Mootant and I have discussed making a toggle between highend and superlowend particles. He said he'll give it a shot, duno when he'll do it though, or even if it's possible. I'm going to work on the DX80 fallbacks, so people on superlowend (who probably run with -dxlevel 80) will have much cheaper particles.
Well I mean, don't do a super-low end thing. It shouldn't be, "I get prety shit but I can't play," or, "It looks like shit, but I can play (overkill)". See if a balance can be achieved.
The standard particles will work on 90% of systems, the exception is nukes. Low end particles will be fore people like dubee.
Plasma cannon lags the crap out of me, and I'm using an OC'd HD4650 (haven't gotten to installing the 4850). Now I know the 4650 is a budget card, but I mean, I should be able to play it just fine. Everything else is fine (I haven't had the privelege of arty yet), just nukes, plasma, and sometimes when I'm directly in the middle of the HE explosion.
Please try to make it a comparable visual experience between high and low end systems so one doesn't have an advantage over the other. You already knew that, obviously. /worthlesscomment
It's traditional for lower settings to be an advantage. (With the exception of shadows, in some cases.) At a minimum, it gets you higher fps. Otherwise, it gets rid of unnecessary doodads that block your vision. The tradeoff is that the game gets ugly.
Rehnquist, the low end stuff is for loooooow end machines, people basically running windows 95 if you know what I mean. Demented, I can still make the cheap ones block LoS for the same amount of time.
