What happened to the Graphics engine?

This is a small but serious question I was asking myself for a small while now.
Since a few updates ago, the game dosent look as good as it used to.
For example:
These are 2 screenshots that were taken over a year ago
They are unedited.


Now the game looks more matte and boring in my opinion


It just dosent look as good. It´s not as shiny.
Why did you change it ?

 

because you had reshade or some kind of graphics enhancer

 

Graphic enhancer :|

I only need to hear that word and need to ....

No I used custom PostFX settings. Which I am using now as well .. but it just dosent look right.

 

Enhanced Reflection on? Looks like it isnt.

 

Whoops.. Why did i wrote enhanced reflection Nadeox is right.. I meant dynamic also..

 

Dynamic refelction dosent make a huge difference tho.

 

I also agree that the game looks washed out right now. Here current vs old :
The way the paint shined in the old versions looked better. They also downgraded the tree mesh quality by allot.
I think they just dont know how to optimize tq3d properly, instead they just downgrade. I will try to make it possible to use old graphics in the latest version, becuase the game looks just too washed out in my opinion.

 

i thought im the only one having problems with the trees. It appeared after i upgraded my gpu. But the reflection is still strong.

 

They downgraded the tree mesh quality in the 0.5.6 update.

 

Thats total nonsense. My game looks nothing like that, clearly you have it setup completely wrong in both mesh quality and shadow/shader settings which are both way lower in the new version screenshots, dynamic reflections are also disabled which improve it alot overall. Yes the lighting is slightly changed because of the east coast usa revison (looks way better too) but the graphics havent changed a bit.

 

Nope, i use max settings except the dynamic reflections.
--- Post updated ---

 

Yes, it looks fine in the picture as it does in the one above, the image I'm thinking of is this http://beamng.com/attachments/beamng2016-12-0720-00-34-88-png.205789/

Clearly its zoomed in or using some weird FOV because my game definitely doesnt look that bad.

 

Offcourse i zoomed in, to show how bad the trees that are further away look after 0.5.6 update. It wasnt that bad before, as you can see on the other picture.

 

There mus be something going on, I run the game on a laptop and my draw distance/mesh quality looks better than that.

 

crydev is right!

they did indeed reduce viewdistance to improve performance -
which might be the right decision since torque 3d runs like absolute arse.

still i would have liked for them to find a solution for performance issues instead of just turning down the graphics.
the game didnt look good from the beginning so lowering graphical fidelity is the last thing they should do.

thanks for reading this bye

 

Tree LODS were reduced for performance reasons, and I think the devs changed the way specular works (massively decreased it) while also changing the way reflections look with different default cubemaps and material alpha values

It's an amalgamation of improvements that ended up making the game look worse, but of course this was unintended.

However they have improved the performance noticeably, and added nice graphics features like SMAA which IMHO improved the look a lot. So we can't forget that.

But I think you're right, the engine does need a lot of work and it seems the devs aren't doing anything on it. New content is always nice but the graphics have only gotten worse since release (although it runs better than release).

 

I wonder if I culd get this with current graphics. And BTW I agree.

 

In my opnion they should add a Ultra graphics option, for those who have powerfull gpus.