EQ Classic HD

What is EQ Classic HD?

EQ Classic HD is an ongoing project by Cucumbers, Paulgiamatti, Sorn, and Zaela to graphically enhance, upscale, retexture, and reimagine classic EverQuest. We primarily deal with textures, although our package does correct some minor model animation bugs and transparency issues.

Who does what?

Cucumbers founded the project in 2016 after being inspired by Chebby (aka Psycher), Nysus, and Xevin's custom textures. He is the upscaling guru, and he has retextured a huge amount of stuff by hand, most notably various Kunark bladed weapons, shields, various classic weapons and held items, and some armor textures.

Paulgiamatti came on board originally as a tester, but ended up contributing tons of item retexturing as well as handling a number of tasks such as project management, community outreach, and install kit development.

Zaela makes texture life easier. As well as being the author of various indispensable utilities such as EQGExport and WLD Editor Suite, his coding skills and deep knowledge of client-related technicalities have allowed us to include various transparency, particle, and model animation fixes.

Sorn is our retouching artist. Her masterful reworks include all character faces and a few character body textures.

What does it do?

• All player character textures (armor, held items, weapons, faces) have been upscaled, retouched, or completely redone. Textures redone in the past by Nysus, Xevin, and Joyelle are also included.

• All player character textures have been converted to .dds to conserve space, memory, and allow for mipmaps.

• Transparency fixes pre-applied and minor Velious helmet visor tweaks.

• Various animation and epic particle fixes.

How do I get it?

Download

For Project1999: [1]
For The Al'Kabor Project: [2]

After opening the download link, click the Download button in the upper right-hand corner, then click "Download anyway".

Install

For Windows, simply extract the EQClassicHD folder to a location of your choice, then run install.bat (double-click, or right-click and select Open).

A couple notes about the Windows installer: it will request administrative privileges, so if you have EQ running it will probably black out your EQ window (just a forewarning because that's super annoying for some people). It will prompt you for your EverQuest directory and automatically create backups of all of your current textures, so to make uninstalling much easier it's recommended that you use install and uninstall.bat. They can be run just like any executable - double-click, or right-click and select Open. The installer and uninstaller will only work if some certain conditions are met.

• install.bat conditions: before install.bat will run, it must be outside of your EverQuest folder and in a folder with the downloaded install files.
• uninstall.bat conditions: before uninstall.bat will run, you must have already run the installer which will have created backups of all of your current textures.

So to make things easy, just unzip the EQClassicHD folder somewhere, then simply run install.bat within that folder. It will auto-backup all of your current stuff, and if you want to stop using EQ Classic HD, all you have to do is run uninstall.bat to restore everything back to how it was before.

You can extract the S3Ds into your EverQuest directory and overwrite your current stuff if you want, but then if you want to uninstall EQ Classic HD you'll have to manually replace those S3Ds with the originals. Here are links to the original EQ textures in case you need to do this and you forgot to backup your stuff beforehand:

High-resolution textures: [3] Low-resolution textures: [4]

For non-Windows, backup the following files in your EverQuest folder (create a folder called "S3D Backups" and move the following files into that folder):

• gequip.s3d
• gequip2.s3d
• global_chr.s3d
• global4_chr.s3d
• global17_amr.s3d
• global18_amr.s3d
• global19_amr.s3d
• global20_amr.s3d
• global21_amr.s3d
• global22_amr.s3d
• global23_amr.s3d
• globalfroglok_chr.s3d
• growthplane_chr.s3d

Now extract or copy the .S3D files contained in the EQClassicHD folder to your EverQuest directory.