really nice progress.

i wonder if theres any progress with the night setting, as its the worst looking time ingame, even on maxed settings

The rework of the lighting is still ahead of us, but it definitely needs improving too, yes. One thing we already solved is to have shadows at night as well.

This is not what Perpetuum need now... We need content for new players...

Damn you beat me too it

But Yes BoyC is a graphics engine designer and has been sinse I was talking with him in Beta about how he was building the Perpetuum engine.

I agree there is a need for more content to encourage people new to the game to stay as well as attract new people to the game but that is a seperate item.

As long as the new engine does not kill the graphics cards in our machines I welcome the upgrade and I am glad to see BoyC is still at it..

Honestly, shadows dont matter.  No offense but they look goofy and mechanical in this game and get annoying to watch them pixilate or whatever blocky movement effect they go through.  Also shadows is often the most turned off graphical effect in any game.  I turn them off in almost any game, even games where the look fantastic.

If we were going to develop fluff game effects, getting that new shader, animations, and more easy listining hungarian techno beats would be appreciated by all.  Not sure why i like the music in this game but i do and the second thing ill turn off after shadows in most games, but not this game, love the music.

I will say, that for as small of a game as this is, and for as small of a company as this one is (still remember the photos of the team and its launch party)...for a bunch of scrubby lookin dudes you all are putting some very large and cash heavy companies to shame with this little game, even if the games activity is small right now.  This is comming from someone whos been though a lot of beyond *** mmorpg attempts and a whole bunch of fail sandbox attempts.  Lot of the sandbox competition out there is years ahead of this game but isnt anywhere close to as playable as this game was even at launch.  Think that makes up for the *** shadows comment.

Stranger Danger: I'm also looking into making the shadows better - that subject is still heavily in the research phase. One of the key points I'm looking at with each technique I try is that the performance should not suffer and most shadowing approaches I've checked that would actually be an upgrade don't fit that bill. However with the shader 2.0 limitations lifted my hands aren't as bound as before
But yeah as many people said I don't create content, I create the code that displays the content, so don't worry - the content guys are very hard at work on the new stuff.

You're talking about several different things here
One is the client's performance requirement while not active (when you're doing other stuff) which we already regulate, but from what I've seen in other games we could go as far as dropping the framerate to 10-15 fps in this case - this can be implemented as a client option if needed.

Then there's the terrain vs terminal performance discrepancy vs having multiple cores in your machine. The way the graphics pipeline works is by first doing stuff on the cpu to prepare the scene to be rendered by the gpu. While the cpu is working optimally the gpu is drawing the previous frame, but if the cpu side is taking too long the gpu just idles waiting for things to do. In the case of the terminal the cpu has very little to do except drawing the interface, so the gpu becomes the bottleneck. On the terrain however we need to process many thousands of items in the scene graph (animating the whole scene etc) which takes a lot of time.
On most systems we've tested if we calculate everything we need on the cpu side just "fail" to send it over to the gpu, we get a framerate increase of about 5-10%. If we remove the cpu side work from the engine as well, we get 500-1000% increases. This means that the drawing part on the gpu (the fancy new terrain shaders for example) doesn't really matter in the performance because the gpu is waiting on the cpu anyways. The systems that don't behave like this are those that have gpus on the lower end of the scale coupled with relatively high performance cpus - mobile devices mostly, like laptops and such.
Also, due to the nature of scene graph traversal and the architecture of our engine the 3D engine's cpu part can only use a single core in your pc.

The new terrain engine actually removes most of the associated load on the cpu side while moving around and thereby makes things a lot more even. My aim is that the performance of the game is actually increased from these changes.

Stranger Danger:

"I will say, that for as small of a game as this is, and for as small of a company as this one is (still remember the photos of the team and its launch party)...for a bunch of scrubby lookin dudes you all are putting some very large and cash heavy companies to shame with this little game, even if the games activity is small right now.  This is comming from someone whos been though a lot of beyond *** mmorpg attempts and a whole bunch of fail sandbox attempts.  Lot of the sandbox competition out there is years ahead of this game but isnt anywhere close to as playable as this game was even at launch.  Think that makes up for the *** shadows comment."

Still Perpetuum one of the best Sandbox MMORPG's in market! (afaik, but not soo far my know about it)

as a sidenote: shadow =/= shadow .
even if you deactiave shadows completely, you still get at least phong shading during day, but you dont get it at night. i count this to "light & shadow" which the game lacks, especially at night.

also the game has only 1 lightsource active (sun), and a fake light around your robot at night (the only thing often that tells me that its actually night, and not only fog). The lack of individual light sources like laser, explosion or struktures makes the game look plain and outdated for about 50% of the playtime, if not more counting bad "weather" situations.

having "hard" shadows casted from such individual lights is a completely different topic but is something that should be "common" option to activate nowadays (i remember, Diablo2 which is now 11 years old had that already, even though its a 2D-game)