by Raph Koster
When we announced Stars Reach, the art style and visuals were not yet as far along as the gameplay, the cloud technology, and the simulation. Visual improvements were planned for later in the schedule, starting with this month’s pre-alpha testing.
This gave us a challenge: Our development plan calls for early input from player-testers. Waiting for near-final visuals would have meant player input coming too late in the process to help us scale the servers and improve the game. So we cut a trailer with the imagery we had available, giving players a general sense of what the game was. We did receive some criticism on the visuals of the trailer.
Well, we have made great progress and some of that is visible now. We’ve improved the lighting, increased detail levels, added functionality to and enhanced the simulation, and much more. We still have more work to do, especially on characters; in the meantime, we’re sharing some video and screenshots that show how the game looks today. As you can see, we incorporated some of your criticism into the new appearance.
Expect more visual updates before this game reaches beta phase, but even now we can begin to show you a combination of art and technology that approaches our intended finished look.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/B08Ld2sLa00?si=0f8xs7WWdLyc3Xxv
A lot of work went into adjusting the lighting in the game. In modern videogames, light interacts with the shaders that are on all the objects. Texture detail might be present but basically invisible unless the lighting is set up correctly.
We did a general pass on tons of objects throughout the game to make sure that shaders were set up correctly, and then built a new day/night cycle for it all. Contrast and saturation were adjusted and balanced out to be closer to the look we are aiming for.
We also finished off some capabilities of those shaders that you haven’t seen before. You may already know that our simulated world has temperature and humidity for every cubic meter, and that the grass reacts. Well, now the grass actually stays burned and trees blacken, when set on fire. They also ice over. So do the rocks, the bushes… everything.
Simulation detail also increased, and that brings with it visual detail. In those older videos, we only had about a dozen sorts of materials in the world – one or two sorts of rock, one kind of dirt, and so on. We now have ten times as many as we used to – and they all behave differently! They melt and freeze at different points, they have different densities, and they slump and fall differently because they have different adhesion characteristics.
This turned out to be a huge difference in the look of the world. Minor details like sand always sliding down, or bare dirt being more susceptible to giving way than dirt held together with grass roots, add visual touches that powerfully echo what we see in reality.
Before...
Along the way...
Where we are now...
We also implemented all the chemical reactions between different materials. Suddenly the simulation was doing worldbuilding for us! The bottom of stone riverbeds eroded away into sand and clay. Dirt embankments turned muddy and were swept away. Dirt on slopes too steep to hold it slid off, and the sides of mountains that used to be bare gained pockets of greenery all over anywhere that plants could cling to life.
The best part of all this was how it showed up when players were modifying the world. Dig a tunnel, let water in, and you can just watch as unexpected color and detail shows up – whether it’s algae or moss on a rock face, or soil rounding off the landscape, stuff just looks more like you expect it to, but still in that painterly, welcoming style we were aiming for.
We still have plenty more work to do – character customization is well along but not yet visible, and work continues on that. And of course, upgrading the terrain rendering means that soon we will need to revisit the grasses, and so on. It’s a never ending quest to make it all look better and cohere. We are solving rendering issues that other games simply don’t face, and we will probably be working on the look and the art right up to the very last minute. Thanks for coming along on the ride!
(Oh, who am I kidding? It’s an MMO. We’re definitely going to keep going after the last minute! Haha.)