Ara: History Untold's Living World - Terrain Textures
Continuing our series on the look and feel of Ara: History Untold, this week the team wanted to share a little bit more about the terrain and world textures.
As we talked about in our Microflora post, the team was able to increase the resolution of the terrain textures in recent weeks to help ensure a more detailed look, but they didn’t stop there – updates have been made to normalize the lighting across all the elements of the living world to help ground the gameplay and natural elements, and the team also did a pass at regenerating the textures to balance colors and reduce noise, for a more natural look.
With all visual changes, the team is looking to ensure that performance and gameplay are front and center. We are excited to report that despite the increases made to resolution, they were able to make the net render time 15% more performant due to simultaneous optimizations made to terrain blending, with the added benefit of further smoothing lateral camera movement, based on feedback from our recent Technical Alpha.
Take a look at the progress we've made below, and be sure to stay tuned for more!
A split image showing the before and after of the savannah biome.
The savannah biome during our second technical alpha.
The savannah biome with the increased resolution and updated lighting.
As we talked about in our Microflora post, the team was able to increase the resolution of the terrain textures in recent weeks to help ensure a more detailed look, but they didn’t stop there – updates have been made to normalize the lighting across all the elements of the living world to help ground the gameplay and natural elements, and the team also did a pass at regenerating the textures to balance colors and reduce noise, for a more natural look.
With all visual changes, the team is looking to ensure that performance and gameplay are front and center. We are excited to report that despite the increases made to resolution, they were able to make the net render time 15% more performant due to simultaneous optimizations made to terrain blending, with the added benefit of further smoothing lateral camera movement, based on feedback from our recent Technical Alpha.
Take a look at the progress we've made below, and be sure to stay tuned for more!
A split image showing the before and after of the savannah biome.
The savannah biome during our second technical alpha.
The savannah biome with the increased resolution and updated lighting.