicated to use, but they have been proven to increase performances greatly.

Set game priority to High

Windows manages each process with a priority system. Usually, it's doing good, and the fullscreen application will get as much resources as necessary. For some reason, DAOC doesn't get as well a treatment as most games, but we can remedy this by setting this priority manually.

Why not Realtime?

Technically, Realtime is the highest priority available in Windows. You'd think this is what you want your game set as, then, right?
Unfortunately, highest priority means exactly what it says. This means it's higher priority than mouse input, keyboard input, or disk cache. It can suck up your entire processor, and since no interactive event will be processed anymore, you can entirely lock your computer.
Simply set the game to High priority, and it'll be more than enough.

Setting it up every time

This is the easier way to do it, but you'll need to re-do the same manipulation every time you restart the game. This means after each LD, too.

Open your Task Manager. You can do this by pressing ctrl+alt+delete on your keyboard, and choosing Task Manager.
Go into the Details tab. Instead of a list of applications, you should see a list of .exe files such.
Find game.dll in the list, with the DAOC icon next to it.
Right click on it. Select Set Priority, and then High.

Making this a permanent setting

Once you've done the above method once, and noticed a significant upgrade in your FPS, you might want to set this as a permanent setting.

Multiple methods to do this

I have found multiple methods to do this, and none are really straightforward. I'll present you the only one that worked for me. I tried editing the registry manually, but it didn't work at all. I tried editing the shortcut, but since the game is launched through Eden, it doesn't work either.
This requires installing another software, but I think it's worth it.

Install Process Hacker. This is a powerful, free and open source replacement to your Task Manager. I think this method might work with the portable version that doesn't need to be installed, but I haven't tested it.
Run Process Hacker as Admin.
Launch Eden and Dark Age of Camelot.
Find DAoC in Process Hacker. This should be game.dll under the EdenLauncher.exe process.
Right click > Priority > High, then Right click > Priority > Save for game.dll
Now you can close DAoC, and start it up again. Hopefully, you can then check in Process Hacker the current priority level and see that it's once again set to High.

Increase the RAM available to the game

No longer necessary

Eden's launcher now actually patches the game for you to use the 4GB hack automatically!
Thanks to the devs for this little boost to our old ass game ♡

As a 32 bit program (Windows x86), DAoC is only capable of managing up to 2GB of RAM at a time. Adding more memory can help prevent some crashes, and help with performances. This can be fixed using the 4GB Patch.