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Hi everyone,
Trails beyond the Horizon is releasing today, and as always with our PC ports, it's my pleasure to share some information about the features and improvements, and also some - hopefully amusing - anecdotes from the development.
On a technical level, this release is a continuation of Trails through Daybreak 1 and 2, which are games where we already tried to include everything and the kitchen sink in terms of PC features - something at which we succeeded pretty well! We included almost everything from those releases in this game, which also goes for improvements made post-release. To elaborate a bit on what this means, I'll briefly recap the most important features which have been carried forward.
While our existing feature set is quite extensive, there are still also some new features to talk about that make their first appearance in this game.
One of these is quite simple: in addition to plenty of in-game anti-aliasing modes, we also already featured a minimap anti-aliasing setting (that I'm still very proud of and wish was adopted more widely), and a portrait supersampling setting. However, there is one particular rendering pass that escaped all existing anti-aliasing methods. The details are a bit complicated, but the result is that in addition to main game render scale, main game anti-aliasing, portrait supersampling, and minimap anti-aliasing there is now also a "Transparent UI VFX Anti-Aliasing" option. This graphics debugger screenshot shows an example of the elements that are affected by this setting highlighted in red: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45560222/0a43d59c4bf134339081deacc33603e6b50b8d58.png
One thing I have learned over my time doing feature-rich PC ports is that some players don't read. I feel confident in ranting about this for a bit because I am pretty sure that everyone who reaches this point is not in that group. To be clear: it's obviously not the job of someone who just wants to play a game to care about technical minutia - that's why we have plenty of hand-tuned graphics presets that you can select from with a single choice at the very top of the options page. What is a bit draining at times is when someone does not use those presets, but rather goes down to the individual settings and selects "Ultra" everywhere, completely ignoring even BRIGHT RED WARNING TEXT, and subsequently complaining about the resulting performance (even though they e.g. selected settings that go beyond the PS5 Pro configuration while running on a sub-PS5-level PC). A simple "solution" to this issue is simply not allowing settings that go substantially beyond the console versions, especially in regards to aspects such as draw distance of foliage. I find that a predictable but counter-productive outcome. Instead, I mostly believe in letting people shoot themselves in the foot rather than arbitrarily capping the high-end scalability of a game. For me, one of the many great things about PC gaming is that a good PC version can benefit from future hardware without re-buying some remaster.
However, there is exactly one particular scene in this game where this principle isn't enough. In it, a grain field that simply serves as scenery is rendered using the general detail/clutter/foliage system, and as such, it is also affected by our "Detail Density" setting. In this case, that can lead to utterly absurd amounts of individual, fully modeled stalks of grain being rendered, tanking performance on even very fast systems. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45560222/c9ac9f27359140eed1d9320afa928ed1fb6646fd.png Note that the comparison above is from a camera angle that you cannot even achieve in-game, showing the difference much more clearly than it could actually be observed by a player. To prevent "Ultra" detail density from tanking performance here needlessly, this one particular instance of foliage is special-cased in the code, capping the setting to the equivalent of "High". Note, however, that there is an escape hatch: you can manually edit the settings file to set the option allow_silly_grain_levels to true. There is absolutely no reason to do this.
Particularly in the current hardware market, it is even more important to support not just the latest and greatest, but any hardware that can reasonably run a given game. This is one of the reasons why our ports support Windows 10, and will continue to do so while at all feasible.
One of our testers uses an Nvidia GTX Titan GPU. This was a very high-end graphics card, but it's also from an architecture declared end-of-life by Nvidia, and released in 2013, ~13 years ago. Nonetheless, in principle it is sufficiently fast to play this game, but it was crashing on startup.
It required quite a lot of in-depth debugging, which was made more difficult by not having any comparable hardware at hand, but ultimately I figured out that some of the rendering passes of the game depend on the TypedUAVLoadAdditionalFormats feature, which is present on basically every modern GPU but absent on that particular generation of hardware.
Long story short: the release version of Trails beyond the Horizon includes an alternative fall-back path for that functionality, which is automatically chosen on hardware that does not support this particular feature. So, if you planned on playing the game on a 13-year-old high-end GPU: enjoy, this one's for you!
I could continue to talk about various smaller and larger things we did for this release for hours, but I believe this post suffices to paint a picture of the level of dedication and attention to detail that are the hallmarks of our ports.
I do very much hope that everyone who decides to buy Trails beyond the Horizon enjoys the game, and perhaps benefits from at least some of this work. As always, this would not have been possible without the awesome team here at PH3, or the support of our fantastic beta testers.
Cheers, Peter "Durante" Thoman, CTO, PH3
Please note: Except for returns as stipulated by Steam, upgrades to the Deluxe, Deluxe+, Ultimate, or Complete Edition (and obtaining the applicable launch exclusive bonuses) are not available during the launch deal period. After the launch period ends, upgrades can be made for the price difference.
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This page aggregates Steam news feeds, patch notes, and developer announcements for The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon, sourced from official Steam community posts.
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