Hi everyone,
Trails through Daybreak II is releasing today, and as always with our PC ports, it's my pleasure to share some information about the features and improvements we packed into this version of the game.
What is a bit different about this release compared to many of our previous ones is that it is a direct sequel to a game where we already tried to include everything and the kitchen sink in terms of PC features - something at which we succeeded pretty well! You can read more about some of the PC features of Trails through Daybreak (I) here. Before moving further along, I'm happy to announce that we've managed to include every single PC-specific feature and enhancement that we provided in the first game, and further improve on some of them! To elaborate a bit on what this means, I'll briefly recap the most important features.
Overview and Highlights
- Arbitrary resolution and aspect ration support. As you can see above, we really do mean "arbitrary". As always, this is quite a lot of work to get right across the many UI elements in a fully-featured JRPG.
- Variable frame rates up to 360 FPS supported in-game -- up to 500 FPS via config file, but no guarantees on that.
- A wealth of graphics options, here are a few of them:
- Configurable level of detail and draw distance for characters, environment, and lights, with a very large range from low to ultra.
- Shadow quality options, including resolution and filtering, with high-end options for variable penumbra PCSS shadowing and high-quality HBAO+ local environment shadows.
- Highly adjustable rendering quality with MSAA, SGSSAA and trSSAA options, as well as portrait supersampling, minimap anti-aliasing and more!
- Scalable quality for screen-space reflections, volumetric lighting, tesselated water rendering, high-resolution cube maps, and more, from settings appropriate for Steam Deck to ones that go far beyond the console versions and can put high-end PCs to work.
- Various general and gameplay features and improvements:
- Asset caching for blazing fast loading times.
- Configurable multitasking behaviour - choose whether to pause on overlays or focus loss, whether to confine the cursor, and whether to continue playing audio when in the background.
- Turbo mode supported as either a toggle or hold-down action, and with an individual choice of speedup factor for various game scenarios.
- Highly configurable message auto-advance.
- Timed autosaves with a large number of slots so you never lose any progress.
- Additional battle information options such as always displaying the turn order.
- Fully customizable input specifically tuned for PC:
- A new targeting mode optimized for mouse: "Free Look". This works quite differently from what the console version does, but our testers who play with mouse and keyboard love it. Do give this a try if you are interested!
- Additional direct shortcuts for various (sub-)menus, such as directly going to the items screen (with the default shortcut "i"). A keyboard has a lot of keys, and there's no reason not to use them.
- Full cursor-driven mouse menu support across the many UIs in the game. This is just another point in this list but it is a very non-trivial amount of work.
- Dynamic automatic or manual button prompts, which respect your custom rebindings, and can also show secondary bindings.
- Bonus features and full platform support:
- The fan-favorite background music information display feature returns! Now with even more information regarding the origin of each music track.
- Steam Recordings timeline support with event and game mode tracking. Since this is still very rarely supported, if you have no idea what this is then read more here.
- As always in our releases, you can launch directly into where you left off from Steam, skipping all menus and intro screens. This is hardly new, but it's still extremely rare outside of games released by us, so I thought I'd mention it.
This is not quite a full list of everything added or improved in our PC version, but it should cover the most immediately visible user-facing changes.
Some Updates and Nerdy Details Behind the Scenes
Now we get to the part that probably only interests a few people -- if you just wanted to know about the PC version you're going to play, you can safely tune out here -- but I also know that there are some of you who enjoy these looks behind the curtain. I'll focus on some of the things that changed between Daybreak I and Daybreak II.
Leveraging SGSSAA for Free Improved PCSS Shadows
I'll start with perhaps the nerdiest of them all. The difference here is tiny, even to me, and it only affects those who were already using both the highest image quality option (full SGSSAA) and the most demanding shadow filtering (PCSS). However, I still wanted to implement this since it is a free (in terms of performance) quality improvement under those specific circumstances - no matter how minor.
What you see above is a 2x zoomed in comparison of the shadow of a building (with a relatively large penumbra due to its height) on some floor tiles. Depending on what you are viewing this on, and your eyesight, you might just make out a bit of a grainy pattern in the gradient on the left. Without going into too much detail, this is due to the random sampling pattern used for shadow penumbra sampling, and in the SGSSAA case we can further improve the result by varying the random seed not just with the pixel position, but with the sample position.
Smooth Clouds
Trails through Daybreak II actually has some rather intricate, dynamic cloud rendering for its skies. This is something I was reminded of very recently while playing an overall much higher-budget JRPG with incredible production values and noticing that it simply uses a few images of clouds, like in the good old days. But that's besides the point -- what's notable is that because of this level of sophistication, the clouds are rendered in a separate pass, and composited with the rest of the scene later on.
This composition procedure did not play well with our anti-aliasing implementation, leading to the interesting situation where you could see jagged pixel edges only on the roof edges touching a cloud, and not where there was blue sky. While interesting, that's hardly the point of doing rather expensive AA in the first place, so as you can see above this problem has been solved.
Do look at the sky some time when playing the game, and marvel at the procedural clouds!
Eking Out Some Additional Rendering Performance
For more constrained devices, Daybreak I and even more so II are more challenging games to run than earlier Trails games. They are designed primarily for PS5, and while that does not quite match up to high-end PCs, we also know that a lot of people play these games on systems that are slower.
As such, we remain on the lookout for ways to improve performance, and in Daybreak II we introduced a new setting to adjust color processing precision. This causes a very minor loss in fidelity in very specific circumstances, but can also result in an up to 15% overall performance increase, depending on the scene and your hardware.
Watery Woes
Water in Trails through Daybreak II is a lot more intricate than previous games. It actually uses a mesh that is tesselated and transformed entirely on the GPU, and this presented us with two issues:
- It is very performance-intensive on some lower-end hardware, such as the Steam Deck, and for a relatively minor visual improvement.
- In its original state, it does not reliably and consistently work on AMD hardware on Windows. After a bit of time, the entire water shading would collapse and it would look somewhat closer to lightning than water, as you can see in the screenshot below.
The latter point is particularly interesting, since it obviously did work on AMD hardware in PS5. But that does not help us with the PC port, so we had to find another solution. This involved a lengthy search for what was actually going wrong, which eventually led to a series of trigonometry function calls running out of floating-point precision at some point. Both Nvidia and AMD implementations seem to be in spec, but the former has one additional bit of precision which made all the difference here.
To solve this issue, we replaced the noise function used in the shader with a more stable one, which also has the nice advantage of being more performant. For lower-end systems, we additionally "forward-ported" the traditional water rendering from Trails through Daybreak I, and this is now available as a more GPU-friendly option that still looks good.
Conclusion
I could continue to talk about various smaller and larger things we did for this release for hours, such as how the Windows 11 24H2 update very specifically broke some of our input code and we had to scramble and fix it, but time is fleeting. If you still are not sick of this specific kind of information dump, here is an interview I very recently did -- mostly about Trails through Daybreak II -- with RPGSite.
I do very much hope that everyone who decides to buy Trails through Daybreak II on PC enjoys the game, and perhaps notices some of the care that went into creating this port. As always, this would not have been possible without the work of the awesome team here at PH3, or the support of our fantastic beta testers.
Cheers,
Peter "Durante" Thoman, CTO, PH3