Here is an update on the SoD client that I have been posting around on a few of the popular EQEmu server forums. Figured I would share it here as well to keep everyone informed of the status:
Currently, as of now, the sale of SoD from steam for $2.50 is still going even though it is well after March 28th when it said the sale was supposed to end. If you don't have your copy of SoD yet, I recommend getting one before the sale ends!
Link to Steam for getting the SoD client for EQEmu:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/24130/
Currently, we are still waiting on Rogean to update the EQEmu Public Login Server to work with SoD, but that should hopefully happen any day now.
The EQEmu developers have been hard at work to get the SoD client caught up with SoF and beyond and even though it has been less than 2 weeks that we have been working on it, it is already nearly done! All major systems seem to function very well. We have resolved just about all of the known issues with the SoD client already and only have a couple of minor issues left to work on until we start getting more bug reports from players actually playing and testing all systems. As soon as the Login Server is allowing SoD clients to log in, any server that is current with the SVN will be able to allow SoD clients to start playing immediately.
I have left my SoD client logged into my test server every day since I was first able to get in over a week ago, and have not crashed a single time other than while we were working on some development stuff. So, the client itself is definitely much more stable than SoF and probably even more stable than Titanium.
It has built-in multi-core CPU support that means you won't need to worry about adding any multi-core fixes or anything to be able to run SoD. It also assigns EQ to a single core per session you have up and will assign your first session to 1 core, and your next EQ session to the next available core and so on. This means that boxing performance should be better than normal on most other clients.
SoD also has a feature to let you set the frame rate for EQ windows in the background, which further helps with boxing performance. One nice improvement that SoD has over SoF is that it has an option that will let you lock the window size when in windowed mode, which prevents accidental window resizing and a potential crash. I haven't seen a single issue from switching windows when boxing on SoD so far.
I also notice that SoD does not spike your CPU to 100% and keep it there like Titanium and SoF can do sometimes. SoD only seems to use the CPU amount that it actually needs, so I think that helps with performance and stability as well.
The SoD client also works much better with custom UIs than SoF did, since SoF has a known bug with UIs that was worked out before the SoD client came out. I have tested quite a few UIs on SoD, and so far, it seems to work with many of the UIs from the beginning of 2009 up to even the most current UIs out there. There may need to be some slight adjustments needed for custom UIs from different expansions (like Underfoot) to work 100% correctly on SoD, but in general they seem to work well for the most part.
The SoF client took us months of work to get it to the point we now have SoD now in less than 2 weeks! I expect some very nice things from the SoD client and again am recommending that everyone who can afford the $2.50 to get it right now and download it before the sale ends.
If you are interested on the current development status of SoD, you can check the development tracking thread for it here:
http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=30909
As you can see, there are not many issues with it that we are aware of that haven't already been resolved. I have even been going back through some of the remaining SoF issues that also exist in SoD and resolving them too. My hopes are that this will be the next mainstream EQEmu client and will replace Titanium. The more people that get it now, the better.
If there are any questions or concerns, post them here and I will answer what I can
Linear Mode
