It's because there's only one layer of shadow. If you're standing under a tree's shadow, your mech doesn't cast a shadow. If the tree is under a hill's shadow, the tree doesn't cast a shadow. If it's night, nothing casts a shadow.

Strobe-lights lie...

Fixed

Turn Perpetuum into Age of Conan so it doesnt run properly on even a decent machine and dies a slow, agonizing death.

I think thats the point, my point anyway, it doesnt look like night, it may remind you of night but if you go into a city at night, or look at a busy highway at night lights look brighter, dazzling, awesome. In PO its more like..er a dull british winters day, depressing, uninspiring.

When your going from an alpha station to a teleport terminal where there is a constant stream of bots going back and forth.. I'd expect it to look like a highway at night...

as such..

http://blog.webgus.net/images/photos/highway_night.jpg

The client does need some work, I don't really care for the 'gunge' look I get when it is cloudy; looks like there is a grey film on the camera lens not like it is dreary. When it is sunny, things are better. I have no issue with how things look at night.

I run it on a dual Xeon Quad cores, 12 GB of memory and Dual Nvidia Quadro FX 1700 box. It should be plenty big. It runs OK to crappy most days. Been playing online games for a long time, so I have played with all of the driver setting to see if I could improve performance.

If there ever is a graphics update I'd say the lighting engine could be greatly improved.

More layers of shadows, possibly some real lights on the robots that give some glow especially for the eyes ( do note that some glow does not equal Satan Incarnate evil eye glow.... ) and probably some more improvements could be made.

But overall I'd say the game is more then good enough.

I have no problems with the night... but why is the weather always so bad and cloudy.
I guess I have only seen one day with good weather, and I liked it so much I forget to buy enough mining ammunition....

Unfortunately this is true. PO Graphics engine sucks hairy balls. You need a really good PC to run it smoothly and NOT just on high settings but even on low-medium settings. I run one of the accounts on my wife's PC that I build myself for her. There is 2.6Ghz CPU under the hood, 4GB of RAM and GTX260 graphics card. That PC can run LOTRO on max with AAs enabled. But I can barely run PO even on low settings. PO either needs to be polished a LOT, or it simply has the worst graphics engine which I consider the latter since they probably couldn't afford a good engine in the first place...

I can run game on max but only on my main PC with 10GB RAM, 1GB Radeon HD 5870, 3Ghz dual core CPU, and 10000RPM HDD. Considering that 3D models in game look pretty crappy - its just awful that it requires so much juice in your PC to run on max. Very very crappy unpolished graphics engine.

What looks really good in this game - are the effects and it seems to have some high definition rendering that enables pretty realistic sun rays in a mix with shadows. But graphics engine still sux they need to polish the engine and do something to decrease the lag and rubberbending.