IDEAS FOR RYZOM

Since both the particle effects for spells and the sound for same are clientside based as far as I can tell, it is probably something in your system that is interfering.  Even other people's animations are client based, though there is a download trigger to tell your client to invoke the effect. (Particle effects for things like fog involve downloaded triggers so there is an effect on bandwidth there.  Ditto for mass battles where the server has to update the actions of many many players and NPCs.)

I found, for instance, that I couldn't get good sound if I was running a streaming radio station or any other use of my sound codecs.  (Streaming radio had two effects, one related to bandwidth and one to resource usage but even local music interfered.)

Ryzom is a memory and cpu hog, pure and simple. The single biggest thing you can do to improve performance is have at *least* 2GB of memory. By default it assigns itself to Core 1 (or core 0 if you count that way). If you have a dual core processor you can make things much better (especially for dual clients) by assigning one to each.  If you have some other application that also works "badly" (i.e. forces itself into core 1) that will cause a problem, but most modern programs are better behaved than that.

for the very reason that windows was a resource hog, i moved to a linux OS, and now i only use (with several memory intensive programs running at once) at most 1.9 GB of a total of 8 GB memory...i also have a dual core CPU, and i have a decent video card...so this is really frustrating...now, i dont run anything but ryzom when i log on to the server, so its not a matter of cpu or memory conflict, i really do think it is an issue of too many effects or sounds being called at one time, and im sure some fat being trimmed would not be a bad thing...it only happens during spells, other particle effects dont have the same problem, and there are many particle effects running all around even just on Silan...its only the spells cast by my PC, or spells cast by enemies that casue this burst of resource hogging...it eventually dies down again, but it can completely render movement impossible if several spell capable mobs attack at one time...this has caused me to die on a number of occaisions because i could not move at all...

I would doubt a connection issue here. Like Grimoire and Bitty I have similar, but slightly different issues: The lags usually do not hit me during battles (just returned from the Marauder Boss hunt and did not have any lags whatsoever, with about 35 homins casting spells). But I do have serious lag issues when walking or running through the streets of Pyr. Sometimes I get a fifth of a second movement, then Ryzom halts for 2 seconds or longer, then another very brief movement. This is a nightmare to work with and stopped me from doing more than the occasional visit to the Ceriakos gate and the trainers right behind it.

I had similar issues in Yrkanis when getting near the street lights there. But this has improved a lot recently. The problems in Pyr appeared maybe about six months ago on my desktop machine, but not on my laptop. Both machines were running fine before. And when I do have the problems in Pyr, the wife can still run through the town without issues - and she's on the same internet connection.

one thing i have noticed in game is that the particle system and the sound associated with an effect often (in my case always) degrades the FPS of the game...in fact there is such a burst of memory usage that the game "lags" terribly when i am casting spells alone, and it is even worse when there is a group of people all casting at once...

my question is, would it be too much to ask if an option for less intensive particles or a more efficient particle system were implemented? this is possible, but it is largely due to (in my opinion from experience) textures in the particles being too large, or the particle model being too messy (such as duplicates being rendered for the same spell effect, or way too many particles per effect being rendered) and possibly in the coding of the particle systems...

Platform? Video card? Driver version? If you're on Linux are you using the latest proprietary driver? Don't use software or Nouveau. My hunch is that you're on Linux with Software-based Mesa or the Nouveau driver. Ryzom may have been developed in the days of the fixed pipeline but the particle system in particular does have some accelerators that are absolutely essential to perform up to standard. It sounds like you're in full software and not utilizing the GPU at all.

That being said the particle system and the landscape system use a woefully small amount of the GPU due to the fact of the reality of technology when it was developed. We're attempting to upgrade the driver to a more modern OpenGL implementation and in the process hopefully begin offloading a lot of this complexity to the GPU rather than the CPU. But it's a lot of work and there's really only one person working on it part time (dfighter.)