graphics update

[Treewyrm]

Errm. What kind of graphics are you talking about? Freelancer is a closed-source software, hence it's impossible to fiddle directly with rendering engine. Higher resolution texture and higher polygonal ships come at cost of performance and from what I've seen Freelancer rendering isn't handling that kind of strain well enough. Since Freelancer doesn't precache ships every time you see a ship that you haven't seen in the current game session it will automatically load, mesh, textures and everything, it takes time and as a result makes player lag. Lack of mesh LODs and texture mipmaps forces game to load full model and texture(s), and that's even more time. Now if you jump into system where nearby a battle takes place with various ships you will probably die before your computer loads them all into memory. I would rather encourage ship makers do LODs first, not to mention using DXT compressed DDS with mipmaps instead of zero level mipmap uncompressed TGAs, and generally reuse existing material instead of making unnecessary new textures. Typically graphical enhancements such as new effects can happen for games that have engine source released, which isn't the case here unfortunately... or fortunately, depends on how you look on it, at least being old game Freelancer can appeal to players who even have low-end systems, hence being more accessible to audience.