Feature List: Velika
Here's a summary of some of the major features that will be present in the upcoming development test for Tera Reborn, including preview images, general thoughts behind each feature as well as their performance cost and gameplay implications.
Dynamic Day-Night Cycle
As previewed in an earlier video of mine, my version of the game uses a completely dynamic lighting system, where any changes to the time of day would reflect changes on the overall lighting of the scene, fog, some weather effects, and most importantly, night lights in city areas. Dynamic lights in general are pretty expensive on the GPU, so densely populated/lit areas will need some significant optimization to be lighter (no pun) on the performance.
2K/4K Textures With Improved Metallic Surfaces
Let's admit it, Tera's textures are in some cases absolutely horrendous in quality, and that just simply doesn't go well with a slightly more realistic recreation of the environment in Unreal Engine 4/5. I recreated most of the environmental textures (buildings, foliage, objects, etc) to have 2K-4K (sometimes even 8K if really necessary) resolution depending on object size, relevance and where it made sense, based on Tera's very low res texture samples. This is a trade-off as it increases VRAM consumption, but helps improve visuals on larger objects and when the camera is closer to those surfaces.
​
Below is a direct comparison of the same scene (with the same quality settings and time of day) in Tera vs in Tera Reborn. [Drag the slider to see the changes.]
Left: Tera (UE3) - Right: Tera Reborn (UE4)
3D World Map
With this test, I'm also checking if a 3D world map instead of a 2D one like Tera's could be functional enough to be worth keeping. While Tera's 2D hand-drawn world map is perfectly functional, just like with other features, I'm trying to push the limits, in this case by creating a 3D simplified and minimized version of the player's current area (think BDO, just much more simple in terms of feature complexity) to serve as a map you can open during gameplay.
Since this captures your actual environment for the visuals, this will need a huge amount of tweaking yet (both performance and UX-wise), but if we think it's a good start, then I'll continue working on this feature later on.
​
General map functionalities (such as marking locations, highlighting monster spawn points, marking quest goals) will come at a later point when their connected game systems (quest system, etc) have been completed.
Procedurally Generated NPC Crowd
This is an experimental feature, meaning it might not even make it into the final build, but for now it's looking quite promising. I added a system that spawns non-interactable NPCs with simple procedurally generated behavior and visuals around players, with the only purpose to improve ambience and immersion of city/town areas. Currently this affects performance (fps) quite a bit, for which reason I added an entry in the game options to scale down or turn off the feature completely. My goal here is to see if this is something that should be kept and worked on in the future, or if the extra immersion is not worth the performance cost.
The general idea is to make larger (and supposedly densely populated) areas feel less empty, and this could serve as a replacement for other players idling/running around in cities/main hubs in an mmorpg environment, which would otherwise feel lifeless and uninviting.
Foliage Improvements
While Tera does have some wind effect on foliage (leaves of a tree, etc) in some places, in most other places everything is completely static, and Velika falls into that category. The change here was to add animated leaves to pretty much all foliage (trees, bushes, grass, ferns, vines), while also adding proper subsurface scattering (that makes the edges of these objects partially glow from light sources when for example looking through a leaf in the sun's direction).
These changes help bring some photorealism to Tera's stylized environment, as well as bringing some life to that otherwise static foliage.
Original (Tera)
Improved tree leaves (Tera Reborn)
Pegasus Flights
Remember the moment you took the pegasus for the first time, and you were like "wow!"? Pegasus flights are awesome, so this is a feature I really wanted to add to my creation. The style and the feel of the flight are very much the same as in Tera, except for one limitation. For performance reasons, in-game areas are not seamlessly connected to each other, which means a loading screen is required when traveling between zones. Tera does this too, though loading and unloading zones is hidden behind a warp effect. A similar effect might be added to this version too at some point, when the feature gets finalized and polished properly.
​
One of the issues with pegasus flights was the fact that even tho they are spectacular, they are less viable when you need to get somewhere quickly. I aim to combat this by having different types of pegasus/other creatures with improved speed and routes.
Improved Object/Texture Blending
One of the things that always bothered me in Tera, was when they i.e put rocks inside the landscape, but the line/edge between the different textures was super visible and not seamless at all. This feature aims to fix this and blend objects into the landscape more seamlessly.
​
Tera's Unreal Engine 3 didn't have a way to tackle this, now we do :)
Original
Improved blending
Graphics Quality Presets
The Graphics Settings menu now introduces Quality Presets, a feature that offers pre-defined settings based on how powerful the player's machine is, and what the player prefers during gameplay (quality vs performance).
​
The Performance preset aims to bring 60+fps on mid-tier machines, while also offering a playable 30+fps on lower end gaming rigs, being the best choice for players that prefer having a smooth combat experience as opposed to having high quality visuals for their environment.
​
The Balanced preset is meant for mid tier machines, targeting 45-60 fps without a major loss in quality, bringing pretty much the best of both worlds. Less visible features are turned off, while the general aesthetics (lighting, post processing) are mostly maintained. This is the default preset if left unchanged in the settings.
​
Lastly, the Quality preset is for playing with 30+fps on high-end setups, or for sightseeing/taking screenshots (where having low fps doesn't affect gameplay too much). This does not bring the highest image quality possible yet (that would require the player to manually max out every graphics setting), but it heavily favors the "eye candy" over the performance boost gained by turning certain features off. Best choice if you just want to see how far the graphics can be pushed.
​
All fps targets are for HD (1080p) resolution running on a Windows 10 (x64) system with regular gaming setups.
​