I had a chance to jump in a play test session with some of our beta testers today. It was a pretty fun match and the BT crew was able to sniff out a few more bugs. Here are a couple quick video clips from our match.

It is recommended to set the quality to 720P

For the past few weeks Ryokeen has been hard at work adding and optimizing shaders for ESF. One of the latest additions is a wave generator. The new shader gives ESF environment artists the option to add ocean like water to maps.

During initial tests the ocean shader has shown a performance increase over the older "flat" water shader. The system uses a grid of approximately 50K polygons to generate the waves. This can be reduced to meet the performance requirements of lower-end machines. Also, the system implements a level of detail system that increases the amount of detail a player sees the closer they get to the water.