At TERA Reforged, we want every player to have as good an experience as we can give them, no matter which country they come from or how long they’ve played. Getting into a TERA private server still tends to require a lot of manual setup, and that’s exactly what we keep working on in onboarding and in the launcher.
This devlog covers two steps in that direction: our own Skill Prediction solution, now built into the game, and a change in how the launcher receives updates. In the previous devlog we introduced Skill Prediction as an experimental launcher feature; now we want to show how it turned out in practice.
Important: we're still in development. Values and mechanics may change as we test, balance, and gather feedback.
At a Glance
- Our own Skill Prediction: built into the game, with no third-party tools to install
- Simple to enable: just turn on the Skill Prediction option in the launcher settings, under Gameplay
- What we tested: at around 110 ms ping, skill responsiveness changes noticeably
- Still experimental: the implementation is unconventional and may be unstable at this early stage
- Launcher 0.3.x: updates now come from a dedicated host, without the request ceiling we kept hitting
- Existing install: if you already have the launcher, there’s nothing to do
What Skill Prediction Is
If you’re new to this, Skill Prediction anticipates the server’s response locally while that response is still on its way, and the server keeps processing the skill in parallel. In practice, it tends to make combat feel much smoother, especially on high-latency connections.
If you’ve used SP (the common short form of Skill Prediction) on other servers, the main difference here is that ours runs inside the game, with no extra program open alongside it.
Why Build Our Own Skill Prediction
On many TERA private servers, on top of installing the game, you still have to set up third-party tools to get features like Skill Prediction. That usually means installing dependencies and making adjustments that call for prior knowledge, or for reading through guides and manuals.
Watching our community grow, we’ve seen real interest in the project from players in other countries, and we want them to get off to a good start too.
There’s also the technical barrier: not everyone is familiar with installing and configuring third-party applications, and plenty of people would rather not deal with it, or feel uneasy running another program alongside the game.
There’s parity to consider as well: with the system built into the game, everyone plays with the same version of Skill Prediction, which leaves less room for unfair advantages.
Those are the main reasons to invest in our own Skill Prediction solution, already built into the game. There’s nothing extra to install or configure.
Skill Prediction in Practice: Archer and Slayer
To make the difference clearly visible, we deliberately ran the tests in an unfavorable setup: we forced the route through an ExitLag node in Miami to reach a server in SĂŁo Paulo, which pushed ping to around 110 ms. In that setup, every skill has to complete the round trip to the server before the animation resolves, and that delay is what the player feels.
One of the skills where this difference shows up most is Rapid-Fire, on the Archer. In the videos below, we run the same sequence with SP off and then with SP on, under the same latency conditions.
SP OFF, Rapid-Fire (~110 ms ping):
SP ON, Rapid-Fire (~110 ms ping):
Classes that rely on chaining skills also suffer badly from high latency: skills are slow to come out and dodges get much harder to time. Below, the same chain on the Slayer, again with SP off and then on.
SP OFF, Slayer, skill chain (~110 ms ping):
SP ON, Slayer, skill chain (~110 ms ping):
How to Enable Skill Prediction in the Launcher
Skill Prediction already ships with the launcher. In the settings, under Gameplay, just turn on the Skill Prediction option: it takes effect the next time you start the game. In the previous devlog we recommended leaving it off; with this version, it’s ready for you to try.
We want to be honest about its state: because it was built in an unconventional way, it should still be considered experimental, so you may run into bugs and instability at this early stage. If anything odd shows up with SP on, tell us on Discord.
Big thanks to the volunteers who ran tests and collected data with us. We wouldn’t have finished this first version of our Skill Prediction without them.
Launcher: Updates from a Dedicated Host
During internal testing, we also found a limitation in the way we were distributing launcher updates. Since they tend to be small, the initial idea was to keep them hosted on GitHub. In practice, though, the platform’s request limit turned out to be too restrictive for what we needed, and failures started showing up even in tests with only a few people.
That produced errors when updating or starting the game, whenever that limit was hit.
In version 0.3.x, the launcher now pulls these updates from a dedicated host, without the request limits we had before. If you already have the launcher installed, nothing changes: it keeps working normally and simply fetches updates from that new address. The infrastructure behind it is covered in the devlog on the TERA Reforged App and our custom launcher.
What’s Next
We’re continuing with the final adjustments to Island of Dawn on the way to the Alpha. If you haven’t installed the launcher yet, you can grab it now and leave Skill Prediction on, ready to test once the server opens.
More news on content soon. See you next time! 🛠️