Coming in the next few weeks. Turning foliage off... Turning shadows off... Reducing our minimums even further in the UI... Further optimizing effects and effect settings... This is 100% due to your feedback. We are listening, and thanks....keep it coming.
Could you expand anymore on the last two points? The UI being a resource hog and the reduction of this combined with the mere possibility significant optimizations both have us comping at the bit, so being coy here is a bit cruel.
Please on top of more performance user settings give more color control for color deficient players. We're a considerable subset of the population and there's still lots of similar colors in game. The faction colors on the minimap were helpful but the territory control is especially a problem for the color deficient and does not change with the faction colors in the settings screen. Also control over squad colors would make a big difference. I have a section dedicated to this in the thread link in my signature. Please consider it!
Oh, and on top of that, there's a big issue with foliage. Currently players use foliage to hide in. The big bushes anyway. How unfair would it be if you hid in a bush that you could see but was invisible to others?? I recommend for foliage that you only turn off the foliage that can't be used for cover. For shrubs, you could increase the LOD scaling but you need to keep them.
Can I ask, will turning off foliage mean ppl hiding behind bushes etc will show up to those with it turned off, or is Foliage more like moving grass and smaller things? if it effects visibility for hiding infantry everyone will have it turned off? Edit, I was typing this as Tanelorn was by the looks of it
You can currently do this now by Useroptions.ini editing. All it does by turning it off is remove grass, and other small foliage, it does not remove things like bushes and trees that you can hide in. So should not be any different when added to UI settings.
The foliage that gets removed is the grass and shells on the ground not the bushes/shrubs. You can turn off the foliage in the useroption ini file they are just giving a ui version to make it easer
Oh dear lord..... You cannot allow people to turn of foliage in a PVP game it creates an unfair advantage. If your FPS is low and you want to play you are gonna have to pay for more/better hardware. This will turnout like every other game out there that has allowed this, either it will be reverted and everyone has foliage or it will kill the player base. SOE needs to wake up.
it just removes grass no bushes or shrubs are removed just grass and shells nothing that you can hide in is removed
The foliage question is a good one. As mentioned, it's only the small moving grasses. Bushes, trees, things you can legitimately hide in won't be turned off.
I dunno, with the right camo, I've plenty of times plopped down in some of the moving grass bits and seen enemies walk right by. Seems to provide good enough cover to me, and incentive to buy the right camos. Unless you are trying to come up with more reasons for people to not bother buying those?
People with low settings who aim to turn this stuff off are running on low or medium textures and low render: at which point everything looks a little blah'ed out, and camo simply helps their wearers hide better.
I actually am not a fan of being able to turn shadows completely off. It's quite effective to hide in the shadows at night, so I feel like turning them off would give a tactical advantage.
I doubt that building shadows would go. In games I have developed on, building shadows use an entirely separate rendering system than avatars and objects. But in PS2 I could be wrong as they have a night day cycle so I guess the shadows move with the sun, making it a dynamic shadow system on buildings too. Still, what is harder on your GPU: 100 animated shadows from soldiers, or a building shadow?
At some point would it be possible to separate bloom from Graphics Quality? When you turn Graphics Quality up above medium bloom is turned on and it seems like a big competitive disadvantage because it obscures your view fairly often. I'd like to keep bullet holes and the general improved appearance of ultra Graphics Quality without the bloom.
Thanks for the clarification on the foliage. As for shadows, I still think giving the option to turn them off leads to a position where people will lower the quality of the visuals to get an advantage over other players. There's no doubt that realistic shadows add massively to the immersion of game worlds and can be used tactically to make yourself less visible to other players. All this is negated if people can just turn them off. I think this option should be looked at again, make them lower quality yes but there must be an attempt at levelling the playing field for all players.
