Characters not following well

Is there a way to get your characters to follow you more tightly?

My characters often stray, or start circling the foreground toon when I hit follow, which gets me into issues if there are mobs around.

What should foreground FPS be set at? and background?
Are there other factors? other settings I can change? I'd like them to all pile up as best as possible.

[firescue17]

Is there a way to get your characters to follow you more tightly?

Double shrink breaks the character collision and prevents them from getting stuck on most terrain.

What should foreground FPS be set at? and background?

30 / 30 should be sufficient if you're running a current processor (EQ is old, more graphics are run on the processor than the video card).

Are there other factors? other settings I can change? I'd like them to all pile up as best as possible.

Not really. Double shrink is the most important factor. You can read this thread on the DBG forums but most of those suggestions are to compensate for sub-standard hardware.

I have a pretty decent computer.. so what's the optimal setting would you say? 30/30 will do, but what would be best?
Should I be setting the characters to different cores?

I always have shammy shrink on, but sometimes still see the issue.

I have a similar problem with my box group. I've noticed if you make a sudden 90° like turn, I usually get one or more orbiting the leader. I've also seen that if run speed for all charcters is the same you can trigger one of your characters to orbit the leader if your moving your box group to a new position and your making a lot of little moves. Having the leader at a slower run speed than the rest of the group helps to reduce character orbiting. As to shrinking your group, that only works on races that can be shrunk. My gnome wizard is always guilty of orbiting, no matter how shrunk the rest of the group is. My only way of keeping the group from running all over is to keep the group mounted and the leader unmounted. That won't keep your characters from running off with a sudden 90° turn.

[lax]

For EverQuest 1, the higher your FPS, the better your characters will follow in both turn radius and in movement speed. This has always been the case for EQ1.

Back in the day, that was half of the reason to be using EQPlayNice and its Rendering Limiting feature -- what it does is stop background game instances from rendering as often, so for those frames that do not render, the game is running many many times faster than usual. The main reason NOT to use this feature to improve your /follow performance in EQ1 is that the game world appears to flicker. That is annoying when you can see them all, but if you are in dire need of improved performance in EQ1 and can get past seeing the background windows flickering, this is king. EQPlayNice is covered by the same subscription as Inner Space + ISBoxer. To try it alongside ISBoxer, just download and install WinEQ 2 from lavishsoft.com; it must be running to activate EQPlayNice. http://isboxer.com/wiki/EverQuest#EQPlayNice