Dev Journal #9: Visual Progress

We are working on improving the visuals for Elemental: Reforged. While we can’t get it to “AAA 2025” levels since this is a 2009-era engine, it’s amazing how far you can get only with stone knives and bear skins.

Since this is a Remaster++ and not a sequel, I think most people will understand if our goal is to make the graphics better. New bullet point: Graphics now 25% less bad! But with modern hardware or even old hardware (by today’s standards), there’s a lot we can do with the old engine.

Even adding normal maps to sand can make a big difference. Not to mention everything having shadows that are consistent.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

If you go back and play Fallen Enchantress, you’ll quickly notice that many things didn’t get shadows. That’s because back in the day, shadows were too expensive to give to everything, so you had to “bake” the shadows into graphics.

It also means we can zoom out much further before going to cloth map:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

The terrain here has been completely redone. Trees, ground, etc.

We are also working on adding additional terrain detail for regions that are good for settling on. In FE, we had to keep the tile yield overlay on all the time because it was hard to know if a given tile could be settled on.

More to come!