So what do we have in here.
Dx 9 - it's mostly the same as the hotfix#2 from the .47 version, except with fixing the flickers in Orient Express.
The bigger news is that we now have DX11... but a word of warning, it might now be as good news as you expect
So amusingly, DX11 on my machine using the identical settings runs with lower fps than Dx9. There IS some reason for this and that is because under the hood it has some extra bells and whistles that visually you can't really tell them apart but they are there. One of the things it does is do away with palettes, which is also going to make it easier to implement newer texture options in the future (something Kmaster wanted).
Now what IS interesting, at least on my system, is that while the baseline FPS is lower than Dx9 and the high end is also lower than Dx9 (I can never reach 300-400fps in lighter scenes as I do with Dx9), it seems that the fps overall are more stable. So while I hover around at 100fps when I feel like I should be getting more, if I throw heavier trucks at it... the fps doesn't really change. So that should be good. Either way, I personally will stick to Dx11 for the following reasons
- 16k Shadow Size Quality - if your FPS allows this, 16k will allow most of the world to be covered in immediate visual shadow. What this means is that you don't get to see that annoying shadow line being draw in the distance as you approach an object. This still happens, it's just that the drawing distance has been literally doubled (actually a little more than doubled).
PLEASE NOTE: This means that the black screen right after loading takes longer. The reason that black screen is happening is not due to a bug, it is the shadow map doing math and loading shadows for like 70% of the objects. And now it is taking longer than DX9 because it has twice the memory size to load for more accurate shadows. This whole black screen thing will eventually be "fixed" (as in, the illusion that it's gone) once I properly fix the menus. I have no desire to spend a day making the black screen go away and have it interact with the old menus without crashing only for me to later discard the whole thing.
This alone makes me wanna stick to dx11 because i hate that shadow line.
- another reason is Reverse Z buffer... this is a bit more technical but ultimately what this means is that there are no more artifacts in the far distance at the cutover line (you can test this with DX9) and the camera no longer goes under the terrain on steep downhills. Funnily enough this was the correct behaviour in Dx5 but DX9 broke that and it was never fixable. Dx11 fixed it.
- with Dx11, eventually I should be able to add nicer smoke/dust effects. I've started toying around with it but this is something that requires a lot of fine tuning because I've never done this before and I literally have no clue what I am doing, lol.
The big mystery that I have with 11 is how will it react with other machines. Will the FPS tank too much on some of your machines? will it somehow magically fix Rudees HDD issues? (it shouldn't but who knows at this point) Will it fix Kimiko's stadium?
So let me know, if you find any bugs that you have reported in the other thread... report them again please. I might have lost track of some of the stuff while I was trying to fix Rudee's issues.
Oh and Rudee, I think your idea of making an "object draw distance" and "terrain draw distance" separate and decouple them is a good idea. I'll do that for the next version probably. I actually added something like that specifically for the water reflection draw distance in Advanced Graphics this time around. This is all about toying around to allow users to set their own distances in order to help with the framerate.
UPDATE: Hotfix released
https://www.mtm2.com/~mtmg/misc/Beta0.48hotfix4.zip
it's hard to find two models alike (as in with the same technical design). This was fine until now when the game didn't have any realistic lighting but now when actual shadows are introduced, the issues come to light because each surface reacts different and I've been spending a lot of time fixing flickers with various models. And for performance reasons, I cannot implement a full real time shadow... well, somewhat. Actually the AMD Fix is exactly that, full real time shadow. For some reason in Dx9, AMD did not like baked shadows so I had to resort to that. Full real time shadow eats up way more fps than baked shadows for obvious reasons.
