Tarisland Devs Show How They Created a Fully Cross-Platform Experience Without Sacrificing Quality

A new developer update video from the Tarisland team dives into how cross-platform play will work in the upcoming MMORPG. Importantly, they show examples of how they've created a fully cross-platform experience, without sacrificing quality.

Producer Yang Min Goes into the team's reasons for wanting to deliver a cross-platform experience. They wanted to provide an immersive, flexible experience that will let everyone decide how they experience Tarisland. PC players are likely to be sitting down for longer sessions, while someone grabbing their mobile device might opt for shorter sessions, and they wanted to deliver an experience that worked on both.

Part of the challenges getting there was the issue of how to create a cross-platform experience that wasn’t constrained by the hardware but also didn’t skimp on quality. The team decided to address the issue of potential hardware limitations and worked to use things like the UD compression algorithm to minimize needed space, and optimized the client resource files, and optimized poly counts to streamline the file sizes. They used something called the Houdini engine to balance performance and scale down required space, and optimized the visuals. This was designed to provide a flexible package that could be downloaded on the go or wherever you are, to ensure compatibility.

If you are going cross-platform, you'll need to make sure that the controls and the UI and the screens all work on both platforms. The Tarisland devs did more work here to create the UI and controls tailored to each platform. Instead of a mobile simulator for the PC version, they created a custom experience on mobile, showing off how you can tailor the screens on PC and mobile to your preferences. 

Since mobile has inherent limitations, they prioritized speed and precision by creating shortcuts for interactions, from changing targets to casting to quick heals. They did not work on mobile first and then simply port or adapt the mobile controls into the PC