Stars Reach visual upgrades
For months now, we have been working on a big overhaul to the visuals in Stars Reach. This has involved redoing most of the shaders in the entire game, and going back and retouching every asset. We started by redoing all the plant life and flora, and we have hundreds of those assets that had to be redone.
Further, they all need to grow, change in response to seasons, be able to catch fire and burn, freeze, shed leaves and die, and so on. We don’t pre-design our biomes; we derive them on the fly from the simulation based on the environmental conditions. The right plants grow in the right places based on the temperature and the humidity and the soil types. (Yes, we even have a dozen soil types).
All that means that every tree you see in the game grew there, and propagates across the landscape just like real plants. Seeds fall and grow into trees, forest fires happen and so on.
Further, everything in the landscape itself can be changed. Mountains can be flattened, roads built, and so on. What you see in this screenshot and the videos is all dynamic, evolving, and modifiable by players. In this picture, that cliff face can not just be climbed, it can be melted into lava. You can see an ice rim along the top — pour water on the ground there, and it freezes and you will skate on the resulting ice. We are finally at a place where we do not need to compromise on the visual quality in order to deliver the simulated living world we have had working for years now.
We also have been working on improved lighting, volumetric fog and other effects. And there is more coming, such as a much improved global illumination model. Truly dark caves are on the way!
Some of these things are in the game now — we’ve been slowly putting in the new assets for months — but a lot of it is still pending a big patch to the game to roll out the technical features. But we’re at the point in development where it made sense to share some of the new visuals as a teaser.
Environments are well along, and we are tackling all the hard surface objects next. Then, we will redo characters and creatures too. It should all add up to a pretty significant change in the game’s style, though we are sticking to a somewhat stylized realism look since the games market is currently chock full of photorealistic games that are indistinguishable from one another.
All of this is also coming with pretty significant optimizations as well, resulting in smoother framerates and general performance. Plenty more to do!
I thought you might be amused to see just how far we have come, so here’s a selection of images from way back when to now. When we first announced and got pushback on the graphics, we said we would keep working on it. Well, iteration takes time. But I think it’s really cool to see the incremental steps forward over time. 🙂
I know plenty of folks are probably wondering, “okay, but what about gameplay?” This update is about visuals, but there’s been quite a lot of game stuff rolled out since I last posted! Banks, player run shops, combat updates, and more. Multiple player cities have been built and destroyed this year so far, and we have even blown up a few entire planets. And coming real soon: player governments. If you want to check out the state of gameplay, there are tons of videos up on the Stars Reach Youtube channel.
For vegetation, you might think about how different atmospheres or star systems affect the intensity of different light wavelengths that reach the surface, how that affects the wavelengths that make the most sense for photosynthesis, and how that in turn would effect the appearance of plants.
For example, here on earth the primary photsynthetic pigments that most plants produce in great abundance are chorophyll a and b. Those adsorb very strongly in the violet-blue and red-orange range, and not as strongly in the green range. Becuase of that plants appear green.
Visible light is the EM that makes it from the sun through the atmosphere (that’s also why we use it to see), and among those wavelengths the violet-blue wavelengths have the most energy (yummy!). So whatever pigments plants came up with was always going to have high adsorbance of those wavelengths. Chlophyll a and b also happen to adsorb well in the red-orange wavelengths, which works well becuase those wavelengths are also largely unimpeded. So chorophyll a and b give you a heck of a lot of bang for your carbon buck on land.
In contrast, in water of a certain depth all the red-orange gets filtered out. Plants that grow at those depths look black in natural light, but red if you shine a white light on them. The pigments that they produce in the most abundance are hyper focused on asorbing the wavelengths that make it down there, and don’t really adsorb any red at all. Why would they? There isn’t usually any around.
Apologies for the long winded post. I wasn’t sure the first sentence would communicate that entire idea 🙂
Those image links didn’t work for me before I clicked the blue “Consent preferences” -icon, chose “Accept all”, then reloaded the webpage.
For some reason that made them work. I’m from Europe. Tested it on Chrome and Edge, and both browsers did the same.