I was mining earlier today and was thinking about specular.

You know how in some games, you fire your gun, the wall next to you lights up with a yellow flash?

Well I was thinking, Why not add that to Vendetta!

For example, when mining, the bow of your ship, as well as the asteroid, glow a bit. Same thing goes with gunfire, and why not add it to engine exhaust/trails (includes missiles)?

it's been suggested, even had photoshopped pictures to illustrate.

No dice. Not a priority for a long time.

Well at least its something to look forward to.

I can see how it can be somewhat of a problem. Right now VO has two very strong points:

1: It runs on, well, just about all of the mainstream OSes.

2: Its graphics aren't so advanced that people with older computers can play with relative ease. For a similar situation, see Warbirds v2.77. 2.77 stayed popular(and earned IEN quite a bit of revenue) due to the fact that its graphics were dated, and therefore allowed just about anyone to play.

Now, many people would ask "why don't we just make quality settings vary so much that everyone can play?" I'm not even going to mention the programming challenge this would imply, but rather focus on something you all might have some experience with/agree with.

Let's say Joe has a computer that is n years old. It's running a 5000-series nVidia card. For arguments sake, a 5600. Not a whole lot of choices in modern gaming, are there? But he finds VO. Wow, all he has to do is move the quality sliders to the left until his framerates are acceptable! Now he has a modern MMO that pushes his system to the peak of performance, becomes a paying customer, and everyone is happy.

UNTIL

Tom built his computer to run two instances of Crysis. That's right, two instances, one on each 30" widescreen monitor at frame rates faster than a normal computer rendering a simple box with two lights. Max settings of course. This computer regularly spews fire, and must be dunked in liquid nitrogen to maintain a temperature that won't burn the house down. God visited Tom. Not because God liked Tom, but because God wanted to gaze upon this mecca of gaming computer bliss. This computer ate the cat. Now, Tom finds VO, cranks the settings up, and it looks so beautiful that Tom cries a little bit. He loves the gameplay and becomes a regular, paying customer.

Tom and Joe get into a fight. Joe, at his lower graphical settings, does not have active lighting on, and most of the ships have lights in some shape or form. Or their ships light up with the exhaust. or something. So he can't SEE the other guy as well as he'd like. Warp over to Tom, and Tom can see Joe just fine thanks to all the glittering lights on his ship.

Imbalance? I certainly think so. Ways to fix this? Sure. Difficult? Time consuming? You betcha.

That said, if this or ANY game had the graphics customization options so that some guy that just bought an off-the-shelf Dell with integrated graphics can run the game smoothly, and some guy that has a beast of a machine can get all the eye candy his little brain can handle, all without sacrificing balance... well, i'd be forced to take them to the local pub and purchase them a beverage of their choice.

Well, Blizz solved it the easy way in WoW - graphics are dated, so it does not cause hiccup on even a few years old hardware, and moving the detail sliders in video options menu has almost no effect, except the draw distance one... ;)

That's pretty similar to what's here. Even at max settings, the graphics are crisp and clean, sure, but lack the eye candy of new games.

There's keeping the game viable and then there's pandering to those who refuse to pay $30 for a new video card (even a 7600 is only $30 these days).

Agreed.

I would say that the bigger problem with this isn't performance, but the fact that it would be annoying to write. IIRC, at least for the OpenGL client, the game uses the default OpenGL lightsources. OpenGL only allows 7 of these to be in use at a time. So any dynamic lightsources would need to be done with shaders. Which would

a) not work on cards that didn't support programmable shaders
b) take a long time to write

C'est la vie.

VO is O-GL? News to me.

Is there an alternative to OGLing OSX and Linux?

That said: WoW does not have to rely on split-second decisions where fps matter as much as in VO, I think.

toshiro, ouch, right. Forgot about that.

Sucks, since O-GL is a pain to program for. Extensions and all.

At least it's not DirectX...

graphics programming is painful, period. DirectX and OpenGL are similar beasts, both with headaches for any coder who glances upon them.

That's why there's SDL :D If the devs aren't using it already that is.