PAT25 Hidden Fog
The Stars Reach pre-alpha playtest just got updated with the long-awaited graphical changes that include the new shaders, the new global illumination and volumetric fog. We’ve seen a few teases, screenshots and videos of these changes over the last few months - but this is the first time we can experience them ourselves.
The patch contains other changes as well:
- You can now pick an appearance from a list of pre-made characters at the start, and your character will no longer randomly change it’s appearance every time you load in or zone. There’s 64 pre-made looks in total, which comes down to 16 per species, 8 per gender.
- The tutorial hallway has been completely overhauled/reworked. Again.
- Character starter packages have been removed. Makes sense, as now that you can buy tools from player-vendors, what you start with no longer matters that much (unless after a wipe maybe).
- Wormholes remain disabled, and the planet removal stays slated for “soon”.
- Various improvements to GovBot, performance, camera, plants&seeds, the ingame chat, inventory, the tools, some crafting/refining recipes, new building tiles + furniture, bugfixes and some other stuff.
Just like with the Skies and Seasons Update back in March, this patch report is heavy on pictures - so much so, that I decided to do things a little differently this time. The next Chapters will all be purely pictures - no text at all. Instead of my writing, I’ll be adding some download-links with each image - so you can get high-res versions to use as desktop backgrounds or whatever. (All pictures (c) Playable Worlds, reproduced under fair use).
Akacala
Audath IV
Baracatis III
Herastag
Deep Space
Conclusion
The new graphics update brought some impressive visuals to the game - but things are not done yet. All the plants have already been updated to make full use of these new shaders, but both the building tiles as well as creatures and characters are still to be updated. You can expect to see further visual improvements in the future.
Despite the increase in fidelity, this update actually brought an improvement in average FPS. Reason for that is, that there’s a number of performance improvements included in these changes, and thus these new graphics are actually less demanding than the previous version was. The fog does impact performance, and is turned off by default. You have to turn it on in the settings manually - but it’s performance impact (while noticable) is not as big as I’d have expected.
I hope you liked the images, and see you next patch!