Why did they changed this from version 1.0 ?

[Xerich]

Are you suggesting ARR's graphics are cutting edge? The game looks like plastic.

The graphics may not be cutting edge, but the tech that is in the game is pretty impressive for an MMO.

The world looks beautiful with it's art style.

Then again, you're probably the type that likes to stare at a wall texture and zoom in 200% to complain there aren't enough bump maps.

[Saziel]

The graphics may not be cutting edge, but the tech that is in the game is pretty impressive for an MMO.

The world looks beautiful with it's art style.

Then again, you're probably the type that likes to stare at a wall texture and zoom in 200% to complain there aren't enough bump maps.

No idea what bump maps are.

[Magis]

No idea what bump maps are.

Bump maps, or normal maps are special textures that hold normal vectors. Instead of each pixel being RGB being a color, each pixel holds a XYZ coordinate for the normal. An example:

http://cdn.wolfire.com/blog/normalma...mapcompare.jpg

or from someones glitched FFXIV (not suppose to happen, but here is an example)

http://i.imgur.com/yrUJGd0.jpg

So what does this help you with? Well "diffuse lighting" (light from a light source onto a surface, that get's bounced off) is the dot product between a normal vector and the light vector, times whatever color was sampled from your actual texture (to lighten/darken it). Basically... the larger the angle between the two vectors, the darker it becomes (it's not facing the light), and the smaller, the brighter. Normally the normal vector is perpendicular to the surface, BUT you can fake that normal, and save it into a texture; the bump/normal map. So now when it is fed into a light shader, the texture begins shading itself even though you didn't add any polygons! An example is the stitching on our armor or belt buckles. The most common use is brick and stone walls.