En Masse Entertainment posted a short developer note update regarding the 64-bit client for TERA (which will be rolled out as part of patch v96).
K-TERA received the upgrade on May 28th; Bluehole/Krafton’s technical director Jin-ho Kim had a Q&A interview with Inven regarding the update which provides further details to the above linked note.
One of the key points he noted is that moving the client to 64-bit will remove one of the key limitations that prevented design and development teams from implementing new types of content. Generally, they had to be careful since the game was really sitting on a foundation that wasn’t able to handle certain (read large scale) types of content. Memory constraints with the 32-bit client impacted performance including loading in graphical assets; something that long time TERA players visually experienced with the texture loading prioritization default gray character model silhouettes and the FPS drops (where visual assets are automatically reduced) for the auto optimization system employed for Guardian Legion missions, as well as stability (due to the addressable memory limitations).
Kim said it was the TERA’s development teams wish for a long time due to the constraints on the type of content they could pursue. And unsurprisingly, he mentioned it ended up being a “massive project” that took longer than expected and required a company effort. While the graphics (assets, animations, skill effects) have not been changed, the prior techniques used for “optimization” are effectively lifted and thus some players will notice a graphics improvement (both performance and visually). One of those constraints; level of detail (LOD) being drastically cut back for major regions has now been removed which translates into better overall visuals (a good example is how objects are rendered when they are far off in the distance).
As noted before, since they also upgraded the Unreal Engine 3 build to one of the final versions (before Unreal Engine 4 was deployed by Epic Games), this will also allow Bluehole to further optimize the graphics performance (and also increase some of the visuals) in the future. Technical upgrades were also made including multithreaded rendering (taking advantage of multicore processors in most modern PC’s) as well as asynchronous loading which will eliminate that infamous screen freeze that happens as resources are loaded (again, normally seen in Guardian Legion missions).
Besides providing a new foundation to design new content for TERA, the team is also evaluating the official support of add-ons (which as of now, is via unsupported and at times, questionable client side modules). There are some really good quality of life ones though and it would be nice to see an actual supported framework for them. Kim did mention they are open to this possibility (but it will likely be a lower priority project).
Kim was also candid with some of the various bugs in the game (not surprising given the amount of stuff that has been added over the years by different development teams and their respective cast of rotating personnel). It’s something they want to tackle but acknowledges it will take time to address. He was also upfront about challenges with server side lag since they haven’t yet tackled server side optimization (which is actually where a lot of the spaghetti code logic involved with calculations take place) which they hope to deal with in the second half of this year.
As expected, the actual rollout for K-TERA wasn’t issue free. Players there still experienced technical problems including client crashes (bugs specific to the new client code are going to create this duality for awhile where players are expecting better stability, but are going to see bugs from completely different issues that were previously the root cause of crashes).
I thought the most funniest part of his interview was with “renewing the graphics”; where Kim talked with the various production people and artistic director (where they said they “wanted to do everything”). Like any major project, it’s a matter of resources; time, money, and people. And Kim acknowledged that the amount of work is “so large” that it is difficult now (but not out of the question). Opinion: what they really need to evaluate is the end goal. It doesn’t make sense to invest the resources into trying to perform too much optimization around even the latest Unreal Engine 3 build. If you are going to even considering redoing graphical assets, it really makes sense to just redo everything in Unreal Engine 4 at minimum or Unreal Engine 5. Whether or not they are open to effectively rewriting the game code from scratch, is something they need to look at in the context of addressing the spaghetti code cruft (where the bulk of the bugs exist).
Basically, it’s the exploding parts problem and it really does come down to resources (time, money, engineering personnel, coders, artists and animators) since it does amount to the sort of production resources that goes into creating new games. The player side of me would love to see something like this come to fruition BUT the business hat wearing side of me does not see the case of it in a niche title like TERA. Regardless, I cannot complain about a better foundation being put in place since it’s a better start than nothing at all.
