Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In this week’s blog, we would like to talk about the newly introduced engine version 1.4 which consists of many graphical improvements as well as a number of performance updates.

We develop engine features in separate branches with each one labelled as a version. This allows us to test new features extensively and efficiently without decreasing the stability for the gameplay programmers.

We introduced a new global illumination system to the engine which can correctly illuminate both static and dynamic objects. It is based on a pre-baked system called "Precomputed Radiance Transfer". It is independent from the atmosphere, which is a must for a game like Bannerlord where you will enter a scene at different times of the day. The system saves the illumination data to probes inside a regular grid. We developed lots of automatic placement tools so that the work required by artists to bake the scenes is kept to a minimal. Modders will be able to bake GI to their scenes using these tools.

By using profilers we have learnt that in large-scale battles the majority of the GPU time is spent on the skinning of agent meshes. Normally, the skinning process is repeated every time a mesh needs to be rendered (shadow pass, gBuffer pass, special passes for custom hair shading etc.). To combat this, skinning calculations of skeletal meshes have been moved from the vertex shader stage to a separate compute shader stage. Despite both stages running on the GPU, executing a separate stage for skinning and storing results in temporary memory enables us to do skinning calculations only once per frame and use special optimisation mechanisms that are exclusive to compute shaders. This results in the rendering time of skinning meshes being reduced by 60% which enables us to achieve 60FPS in huge battle scenes on a wide range of GPUs.

Particles are now shaded in a separate compute shader stage. Each visible particle is assigned a rectangular region (2x2, 4x4, 8x8, 16x16 or 32x32) in a big global texture atlas according to its screen space size. Shading is done on these tiny quads with a compute shader stage. During the actual rendering, we just sample the lighting result from the atlas texture and skip any complex lighting computation. Separating shading and drawing stages enables us to reduce the fill rate costs of particles since the amount of shaded pixels are extremely reduced. This reduces the high GPU cost of the desert-like scenes. This technique also eliminates the sharp shadows on the particle quads, further increasing the visual quality of the already beautiful particles of Bannerlord!

At this point we feel it is important to stress the fact that while yes, we are still developing the engine and making new additions: this work is running entirely parallel to the development of Bannerlord. Our dedicated engine team are constantly striving to give us a better optimised engine which allows us to have larger battles, higher frame rates, greater visual fidelity and faster loading times. This work doesn’t hold back the development of the game in any way, shape or form and will ultimately improve the overall quality of the final product.

https://youtu.be/oUr-MRo0LZ0

In next week’s blog we will be talking to Gameplay Programmer, Korneel Guns. Korneel’s main focus is on the multiplayer aspect of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. If you have any questions you would like to ask him please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer!

Discuss this blog post HERE



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Twitter


Website
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In this week’s blog, we would like to talk about the newly introduced engine version 1.4 which consists of many graphical improvements as well as a number of performance updates.

We develop engine features in separate branches with each one labelled as a version. This allows us to test new features extensively and efficiently without decreasing the stability for the gameplay programmers.

We introduced a new global illumination system to the engine which can correctly illuminate both static and dynamic objects. It is based on a pre-baked system called "Precomputed Radiance Transfer". It is independent from the atmosphere, which is a must for a game like Bannerlord where you will enter a scene at different times of the day. The system saves the illumination data to probes inside a regular grid. We developed lots of automatic placement tools so that the work required by artists to bake the scenes is kept to a minimal. Modders will be able to bake GI to their scenes using these tools.

By using profilers we have learnt that in large-scale battles the majority of the GPU time is spent on the skinning of agent meshes. Normally, the skinning process is repeated every time a mesh needs to be rendered (shadow pass, gBuffer pass, special passes for custom hair shading etc.). To combat this, skinning calculations of skeletal meshes have been moved from the vertex shader stage to a separate compute shader stage. Despite both stages running on the GPU, executing a separate stage for skinning and storing results in temporary memory enables us to do skinning calculations only once per frame and use special optimisation mechanisms that are exclusive to compute shaders. This results in the rendering time of skinning meshes being reduced by 60% which enables us to achieve 60FPS in huge battle scenes on a wide range of GPUs.

