Ara Dev Journal #4: UI Enhancements in v2.0

I’m a UI guy. Most of my work over the years has been on software such as Fences, Start11, WindowBlinds, IconPackager, and countless other programs designed to improve the Windows experience.

On Ara: History Untold, one of the first things we noticed was that the text and icons were blurry. Not a lot, but just enough to feel like an itch you couldn’t scratch. In fact, the entire UI carried that slight fuzziness. The cause was the game rendering at 720p under the hood and then scaling up to whatever resolution you were actually running. There are valid reasons to do this, but the tradeoff was the blur I just described.

For 2.0, we did a deep dive into the UI rendering system so that text and icons now render at the screen’s native resolution. Here’s a look at before (v1.41) and after (2.0 preview):

What it means for players

Many of us, and yes, statistically, you grew up playing the Civilization games, and probably in the last 10 years, had to deal with needing reading or computer glasses, so I suspect you, like me, found the blurry text a little frustrating.

We hope to start the Previews of v2.0 very soon.