I’ve been working on the custom, cross-platform, Orion Engine effect system this week. I’m trying to fill in all of the blanks that have been needing attention for quite a long time. The effect system is used to drive our pixel shaders and vertex shaders. It’s main responsibility is to seamlessly provide a fallback, if one particular rendering method is not supported by the hardware. In other words, it will make the Orion Engine even more scalable; i.e. it will work great on old hardware, yet it can still look awesome on new hardware. It also manages all of the render states that are needed to render a particular shader effect.
Anyway, it might be a little while before I get back to patching the game client again. I need to finish the effect system first, and be done with it once and for all. Once I finally have the effect system finished, I’ll be able to create even more stunning effects in the game!
