Feldon We’ve been closely monitoring the progress on the development of Shaders 3.0. This is the graphical revamp which will improve the lighting, reflections, and other effects on 99% of the textures in the game. So far, we know that Shaders 3.0 is running very well on certain systems, but has significant performance problems on other systems. As a result, it’s not yet on Test, and may not be released until after Game Update 54.
In response some pithy comments that Shaders 3.0 has slipped to the February expansion and will now be used as a selling point of said expansion, Rothgar has chimed in with this update:
This is not the case. In fact, we can’t really use something as a selling point for the expansion when everyone gets it for free without buying the expansion.
We’ve been doing some internal benchmarking on the Shader 3.0 implementation and we still have a few major challenges with the lighting system. The new shader system looks great and it performs very well in certain circumstances. However, there are still common situations that players would run into where the framerate takes a significant dip compared to Shader 1.0. We know why and we know how to fix it. So that’s the good news. The bad news is that it will take a little more time to do it right.
The lesson we’ve learned here is that we shouldn’t communicate a release date on such a large project, so far from completion. But we’ve also learned from past issues that we don’t want to release something that doesn’t meet our own expectations. We’ll certainly keep you informed in regards to our progress.
More news as we have it.