Elysium Lighting Update

Happy Sunday Patrons!!

This week on Patreon we have two bits of news for you! The first is two new polls regarding our Wyverns, and this post goes into some detail about the recent lighting update on our map Elysium!

To improve Ethereal's performance. we've recently discovered a huge slow-down occurring in our in-game lighting. This includes not just the global sunlight, but also ambient lights that are spread around the map such as torches, fireflies, and spotlights on jungle camps. With the help of our new senior lighting designer, we've reworked the lights from the ground up making the map stunning without the bottleneck it used to create in performance. Below you'll see a brief explanation of what we achieved with our completely overhauled lighting system.

Performance: These updates have boosted performance more than we ever could have expected. On average, our internal testers and development team have seen an increase of 20-30fps on average with every setting set at its highest option. While there is still room for improvement, we are extremely excited to see players reach 120+ frames consistently in-game.

Fire Lane: As you can see in the images above, Fire Lane shows a significant change in quality and clarity from the updates. This has allowed the lane to feel still like a treacherous burned-out landscape while still allowing players to see the effects of myths and minions around them. Creating an overall improvement in the laning and gaming experience.

Void Lane: Void lane shows some significant differences as well, here you can see the difference in our shadows as well as the saturation of color improvements. The shadows while still occluding some light, don't darken the area nearly as much, creating a more clear line of sight when myths are running in and out of the light. We feel the color saturation on our map pulled away from the realistic setting that we've always wanted to achieve in ECoS and love the more natural and grounded colors the new lighting has provided to us!

Ice Lane: Ice lane has been a thorn in our side for some time, in our previous iterations of the map, players have had mixed emotions with the coloration and overall brightness/exposure of the lane. This new lighting setup, not only has improved drastically in those areas but has also provided a new sense of beauty and clarity for the lane. Allowing for the lighter areas to still feel like snow, without being blinding to players, and allowing for a more natural design to shine through instead of relying on a blue hue being applied via a post-process.

We know you all can't wait to get your hands on Ethereal again to experience the new map and lighting. We are reaching many of our internal milestones toward having another open test for you and making great progress toward our eventual Pre-Alpha/Early Access Release. We're excited to say that new gameplay is being recorded that we can't wait to show off very soon!

Make sure you vote in the Patreon Polls that went live today about our Wyverns, and we'll see you all next week!

UG | JellyKnees