Will we have more refined graphics settings soon? Currently our options are very limited and somewhat confusing.
TL;DRGraphics options haven't had much attention, but after Gen12 is done they plan a fresh look, with simpler basic settings, a more detailed advanced section, and only options that meaningfully change performance.
Yeah, I have to admit, we've not spent a great deal of effort there, as you'll probably see from the comment. But we've been holding off for a while. Because we were mostly CPU bound, and graphics options are generally there to squeeze out performance. We generally wanted the highest quality most of the time, and it's only to scale back, and mostly we would not be GPU bound. So there wasn't a huge motivation for scaling the engine back. All the focus is getting the CPU cost down, which is what the servers need. It's what the clients need. So that's been the focus. And then implementing Gen12 changes the way the renderer works, so it changes the way we would expose the options. So we're going to get Gen12 done, and then we're going to have a fresh look at these options. They will probably have quite a radical change. We're going to simplify them a lot, but then also we'll have an advanced section that will be much more complicated than we have now. At the moment, I think there's four different quality settings, but we're going to maybe change that up, maybe reduce that a bit. But then the memory management is something we're probably going to push much further. But yeah, we're definitely going to have a whole bunch of new options and make sure that the options we have give you some meaningful change. Some of the settings we have there, you can change things to high or low, reduce draw distance or increase it, but you'll find that the frame rate doesn't really change. And it's a pointless setting, so why have it? So we're going to set them based on what's needed to change the frame rate by a certain fraction. So high might be 20% slower than medium, and low might be 20% faster. That would be the motivation. And if it doesn't change the performance, we won't expose it.