Hey guys,

Following things have been updated:

• Infernal mage's bind attack is now splashable and the duration of the bind was reduced.
• New rendering technique for animations added: 'Animation downgrading'. Distant animations are rendered in a lower quality to improve the overall fps rate. You're free to disable it though, if you find it annoying via the Game Settings. It's enabled by default and only works with the hardware renderer and VBO mode enabled (standard graphic settings unless you changed them or cannot run them).
• PJ timers have been increased by 2.5 seconds. This update has already gone live on the 21st of January. We're officially mentioning it here. (you can eat between 3 and 4 mantas after your last attack before your attack immunity runs out)
• Casting spells has become more responsive when fighting with multiple combat styles. You no longer need to wait the full delay of a weapon attack timer to be able to cast the spell. You'll now be able to cast spells 1.5 seconds after your last attack animation. You can now effectively chain spells and weapon attacks without losing overall damage or attack speed between attacks (spell travel time is between 1.5 and 2.5 seconds depending on the distance to your target).
• Major parts of the client's rendering engine (VBO mode and multi-model buffering) have been rewritten. I've also found a small memory leak which could have caused crashes after hours of gameplay. I've done a test where I put the client into a loop where it had to load and render random map regions. The test ran over 7 hours long without any crashes or interruptions. The client is now definitely in a very stable state.
• You can now properly withdraw a multitude of items again when you cancelled your order in the GE.
• Animated objects will no longer start to flicker (e.g. torches).
• Shantay pass is now clickable again.
• Movement speed calculation of entities is now more accurate. That means that the position the server and client have of your character are closer together. This should also fix some problems where other players appear too far away.
• Smoother ground color transitions. Here's a screenshot to compare the new (left) vs the old (right) ground:
  
• Plenty of bug fixes - Special thanks to everybody posting in our Bug Reports section!

You may notice that there isn't a lot of new things today. I've done a lot of work on the client's rendering technique last week to avoid crashes on some old GPU drivers. Moreover, I will pause the emps development for the coming 1-2 weeks because of irl projects. Don't worry, I'll still be around for tech support and of course bug fixes. There'll only be a short break on the development of new content! After that time I plan on releasing another large update. Any idea what that could be?

All the best,
Thomy