Particles are now shaded in a separate compute shader stage. Each visible particle is assigned a rectangular region (2x2, 4x4, 8x8, 16x16 or 32x32) in a big global texture atlas according to its screen space size. Shading is done on these tiny quads with a compute shader stage. During the actual rendering, we just sample the lighting result from the atlas texture and skip any complex lighting computation. Separating shading and drawing stages enables us to reduce the fill rate costs of particles since the amount of shaded pixels are extremely reduced. This reduces the high GPU cost of the desert-like scenes. This technique also eliminates the sharp shadows on the particle quads, further increasing the visual quality of the already beautiful particles of Bannerlord!

At this point we feel it is important to stress the fact that while yes, we are still developing the engine and making new additions: this work is running entirely parallel to the development of Bannerlord. Our dedicated engine team are constantly striving to give us a better optimised engine which allows us to have larger battles, higher frame rates, greater visual fidelity and faster loading times. This work doesn’t hold back the development of the game in any way, shape or form and will ultimately improve the overall quality of the final product.

https://youtu.be/oUr-MRo0LZ0

In next week’s blog we will be talking to Gameplay Programmer, Korneel Guns. Korneel’s main focus is on the multiplayer aspect of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. If you have any questions you would like to ask him please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer!

Discuss this blog post HERE



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Twitter


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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Hump day is behind us and the weekend is in sight; Thursday is upon us and it is time for another of our weekly updates! Grab a cup of camel-mile tea, sit back and let us introduce you to a new addition to the Mount & Blade series.


Humphrey

Superbly adapted to the desert regions which they populate, dromedary camels have contributed a great deal to both trade and warfare since their domestication thousands of years ago. Their strength, stature and ability to survive for extended periods without food or water make them an invaluable asset for anyone looking to make an arduous journey through a desert.

The Nahasa: the vast desert in southern Calradia, and home to the Aserai, makes for the ideal location for the inclusion of these magnificent beasts. Players can expect to see camels commonly in this region, working as pack animals in trade caravans or as camelry in battles. Although they are slightly slower and less manoeuvrable than horses, camels are able to withstand greater punishment – which is reflected in the game. The rider’s elevated position gives them a height advantage over horse cavalry, but limits their options when dealing with foot soldiers and makes them more exposed to missile units. Camels also receive a small bonus to their speed and manoeuvrability while travelling through the Nahasa, so players may wish to consider enlisting some of these animals into their service during any extended campaigns in the desert.

https://youtu.be/Q7YcTbvqed0
The process of making the camel required 4 steps: modelling, texturing, rigging and animating. For each step we searched for and analysed reference images and videos of camels, working closely to the sources to get the most realistic result. We created a detailed skeleton which contains a number of systems (like dynamic joints and a jiggle system) which made the rigging process take up most of the time, however we think the end result was worth it. Our animator gathered a lot of reference videos of camel movement and behaviour and wanted to note that he really enjoyed working on this project, because – in his own words: “camels are funny animals”.



Camels are just another example of some of the small additions and improvements we are making to Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. They aren’t ground-breaking or game-changing, but they do add some additional diversity to our troop roster and give players more tactical options for both the campaign and battles.

Discuss this blog post HERE



Facebook
Twitter


Website
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Twitch

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Hump day is behind us and the weekend is in sight; Thursday is upon us and it is time for another of our weekly updates! Grab a cup of camel-mile tea, sit back and let us introduce you to a new addition to the Mount & Blade series.


Humphrey

Superbly adapted to the desert regions which they populate, dromedary camels have contributed a great deal to both trade and warfare since their domestication thousands of years ago. Their strength, stature and ability to survive for extended periods without food or water make them an invaluable asset for anyone looking to make an arduous journey through a desert.

