Graphics Overhaul
I sat down and reworked all of Tomorrows Past's basic shader code. With the goal of getting it to AAA quality. I also made a lot of improvements to the performance of the game as well!
New Water Shader
After fiddling with some of Unreal Engine 5's new features, I came across this water function which I quickly tried out in tomorrows past. It looked mediocre at best, but after messing with the settings and adding some of my own code it began to look incredible. It has 3d waves and a complex water depth algorithm, and it took almost no hit to performance.
New 3D Grass
After messing with the water, I took some time to work on the foliage on the map. Retexturing a majority of the landscape to look better. Along with that I created a shader that will dynamically place 3D grass around your player as you move around the landscape, instead of just painting in a whole bunch of grass like other games. This method looks cleaner and runs much smoother.
Small Details
Now these are details that are easy to miss. Around the beach and grassy areas I added a bunch of small rocks and twigs. These details will just make the game look more appealing. The details are really just meant to make the photo mode better.
Volumetric Clouds
I used another great feature in Unreal Engine 5 to create some of the best looking 3D clouds I could. Tough when I first put them in they made the game run at under 30fps, I was eventually able to get the clouds optimized so that they would have almost no hit to performance!
Better Reflections
Before I made this change the reflections in Tomorrow's Past were really basic and made this game look like it's made by one person. Which it is ;) But that wasn't the look that I was going for, so I decided to rework it to a point where I thought it looked acceptable. I will 100% come back to this to improve it further, but it does look much better than last time!
Performance
Now after all of these new features the frame rates in Tomorrow's Past would be much lower as there is more stuff to render. This is infact the exact oppisite of what happended. As I reworked the shaders the frame rates went from an average of 30 fps to an average of 190 fps. And if I turn the graphics all the way down I can crank out a solid 256 fps. (All done on a standard rtx 2080)
Download Size Reduction
After a lot of optimizing my files I was able to get the games download size to under 2 Gigs. This is insane considering this is after all of the new graphic updates! I will continue to try and keep the download size as small as possible so my game doesn't hog your storage and you can enjoy other games along side Tomorrow's Past!
