Suplex?!!

Those that are paying attention in chat may noticed that dynamic shadows are disabled. Shadows were important because shadows helps us to gauge how high an object is in the air. Stuff on the ground have shadow very close to them and stuff very high in the air (such as planes) have shadows no where near to been seen. In game, this darkening effect is visually important to indicate that the characters are indeed standing on the ground and not floating in the air.

Unfortunately, shadows are really really expensive! Each light that casts shadows requires the scene to be redrawn again! So the 2 dynamic shadows that the game had caused the scene to be drawn 3 times! For people without a decent dedicated graphics card this is absolutely a performance killer.

The good news is that even without shadows, the game still have SSAO to rely on for the darkening effect. Here is what pure SSAO looks like:

So in the future versions, there will be no more dynamic shadows until customizeable graphical options becomes available to make the game more accessible to everyone :D.