3D Effects & Graphics

Five levels of optional 3D effects, from the classic look to an HDR picture at the window's own resolution, plus frame rate, texture size and window settings.

By default Galaxy Eggbert draws the classic look: the original's tiles and sprites on lit 3D cubes and models. The Setup screen's graphics options add effects on top of that. They change only how the world is drawn, never how it plays. This page describes the state as of 2026-11-10; for how the drawing is organised (SceneFrame, WorldRenderer, the passes) see Rendering.

The Setup's graphics options

All of them live in savedata.txt and are shared by the three players. The 3D effects are off by default; a file from the first effects build with effects3d=1 is read as High.

fullscreen=0
terrainRelief=0
effectsLevel=3
frameRate=144
textureScale=0

What each level adds

Each level keeps everything of the levels below it.

Ultra

The levels below Ultra draw on the game's 800x480 logical surface, scaled up to the window. Ultra draws the world at the window's own pixels (the HUD stays on the logical surface) and adds:

• HDR finish (UltraFinish): a half-float scene, auto exposure, HDR bloom, ACES tone mapping and a colour grade per world built from its sky.
• Physically based light, with the sky's light taken from the world's background picture and the Ray Dream surface values of every object model.
• Screen-space effects: ambient occlusion (SSAO), contact shadows, and reflections on the water and on metal and polished floors (read from the terrain atlas's surface map).
• Voxel global illumination (TerrainGi.hpp): light bounced from around, baked into the terrain when it is built: a room is lit by its walls, grass tints the wall beside it, an overhang is darker underneath. The reliefs read it per chunk, and sprites and particles per cell, so in a cave they are as dark as its floor.
• Lit sprites and particles; fire, sparks and stars shine above white into the bloom.
• Volumetric fog with god rays through the shadow map.
• Lens: temporal anti-aliasing, depth of field, camera motion blur, film grain.
• Finer detail: the terrain atlas upscaled with normal and surface maps, and the models smoothed by PN-triangle subdivision.

Ultra's first frame builds the finer atlas and its maps; the game logs it and pauses for one to two seconds on the desktop (the work is spread over up to eight threads). Loading a world at Ultra also takes a little longer than at High, about half a second for mission 105 (the illumination bake and the programs).

The water

At Off and Low the water is its animated 2D tile on the outer faces of the water cells. From Medium up it is no longer the tile: its colour and clearness come from the tiles, its surface is a height field of waves in world space (three swells and two scales of chop that run on across the cells, calmer far off; WaterWaves.hpp), with Fresnel clearness, a sun glint and a pale sheen at a glancing view. Seen from inside it is darker. At Ultra the sky is reflected by Fresnel, the screen-space reflections ripple with the waves, and from under the surface the sky shows only within Snell's window. Independently of the effects, a camera under water gets a blue haze and less warm colour, fading out at the waterline.

Where the shaders cannot run

The shaders, the shadow map and the glow need GLSL source compiled at runtime (desktop GLSL 3.30 or GLSL ES 3.00) and render targets. Where they do not compile, they leave themselves out: the stock effects draw the world (no ambient occlusion either), and the fog, the round shadows and the particles remain. Where Ultra's own programs do not compile, Ultra's world is lit as High's.

Frame rate

The game always steps 60 times a second, as the original did. Above 60 fps the loop runs that often and the frames between two steps are interpolated: the camera and its shake, Blupi, every moving object (projectiles included) and the particles. An object that moves more than two blocks in one step (a respawn, a teleport) is drawn where it lands, not in between. Above 60 the screen's vertical sync is turned off. Captures, golden frames, autoplay, demo verification and resume replays always step one tick per frame, so they are unaffected. The fps cheat shows the frames drawn per second.

Textures: Auto, 1x, 2x

2x loads Content/icons2x/ and Content/backgrounds2x/ in place of the normal sheets (TextureScale.hpp). A 2x sheet is used only if it is exactly twice the size of its 1x sheet, otherwise the 1x one is kept, and all texture coordinates are computed from the logical 1x size. Auto picks 2x on the desktop when Ultra is on and the display is at least 1000 pixels tall, since only Ultra draws the world at the window's pixels. The web and Android always use 1x; the APK leaves the 2x folders out.

Fullscreen and window

The main menu's upper-left button switches between fullscreen and a window and always names the other mode; F11 does the same. The first run is windowed; the choice is remembered as fullscreen=0/1.

Environment overrides

For tests and comparisons; see also Configuration.

Presentation only

No effect changes the simulation. With the effects on, the golden behaviour trace and the autoplay traces are equal to those without them; with them off, every frame is byte-equal to the build before they existed. Medium and High have golden frames of their own beside the classic ones: tests/golden/ (classic), tests/golden/effects-medium/ and tests/golden/effects-high/, checked by tools/verify_golden_frames.sh. The effects' GPU-free decisions are covered by the CTest cases VerifySceneEffects, VerifyUltra and VerifyEffectParticles; see Testing.

Measured with GALAXY_PERF in mission 105 under a CPU rasteriser (relative numbers only): Off 23 ms a frame, Low 24, Medium 25, High 68.

Platform status (as of 2026-11-10)

Source map

The level is chosen in GalaxyEggbertGame::AppendSceneEffects() (src/GalaxyEggbertCNA/GalaxyEggbertGameScene.cpp) and drawn by WorldRenderer.