Well, some of you might know me, and if they do, they also know that I'm not very demanding. I am pretty much alright with what is given to me, and I always try to make the best out of it. But nevertheless, some things bother me at times, and after a while, they start to annoy me a little.
I know, this is a free game, free of charge and free to download, the developers work on this project in their free time, beside their real job, and without getting paid, so demanding too much I would call rude, since I can imagine, what it means to be part of this project on developer side. My enthusiasm as a developer of this project would be lowered by far, if people kept demanding better graphics, npcs, quests, and what not, but, and I know I am going against my own opinion of politelyness, I wanted to start this complaint about the graphics engine.
Don't get me wrong there, I could live perfectly with the graphics, because like I said, I am not very demanding, but what I don't understand, and not get around to, is that this graphics engine, which is... like 4-5 years old (?), asks for so much CPU power, RAM, etc.
I have an AMD Athlon 3200+, with 512mb Ram, and a 256mb graphics card (yeah, I know, not too good, but decent), but still my CPU works on 100% when running PlanShift, in some areas I can hardly move around (like DR library, arena, or the very well known DR 'bridge of lag'. Even lowering the specifications doesn't work out too well. I turned multi-sampling (Antialiasing) to 0, anisotropy filtering to 1.0 and texture downsampling to 1/8, but still, moving around in DR for example is like walking through quicksand. And I wonder why. There are other games I've tested, with really nice to awesome graphics, and my PC can handle it much better than PS graphics, I could almost play those games with all high-end options, like real time shadow, water reflections and refractions, background filtering, and whatsoever. So my question is not, will there ever be a better graphics engine as in looking better, more polygons, etc, but will there ever be a graphics engine, which is not as much demanding as the current one? I can also imagine, that the server (which I know has been gifted to Talad and his team) can't handle all that much either, just see how the server is crashing and lagging already at the games' current state of development. How could the server handle the final product with all the items, maps, npcs, abilities (crafting, fishing, masonry, etc, etc), ... ?
I'll come to an end now, I didn't want to displease any of the devs or seem to be demanding, but well, I considered the presence of PlaneShift, and wondered about its future.
Thank you.
