With the upcoming patch dealing with terraforming and player built settlements we also need to upgrade some of our current tools to better suit the challenges these new systems pose. The most basic such system involving the terrain is the one visualizing where players can go - the slope display.

As part of the work on the PBS patch we have upgraded the slope display so you'll not only be able to see where your robot can go, but also where robots of other classes can venture. More importantly the new slope display will also show areas which need to be flattened before a building can be raised at a certain area.

As these new tools won't be needed all the time we're making them optional. You'll be able to cycle between the different display modes using the slope toggle button.

Also, most of the server side code work on the individual PBS nodes has now finished and we're in the process of building the terraform blueprint system while the artists work on the gfx for the nodes. And before you ask, the next part of the PBS series blog should be out next week ;)

Here's a bit of a pre-xmas sneak peek on the progress of the new terrain engine. We're still heavily working on it, but the difference is already very notable. What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!

Here's a sneak peek of some of the upcoming shader 3 changes. Keep in mind that this is still heavily work in progress, and the final version will include even more upgrades. Shadows are deliberately turned off at the moment, these images show the level of changes upcoming to the terrain engine and the water renderer.

Before:

After:

One of the most frequent complaints we get from new players regarding the graphics is the quality of robot animations. This has posed a big problem for a long time as creating a more complex animation system would require a lot of time, resources and client processing power we don't have. We finally came up with a workable solution for the issue and will gradually be rolling out new walk animations for the smaller robots, starting with the very first bot players encounter: the Arkhe.

Once we're done with the small robots we'll be looking at the big ones of course, which will need to be rolled out in a single, big patch - but that's still some time away.

And how does it compare? Let's have a look:

As some of you might know Perpetuum currently is running completely on shader model 2.0 shaders. This decision has been made a long while ago, when we only started out on the game, for several reasons:

• We wanted to target as many people as we can.
• We wanted to keep the required PC specs as low as we can.
• We didn't have much experience with DirectX and wanted to start working in a smaller sandbox first.
• With some work we managed to put everything we wanted visually into shader model 2.0 in the end.

We've reached the limits of shader model 2.0 a while ago, and the game really looks better than we would have ever thought. However at this point there's no real option for real visual upgrades without either switching to a higher shader model or going through significant hacks that reduce client performance and mess up the codebase.

This post is advance warning that we'll be changing the minimum requirement for Perpetuum from shader model 2.0 to shader model 3*. As the vast majority of you have hardware that supports SM3, the change will only affect a handful of players.

Do note that changing shader models isn't a silver bullet that will make the game look better magically overnight. This change is necessary in order for us to move the 3D engine forward to more current visual techniques and will take effect when we roll out the first such change, about a month from now to give proper warning. Initially the changes will focus on client performance as opposed to visual upgrades, and we'll gradually move to making things look better when we feel the client is performing well enough.

* For those who are not that tech-savvy, shader model 3 is supported by GPUs manufactured since around 2005, specifically the AMD/ATI X1000 series and above, and the nVidia GeForce 6 series and above. While the Intel GMA series GPUs do have SM3.0 to some extent, they are not officially supported.