Hi everyone,

I've previously talked about the optimization of our port, as well as the coop feature in some detail. In this final in-depth post about our version of Ys X, I want to provide an overview of some of the features of the PC version.
I'll start with some highlights, and there is a more complete list for reference at the end of this post.

Draw distance is really important to me personally, as I am quite easily distracted by pop-in. In Ys X, we have three separate settings governing various aspects of draw distance, and in the image above you see a comparison between all of those at their default setting (left) and at the maximum (right).

Note how this significantly affects three aspects:

• The visibility of characters -- such as the fisherman and his dog on the left, the lookout in the center, and Magni at the right.
  
• The rendering of decorative "clutter" geometry, such as the barrels, boxes and netting everywhere around the docks, or some trees in the background.
  
• The level of detail of larger parts of the level, such as houses. As a good example, look at the roof details.

Rather than talking specifically about "Ultrawide" or "21:9", when we work on aspect ratio issues, we aim to tackle the problem from the ground up. As I described in some previous posts on this subject, fully supporting arbitrary aspect ratios in a game not previously built for this is not trivial, but we've amassed a lot of internal knowledge and reusable tools for this purpose by now.

We've touched almost all of the UI and lots of effects individually to make them work at non-16:9 aspect ratios, and of course we also support a completely arbitrary choice of rendering resolution. Above, you see a screenshot rendered natively at 3000x1000 in a 3:1 aspect ratio, and of course the minimap is positioned correctly.

In addition to supporting direct mouse camera input (without any intermediate processing or conversion), and pointer-based mouse input in menus, we have also made more fundamental changes to some input mechanics to better accommodate players playing with mouse and keyboard. The most prominent example is how skills are invoked: on controller, there are not enough unique inputs so one button needs to be held as a mode switch. On keyboard, this would be more awkward, and it's also not necessary since there is a sufficient number of keys available and in easy reach of the "WASD" hand position. So, as you can see in the comparison above, the default mouse/keyboard bindings allow for directly using skills with 1/2/3/4, while the controller inputs function identically to console versions of the game.

As always, all actions can be rebound, and feature a primary and secondary binding, and all button prompts reflect any rebinding done by the user. For the first time in our ports, there is now also the option to alternatingly show both the primary and secondary binding for an action, if both are configured.

We fully support the new Steam timeline integration features for recording, meaning that the timeline changes to indicate the type of gameplay (in menus, seafaring, or standard exploration), and that various events are marked automatically. This includes things like fishing, map changes, finding treasure, or fighting bosses.

We also support dynamic cloud sync, which means that e.g. your Steam Deck saves are synced to the cloud even when you do not quit out of the game.

As usual for our ports, we offer a number of graphics settings to leverage the vastly different capabilities of various PCs, including some very high-end options. Like we did for the first time in Trails through Daybreak, we have also made almost all of these settings capable of being live previewed, as you can see in the screenshot above for the shadow filtering setting.

On your journey through the game's waters, you'll come across wind paths that allow you to rapidly traverse large distances. These can be quite polygonal in a few places in the original game, as seen on the left in the screenshot above. In our PC version, they are composed of a larger number of individual elements, as you can see on the right.
Note that this is not exposed as a user-exposed setting -- after some testing we could not find a notable performance impact on any hardware configuration, and it would also be very hard to adjust without a reload. If you are really curious to see what these looked like by default, you can set the "wind_path_quality" setting in the "Graphics" section of the settings file to "1".

I previously talked about game asset compression in a technical blog post[ph3at.github.io], and introduced our archive format "P3A". We used this format and its associated caching features to great effect in Trails through Daybreak, resulting in rapid load times on systems with sufficient memory, despite using very little disk space.
This file format and caching make a return in Ys X: Nordics to equally great effect, with the game coming in at less than 7 GB without any reduction in asset quality, and with sub-second reload times on fast systems after the cache has been warmed up. This also includes the same mod support we featured in Trails through Daybreak, where any archive placed in the game's "mods" folder will overwrite existing game assets.

Here is a hopefully complete list of features unique to our PC port.
The bolded features were not discussed above:

• A BGM info UI option.
  
• Configurable camera field of view.
  
• Various PC ecosystem quality of life options, like configuring what happens on alt-tab etc.
  
• Several draw distance settings for various aspects of the game.
  
• Full arbitrary framerate support, solving many subtle bugs that only affect high framerates.
  
• Arbitrary resolution support.
  
• Arbitrary aspect ratio support, including adapted HuD positioning for any aspect ratio.
  
• HDR support.
  
• High-quality Keyboard/mouse support with dedicated actions which make sense for M/KB (like direct skill access)
  
• Co-op, as discussed in its own separate post.
  
• Full rebinding for both controller and MKB, support for primary and secondary bindings, and mixed use -- all reflected in button prompts and help messages.
  
• Various advanced shadow filtering and quality options, including PCSS.
  
• A more functional save/load menu, based on the menu used in Trails through Daybreak.
  
• Steam timeline integration.
  
• MSAA/SGSSAA options.
  
• Several other graphics quality options and improvements, e.g. for volumetric lighting.
  
• Live graphics settings previews.
  
• Steam dynamic cloud sync.
  
• Character/enemy animations update every frame regardless of distance.
  
• Asset caching for extremely rapid reload times on systems with sufficient RAM.
  
• Higher quality Wind Path meshes.

One final thing: if you played the demo before and continue your save in the main game, your previous progress achievements will be unlocked when you complete chapter 3 (a bit further along after the end of the demo).

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the game!
- Peter "Durante" Thoman, CTO, PH3