Just Cause 4: Development Update

The team's working on improving vegetation, water and more.
By The Just Cause 4 Team

Firstly, to all fans that have played and provided feedback on Just Cause 4, thank you for your continued support. We actively read feedback and pass it on to the development team.

One thing we’re keen to do is share more with you, the JC community, about the development of the game. Here’s what we’ve been working towards lately and what to expect from future patches for Just Cause 4. Don’t worry – this blog will focus on production and won’t include any Just Cause spoilers!

So what’s been going on recently at Avalanche? Today we released a small PC update that fixed a broken Just Cause 4 achievement.

We’re also pleased to say that work on the future updates to Just Cause 4 has been going well. Visual upgrades have been a core focus for the team here in order to deliver the most immersive Solís experience possible.

Here’s a preview of some of the changes we’ve been working on for the next couple of updates to Just Cause 4:

Improved vegetation

Vegetation-related fixes have been a primary objective for the team. As you can see in the image below, medium-sized rainforest vegetation now renders shadows, regardless of its distance from Rico. Previously, in the range shown in the below image, many of the smaller shrubs wouldn’t have any shadows.

A separate issue related to the fade effect on vegetation close to the camera has now been fixed. Previously, this effect would cause visibility issues when walking through vegetation or tethering to vehicles, but now it applies to bark and smaller shrubs, instead of just large plants' foliage.

Improved water effects

The team has also focused on improving the visual quality of rivers and water in Just Cause 4.

One of the key improvements has been underwater visibility - underwater tonal colours have been fixed, rays of light and ambient light now match the surface, and we’ve fixed river surface visibility when underwater, so waves/ripples from boats/foam are visible when Rico’s submerged!

Waterfalls now exit rivers in a more realistic manner (we’ve removed particles in the below screenshot to show what's behind the waterfall:

There have been various other graphical fixes to JC4 rivers, such as improved foam and water wakes generated by boats, to fish now spawning underwater.

More improvements to come

These are just some of the improvements we’re currently working on. We’re going to continue our efforts to provide even more fixes for JC4, such as stabilisation improvements, 4K checkerboard rendering on consoles and more. Avalanche are also looking to overhaul the anti-aliasing solution, in order to improve the overall visual fidelity and remove some of the noise that can become apparent in high contrast lighting.

Our team is working very hard to ensure we can deliver the patch work you have requested to the highest quality and as soon as possible. These Developer Blog Updates will hopefully shine a light on some of that work and give you an insight into what’s going on behind the scenes. We hope you find them interesting and useful!

We look forward to sharing more of our progress with you soon and hope that you’re excited to find out more about what’s going on behind the scenes here!

The Just Cause Team


All screenshots in this blog post were captured on a high end PC with a GeForce GTX 1070 and i7-6700K.


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