Patch Notes: Fast shadows, without the flicker
Enhanced Lighting
- The shadow cache is on again by default, so lamp-lit rooms such as taverns, shops and guild halls get their frame rate back.
- Fixed the shadow flicker with Enhanced Lighting on Windows: a rapid, strobing flicker on some NVIDIA cards, and on others every shadow in a room blinking at once. It came from how the cached shadows were copied on Direct3D, not from the cache itself.
- The "Shadow cache (faster, may flicker)" switch is gone from Enhanced Lighting. It is no longer needed.
Patch Notes: Clear roadsides and blended climates
Roads and paths
- Trees, bushes and rocks no longer stand on roads and tracks, and their branches no longer hang over them. This includes the 3D trees from Low Poly Trees.
- Herb patches, ore veins on open stone and Motherlodes keep off the roads too.
- Forests no longer grow across dirt tracks.
- Settings › Clear roadsides (on by default). Off lets them grow up to the edge of the road, as Daggerfall does.
Climates
- Where two climates meet, the land no longer changes along a straight line. The border wanders and breaks into patches about two hundred metres deep: grass thins out into sand, rock creeps into the woods, snow comes in drifts.
- The trees follow the same border. Near it, each tree belongs to the climate of the ground it stands on.
- The grass follows it too.
- Settings › Blended climates (on by default). Off changes them at a straight edge, as Daggerfall does.
Both settings take effect when the world next loads. Online, both are always on, so everyone sees the same trees in the same places.
Fixes
- In winter, the trees of a wood are cover the way they are the rest of the year: enemies hide behind the trunk and under the crown.
What's Changed
- VERGE1 + ECOTONE1: the wild keeps off roads and tracks; climates meet at a wandering, patchy border by @Lattymoy in #660
- CACHE-COPY: the shadow flicker was the cache's copy on Direct3D - fixed, and the shadow cache on by default again by @Lattymoy in #661
Full Changelog: app-v0.1.6678...app-v0.1.6690