Posted May 09, 2015
Nightmarekiller: 1. Foliage. We did replace foliage (grass, junk etc.) placement algorithm, so it distributed a bit differently now. Just as previously, foliage is placed randomly, so in some places it can be a bit less or more dense in DX11 version. We didn’t decrease the draw distance nor average foliage density.
2. Lighting. All lighting changes were made by our graphic artists, who decided to improve looks of this game by tweaking lighting and post processing.
3. Shadows. Shadow filtering algorithm was improved, so now shadows have less jaggies and look better. It’s mostly visible when you compare tree shadows from the beginning of the game.
4. SSAO. SSAO was totally rewritten. DX9 version had a lot of awful SSAO artifacts (especially in motion), which now are gone. Additionally it was tweaked to be softer and more realistic.
Here the guy is not explaining nothing. 2. Lighting. All lighting changes were made by our graphic artists, who decided to improve looks of this game by tweaking lighting and post processing.
3. Shadows. Shadow filtering algorithm was improved, so now shadows have less jaggies and look better. It’s mostly visible when you compare tree shadows from the beginning of the game.
4. SSAO. SSAO was totally rewritten. DX9 version had a lot of awful SSAO artifacts (especially in motion), which now are gone. Additionally it was tweaked to be softer and more realistic.
I'll summurize: it's better, because it's different, since it's not the same as before, that is better.
5. Performance. Performance is much better, because we got a bunch of new engine programmers who have totally rewritten the entire engine. It took us more than a year, to do that. Because of the sheer magnitude of changes we have introduced there will be inevitably some differences between versions, but we didn’t cut anything, we just worked really hard for a long time just to squeeze every cycle we could.
now it's better, since we redone it, so it's different, so it is better.