TL;DR
Hey, Deer here to give you a quick tour of some major changes coming to Bushi. I'm Deer, one of the core developers of Bushi and a member of the founding team! We’ve been hard at work for the past several months to overhaul and polish the game to look amazing across a wide range of hardware. This has been accomplished by our amazing art team which has not only produced new assets for upcoming content, but are also in the process of giving existing maps a much needed redesign and face-lift. To those on older hardware or who have struggled to run the game in the past: have no fear! Although we will be including new Unreal 5 systems to improve fidelity, all performance draining features will be optional. In addition, expect Bushi to perform better overall on older hardware as optimization has been a focus around these changes.
Water We Doing?
With our new water serpent diving through the lakes of forgotten lands, we felt that we needed a battlefield to match her beauty and ferocity. As such, all water shaders have been completely rebuilt to properly simulate water caustics and reflections. On top of that, swimming has been improved and is now a more viable mode of movement.
Be Water, My Friend.
Although water is often found in games, it can be the hardest type of material for computers to render. Transparency and reflections are often the death of any graphics card no matter how fast it may be. We’ve worked around this by baking most of the lighting data into the water beforehand which should result in a “fluid” experience.
A Geologist’s Geometry
Rocks and dirt may seem mundane on the surface, yet they comprise most of the terrain in which you will traverse, fight, and survive on. We’ve expanded our modular assets to allow for more variety, cleaner visuals, and unrestricted creativity. Gameplay has also been a priority with this latest terrain. Surfaces on rocks now have more defined faces allowing for more deliberate and precise parkour. Landscape verticality has also been improved in general to allow for more wall-running and sliding opportunities. Collision, hit-detection, and movement all function more smoothly with these assets which greatly benefits new mechanics such as the [Grapple Hook]! Performance is still our main goal, and as such you can expect improved frame rates across the board. Our artists and level designers have made this possible by reducing overdraw from unnecessary triangles being rendered, and have rewritten our shaders to require less computations at runtime.
The Folly of Foliage
Vegetation is often another obstacle that graphics cards struggle with due to its sheer density. The most commonplace solution is to reduce the render distance of such details, however we wanted to be able to simulate dense forests of bamboo and grass. This was made possible by utilizing LODs, masks, and culling. Level of Detail (LOD) allows us to swap distant foliage with lower fidelity assets. This transition is almost entirely seamless, fast, and will stop your graphics card from going over 100 degrees celsius. Masking has also allowed us to prevent overdraw that would be introduced with traditional transparent/translucent rendering techniques. Finally, Unreal’s new culling improvements have allowed us to further reduce overdraw from obscured foliage. All of these have enabled us to allow for a near-unlimited render distance for dynamic vegetation and foliage.
Parting Words
We’re hoping that all of these improvements will allow for a more immersive experience, while retaining the competitive aspect of the game. Readability, performance, and stylization have been the three core tenets of this art revision. These principals have allowed us to hone in on an aesthetic that we think looks good, runs well, and is fun to fight in. This process is on-going, so feel free to reach out to us on our [Socials] with suggestions and feedback!
You can expect further updates on Bushi’s development soon! Until then, this is Deer signing off.
