I'm sorry this is rubbish, 32bit has no limitations heck you could have even done horizons on it as that's just a height map and some meshes.
As for shadows Neverwinter Nights had multiple shadows back in the early 2000s so it's a limit of the Cobra engine NOT drivers. All FDEV would have to do is get the angle and range and cast light and shadow dependent on those.
EDIT: OpenGL and Direct X have a eight light limit which still doesn't say while they only use one in space. I have been asking since 1.x for just light casting on ships NOT shadows just light it's the easiest thing to do and is even in the NeHe OpenGL tuts.
My credentials are I have been a coder since 1981 and released a space game back in 1999 which had multiple light sources. I have had systems with multiple lights all lighting up ship meshes making them look incredible.
I don't think it's a matter of "Cobra can't do multiple lights/shadows". My understanding is that the performance hit is too high. (It basically halves the framerate.) This has been requested for years now. I'm sure that FD will get around to implementing it on PCs; I'm not sure about consoles, but it probably won't be an option for the current models.
Because they don't have a perfectly adequate one. Did you miss the title of the thread??
This game gets new bugs in every update, taking months to fix. Trivial improvements are "too difficult". Simple fixes like getting the mouse to work properly in the galaxy map are apparently impossible.
These are not signs of "they know how to use it already".
Much of what you are complaining about is "game" code, not "engine" code. Yes there are bugs, yes, it seems to take a long time for ED to fix some of the bugs. As a programmer, I have to point out that you haven't seen the code; it's probably a lot more complicated than you think it is. I assume they are working on higher-priority tasks.
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