I’ve been spending a lot of time reworking the game’s visuals from the ground up.
The goal has been mainly to not just to throw in a bunch of effects, it was to make the world feel more immersive while keeping performance as smooth as possible.
Lighting, atmosphere, particles, and environmental effects have all been reworked to give each planet more depth and make exploration feel less flat. I also integrated Ro-Volumetrics for volumetric fog and lighting,
This adds a lot more atmosphere to the ship, caves, storms, and darker environments without hurting performance as much as trying to make my own lol.
Atmospheric effects are so pretty now with the weather and volumetric systems too, especially the other planets in the sky.
To support all of this, I also improved the chunk loading and seed saving as I had a lot of issues with generation. Instead of trying to render the entire map at once, the game intelligently streams chunks in 512 stud chunks in and out around the player. That keeps memory usage lower, reduces unnecessary rendering, and lets the game push higher quality environments while maintaining stable FPS.
the screenshot above is after like a 20 minute session in game of fighting and walking around and then returning back to base so I’m still maintaining solid performance although memory is kinda high.
Performance increased like some crazy amount from the LOD system I added which also improves lighting performance and animation performance slop, were talking like a 40% or so increase in performance.
it’s actually insane how much few effects change your entire environment because like look at that in game screenshot.
A lot of the work on the graphics overhaul has actually been behind the scenes like optimizing assets, reducing unnecessary rendering, and making sure all of the new visual systems work together efficiently. The result is a world that looks significantly better while still running well across a [hopefully] wide range of systems like mobile and console.
Thank y’all and PLEASE do give feedback on this.
