Responsive Water

A completely reworked water rendering system delivers greater visual fidelity and support physically-based shading. Effectively, there’s volume and depth to rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans. Each of these water types looks different and naturally reacts to what is happening around it. As wind rushes along the water, you see ripples and waves.

As we step up to the new graphics engine, we also visualized interaction effects between water and in-game objects, introducing deformation, sea foam, and underwater effects. So when you’re crossing a river to close on an enemy, your tank disrupts water as it moves, while firing a shell creates circularly spreading 3D waves over its surface.

Diverse Volumetric Flora

The greenery you get on maps is getting a lot more diverse with over a hundred unique trees and ten variations for each ecotype recreated from the ground up. Along with adding diversity, we put extra work in to create trees that have a nice amount of volume and look realistic close up. They no longer seem as if they were made up of several flat images.

Flora doesn’t just align with the overall map setting; it comes in different shapes and sizes. Painted in various colors, foliage reflects the seasons, giving you bright yellow and red for autumn arenas, lustrous dark green on summer maps, and snow sprinkles down from the branches on winter battlefields.

The work on greenery didn’t end with ramping up their looks. To breathe life into the maps, we introduced special interaction effects between vehicles and flora and light transmission.

Photorealistic Skies

To improve your immersion into a realistic world, we fully reworked all content and created photorealistic skyboxes for every map. In addition, we added moving clouds just to give arenas a bit more of a dynamic feel.

Advanced Lighting

A completely reworked lighting system with realistic shading/lighting models and environments introduces more accurate shadows, reflections and global illumination, enhancing the look and realism of everything you see.

To ensure battlefields are illuminated realistically, we created a model that follows the natural lighting laws of physics. With it, all we have to do is choose a light source for in-game objects (e.g. daylight, sunset or, let’s say, light coming from a campfire). The technology takes care of the rest, calculating and creating lighting and shading according to the set criteria, while artists and special effects specialists, who did it back in the day, apply their skills to create other effects.

Global illumination technology adds harmony to the picture, accurately simulating how light reflects and refracts between different surfaces, creating an array of indirect lighting sources. In technical terms, it computes the way that light is bounced from, or absorbed by, materials in a scene and ensures that highlights come from the same place and shadows are cast in the same direction, even across multiple objects and layers. For example, when sunlight comes through a colored translucent surface, it casts a shadow on the surfaces it reaches, transforming their color scheme.

Just look at the two images below: one of them seems more realistic thanks to global illumination, with the orange canvas casting a shadow on the tank’s side armor and cobbled road.

Improved Shadows

Shadowing in environments looks nicer than ever before, adding greater depth, beauty and realism to battlefields. The new Adaptive Shadow Maps technology calculates shadows from static objects (houses, stones, trees, etc.) and saves them in a special reusable shadow texture, reducing the load on the graphics card and processor. As for dynamic objects like tanks or falling trees, they receive improved dynamic shadows. Most visibly, particle effects interact with shadows in the new graphics engine. Fumes, dust, and smoke now receive and cast semi-transparent shadows. For example, when a tank is moving in the shadow cast by a mountain, the dust from its tracks doesn’t glow unnaturally (as it used to). Instead, it takes the mountain’s shadow and is lit with consistency, in harmony with the tank and nearby objects. Lastly, material shadow effects are there to accurately reproduce the depth of various materials.

Destructible Objects

The reworked maps get long-awaited Havok® Destruction technology. Its introduction begins with smaller destructible props like stone hedges, wooden poles, barrels, and brick.

NOTE: We’re far from done fine-tuning destruction, but decided to show it to you regardless, to collect your feedback. That’s why you might run into some odd-looking bugs. For example, pieces of wood and other small destructible objects sometimes become stuck in a vehicle upon destroying them. It’s a rather common issue for games that use Havok® Destruction, and the dev team is working to get rid of it. If you come across any other bugs, go ahead and report them on the Sandbox forum.

Post-Effects

As we move to the new graphics engine, we introduce a variety of new and improved post-processing effects. Bloom, god rays, chromatic aberration, and screen space reflection all help improve image quality and clarity of detail to ultimately deliver sleek modern visuals.

Performance

Graphical advances naturally up the pressure on your graphics card. We worked a lot on performance optimization, reducing the overall memory footprint of graphics, using streaming technology to rework graphical sub-systems from the ground up. Now, all graphics elements that don’t change frame-to-frame don’t get rendered and are reproduced from the cache. Along with caching, we optimized graphic elements to reduce the memory load even further and give you the headroom to enable extra effects.

Terrain: The new graphics engine adds a virtual texture with 16 layers, blended using a complex formula that works faster than the four-layer textures used in the older graphics engine

Water: The heavy-on-performance reflection generation process was replaced with the cutting-edge Screen Space Reflection algorithm, significantly lowering the load on the graphics card

Adaptive shadows considerably cut down the pressure on performance

The battle UI logic was optimized to reduce the load on memory

3D scene and post-effects aren’t rendered behind static UI elements (e.g. minimap, damage panel, etc.), which saves FPS

Multi resolution particles were implemented to smooth out FPS drops when multiple particle effects are being rendered on screen at the same time (e.g. explosions and fumes)

Following a great deal of internal playtesting that showed no drop in FPS on older rigs, we’re now readying to release 12 reimagined maps in Sandbox to gather game data, feedback, and smooth out performance going forward.

Maps now look completely different with enhanced graphics, and you might not recognize an arena as you once knew it. It’s a lot to take in, so please be patient. Let it sink in before you rush to share your first impressions and keep in mind that none of this is final. If you think any of the improvements are heading in the wrong direction, or believe we should be looking at something that isn’t on this list, please let us know. With so many changes, it’s difficult to predict all the outcomes, but with your help and feedback, we believe we can continue to head in the right direction.