That last sentence was mirroring your previous opening comment almost exactly. I don’t just say those kinds of flippant things out of hand unless provoked. You only have yourself to blame for that. But you’re right, I shouldn’t have risen to it.
If you’d rather have stayed out of the thread, then you always have the option of deleting your posts. But your comments are always welcome as long as they remain civil.
No-one is saying “SO MUCH” and I don’t think anyone mentioned meshes either. You’re adding that yourself to exaggerate your point. The only texture changes I’m seeing have been general landscape textures (not rocks, trees, buildings, characters, placeables etc etc) and the changes don’t need to have been huge in order to have a big impact both visually and performance-wise - you simply need to remove (or reduce the intensity / displacement strength of) things like bump maps or normal maps which would make the textures appear smooth and less detailed, but still produce a significant increase in performance. Its those things that give the landscape its appearance of fine gravelly detail - not ultra-detailed meshes. I think thats most likely what has been worked on.
I don’t imagine that this is the kind of change that Funcom would bother listing for the dev kit, because who would it help? But who knows?
Of course, it could just be the lighting change causing the textures to appear worse than previously, as lighting and post-processing can have quite a big impact upon how textures end up looking. But considering they said they were working on the textures and the fact that they do look worse now suggests it could easily be a factor.
Personally, I never called for optimizations. I’m happy with the way the game used to run and I liked the better textures and lighting.