New models have been arriving with more and more detail, and that carries a cost you don’t see until somebody tries to play on an ordinary machine. So it was time to do what every game does: let you turn the quality down.
There are now three levels — low, medium and high — in Settings › General.
How it works
They apply on restart, and the setting lives on your computer rather than your account. That matters more than it sounds: the same pilot can log in from a weak laptop while travelling and from their tower at home, without changing a thing or fighting themselves over it.
You start on medium, which is the sweet spot. In the middle of a fight an enemy ship takes up a small slice of the screen, and at that size all three levels look practically identical. You see the difference in the hangar, with the hull a hand’s width from the camera. Anyone who wants the maximum has it one click away.
What never goes down
Lowering the quality doesn’t touch the skies or the interface, and that’s deliberate:
- Sector skies are 360° panoramas. Even looking at a single point, you are seeing a very small slice of a huge image, so shrinking it shows up immediately as banding and grain. They stay exactly as they were on all three levels.
- The interface is drawn at its exact size: icons, frames and HUD numbers stay just as crisp even on low. A blurry panel saves nothing and annoys you constantly.
What does get adjusted are hulls, rocks, projectiles and effects — precisely what you see at a distance and in motion while flying.
In short
If the game already ran well for you, there’s nothing to do: medium is what you were already seeing, and it now asks considerably less of your graphics card. If it ran tight, low has room to spare. And if your machine has power going free, high puts the full detail in the hangar, which is where you get to enjoy it.
