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.

2021 2022 2023 2024 — same jungle you see in the new visuals! I could swear I own this paperback Upcoming visuals

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.