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Hi everyone,
in the run-up to our Trails from Zero release we detailed a lot of the improvements we made to our version of that game, across three Steam community posts. The first one focused on arbitrary aspect ratio support, UI, various quality of life features, and graphics settings. In the second post I went into some detail on how we improved the assets of the game, including sprites and map textures. And in the third and final part I went into some extra platform features, optimization, the music information UI, and various bug fixes.
After the release of Trails from Zero, we continued to expand the feature-set in response to player feedback, in particular with the introductions of shader-based water rendering and an automatic text advance feature.
I'm happy to announce that Trails to Azure includes every single one of these enhancements from the get-go!
So, if you want a lot of background information on and illustrations of these features, you can consult the links above. However, that's a lot of reading, so I've summarized things in a handy list of categorized bullet points:
Graphic AssetsSprites: use the highest-quality available baseline available, and further improve them by de-dithering them with an artificial neural network.
UI textures: source from various versions to get the best one; completely redraw several of them.
Map textures: Use a combined multi-AI / manual selection / redrawing approach with human supervision on every single one of them.
3D assets: fix a huge number of smaller graphical inconsistencies or missing geometry throughout the game.

Graphics (non-assets)Add dynamic character shadows for lights in night scenes and dungeons.
Add dynamic water shaders with refraction for water surfaces.
Increased draw distance (practically unlimited).
Support for high/variable framerate.
Support for anti-aliasing (both MSAA up to 8x and FXAA options) and anisotropic filtering.
Support for arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios.

InputFull mouse menu navigation.
An optional mouse movement system with a lot of options for fine-tuning.
Extra direct keybinding options for common actions.
Full rebinding support with dynamic button prompts for both controller and mouse/KB input.

User Interface and QoLAdded a message log feature.
Added a feature to show the name of each song and which OST it can be found on when it starts playing.
Added an auto text advance feature.
A UI scaling option, to better support both monitor and other (e.g. Steam Deck) setups.
Various options to hide status display elements dynamically.
Save game compression, save compatibility with prior releases, timed autosaves, and "resume from latest save" feature.

OtherAdd optional "rich presence" support for platforms where it is available.
Fixed a large number of legacy bugs, reaching from the more obvious to the extremely obscure.
Performance optimization to reduce power consumption on the Steam Deck.

Sadly, there is one small issue related to importing Zero saves on the Steam Deck which we currently can't work around due to the limitations of the Proton layer.
When playing on the Steam Deck through Proton, you cannot directly import save games from "Trails from Zero". To circumvent this problem, you can either start your game on a Windows PC and import the saves there, and then cloud sync your initial Azure save to the Deck, or you can manually copy the save files. We will provide a guide for the latter in the troubleshooting forum.
As always, none of this would have been possible without the great people at NISA and Falcom, our fantastic beta testers, and of course the team at PH3.
I hope you'll enjoy Trails to Azure, we absolutely put our all into making a great version of it!
- Peter "Durante" Thoman, CTO, PH3