So there’s some good news and some bad.

The good news is that we deliver the November release on schedule. The bad is that we weren’t able to add all we wanted, nor in the quality we usually ensure.

The November update is a purely graphics update: we have spent almost two entire months on two major improvements:
– Anti-Aliasing
– Ambient Shadows

Anti-Aliasing is especially important in VR because we move our heads in minute ways, and horizontal or vertical lines that only change slightly begin to shimmer noticeably. Anti-Aliasing technology has matured lately, moving onto GPU and providing decent relief at reasonable performance cost. Unfortunately, traditional Anti-Aliasing doesn’t much help in VR, so the newest solutions rely on a relatively new technology called ‘Temporal Anti-Aliasing’ (or TAA for short). We have started integrating TAA into SpellShokked, and the PC version now can opt to turn on TAA.

Ambient Shadows (or ‘Ambient Occlusion’, AO) is a technology that improves the scene by implementing something that we all know happens, but isn’t currently supported by standard rendering: the fact that shadows in corners are deeper than on normal surfaces. This is because in corners shadows tend to overlap each other. Spellshokked now has optional support for AO.

And here is the bad news: Our SpellShokked domain got attacked and still is under attack from anti-social elements that look for ways to peddle their usual trash: child-porn, pen*s pills, MAGA hats. We had to nuke and reinstall our entire main site, and constantly defend (clean out, improve security, maintain IP blocks) both our main and game site. This took so much time out of our normal schedule that we weren’t able to ensure quality on TAA and OA, nor were we able to test it sufficiently with networking.
Furthermore, we know that TAA on the Mac is broken, so please don’t turn it on if you are on a Mac. The fix is planned for the December update.