Howdy folks!
Since the last update, testing has identified a weakness we felt obligated to correct, and that is - ToEE's poor render performance on modern systems. Although technically "not our fault", a few users using lower end systems complained about sluggish performance, and we decided to fix it in order to have a rock solid release.
To that end, Pugmeister has started working on a major rendering reform, during which we have discovered that the main culprit was the Shadows. Now that it's supported with a more modern rendering pipeline, the frame rates have improved dramatically! We are quite pleased with the result. However, there remains some work to be done, which means the first release will be postponed to early next year (probably mid to late January, depending on how testing goes).
Meanwhile, I've been giving the pathfinding an overhaul, fixing some obvious weaknesses in the present system and tackling various issues based on a case study I've been conducting. This resulted in faster pathfinding and less errors when trying to navigate long distances, allowing us to conduct more PF polls for the AI and hopefully make it a bit smarter!
8 portrait slots now available at char gen, and really long movements now possible. Oh yeah.
Aside from that, we've made various improvements to the game, such as adding 8 portrait slots in character generation (this always confused Co8 users!), soft shadows for characters, Middle Mouse Button scrolling (press and hold, and move the cursor in the direction you want to scroll), more generous scrolling margin for Windowed mode, replacing the outdated keyboard input system, and several other fixes and improvements.
And just for kicks, Pugmeister made this particle editor too
We'll soon be rolling out test builds with the new rendering on the forum - hope you'll enjoy it as much as we do!
Cheers,
Cattle & Pug
Update 31/12/2015:
"The enemy of the good is the better..." :)
Release will most likely slide into March since we've decided to add some infrastructural work for improved debugging. Thank you for your patience, and happy new year!
