D2X-XL v1.14 will have a new, simplified UI, and I would like to briefly explain the reasoning behind these changes.

The point of having so many settings in the menus never was to demonstrate technical superiority. Many of the settings actually were historic (to satisfy those people who always complained about D2X-XL and could never be satisfied anyway). As there were logical choices for these settings, they were removed and these choices made the defaults. Other options were of rather experimental nature, to allow me to find out which settings looked good w/o being detrimental to the game's performance. Since there is enough "empirical data" available in this regard, these menus basically are superfluous now.

Smoke is a prime example. I am convinced that the settings I have chosen offer optimal looks, because it is exactly smoke effects that always had my special attention, coding efforts and tweaking. I believe that once you have been using them a while and have gotten accustomed to them, you will be satisfied with what D2X-XL offers here.

Besides that do I get a lot of potential sources of error and most of all a lot of unnecessary support requests by people who use unreasonable values (often because they do not really understand what they are doing or what side effects it has), and who subsequently run into all kinds of trouble, ranging from low frame rates over memory problems to crashes. In the worst case - and I've seen it happen more than once - they start to bitch about D2X-XL at other places and give it an undeserved bad reputation.

A classical case of misinterpretation would be max. lights/face for per pixel lighting. Actually that value is an upper limit that is only reached in rare cases. Usually there are no more than 10 - 15 light sources influencing a single face. D2X-XL raises the bar here quite a bit now: If you want the best lighting quality, your hardware must be able to handle it. That means that depending on lights/pass D2X-XL will take 15 - 24 light sources/face into account which by experience produces optimal lighting results.

The max. available texture quality has been reduced from 512x512 to 256x256, because even experienced D2X-XL users tend to use too high a value for their hardware here and as a consequence send me bug reports about crashes caused by lack of memory. I know there are quite a few fans of this setting, but trust me, your feeling that D2X-XL looks better with 512x512 than with 256x256 textures is rather rooted in your firmly believing it than in reality , and it is exactly this setting that can make the difference between a smooth and satisfying playing experience with D2X-XL and constant stuttering and crashing. The new high quality medium resolution texture packs are another strong argument to cap texture quality at 256x256.