The Nahasa: the vast desert in southern Calradia, and home to the Aserai, makes for the ideal location for the inclusion of these magnificent beasts. Players can expect to see camels commonly in this region, working as pack animals in trade caravans or as camelry in battles. Although they are slightly slower and less manoeuvrable than horses, camels are able to withstand greater punishment – which is reflected in the game. The rider’s elevated position gives them a height advantage over horse cavalry, but limits their options when dealing with foot soldiers and makes them more exposed to missile units. Camels also receive a small bonus to their speed and manoeuvrability while travelling through the Nahasa, so players may wish to consider enlisting some of these animals into their service during any extended campaigns in the desert.

https://youtu.be/Q7YcTbvqed0
The process of making the camel required 4 steps: modelling, texturing, rigging and animating. For each step we searched for and analysed reference images and videos of camels, working closely to the sources to get the most realistic result. We created a detailed skeleton which contains a number of systems (like dynamic joints and a jiggle system) which made the rigging process take up most of the time, however we think the end result was worth it. Our animator gathered a lot of reference videos of camel movement and behaviour and wanted to note that he really enjoyed working on this project, because – in his own words: “camels are funny animals”.



Camels are just another example of some of the small additions and improvements we are making to Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. They aren’t ground-breaking or game-changing, but they do add some additional diversity to our troop roster and give players more tactical options for both the campaign and battles.

Discuss this blog post HERE



Facebook
Twitter


Website
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Twitch

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

One of the most important (and complicated) tasks during the development process of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord was to develop our engine. Using a proprietary engine instead of licensing an existing one might look like an unnecessary complication, but it’s actually vital for what we want Bannerlord to be. For a start, the game would not be a moddable as it is going to be without it! Our engine programmer Gökhan Uras explains a bit more about the engine of Bannerlord in this week’s dev blog.


Gökhan Uras

Ankara, Turkey

2012

B.S, Middle East Technical University, Computer Engineering.

Engine Programmer


“I am mostly at my desk, coding and debugging. My main focus is post effects pipeline, general shading and CPU performance. I also do lots of tooling for our editor. I constantly check our issue tracker to see if there is anything that needs tending to right away. I am also in constant communication with my team. We always strive to achieve higher quality in our engine, to that end we always collaborate with each other and the feedback from the rest of the team is always invaluable. On top of that, I am always trying to implement new features for our artists to achieve the visual quality that they desire from our engine.”


Temporal Scalable Ambient Obscurance (TSAO)

“The modding capability of the game. The modding community did wonders with Warband, I can’t even imagine what they will come up with our brand new editor and scripting system. Our editor is very feature rich! It contains smaller tools like a resource browser, particle editor, cloth editor, atmosphere editor, skeleton editor, flora editor, material editor and texture editor. We have a prefab system in place to easily reuse entity hierarchies across scenes. We have a very detailed terrain editing system for painting height maps, texture layers and floras, and you can also easily import height maps and layer weights from outside sources to modify in the editor. We also support real-time reloading of resources to ease our artists’ workflow. Aside from building scenes, modders can add C# scripts to any entity to create any mechanic they want to achieve mod specific behaviours.”

“It is not something I solved by myself but scaling from ~20 people to ~80 people was a really difficult process. We had to change things in order to work efficiently with that many people. We needed to change our version control system and issue-tracking system with our workflow throughout the office.

As an engine team, our code affects everybody in office, from gameplay teams to artists. So we needed to ensure that nobody is affected by our faults. To that end, we implemented an automated test system which rejects the work if anything breaks, before the change goes out to everybody. We needed to add visual tests to the system, which compares screenshots of valid ones and current ones, to catch shading bugs which can be easily overlooked and resurface weeks later. During this period we also established an extremely good QA team, and learned to work with them efficiently to minimise any issues that could affect workflow. It looks easier on paper, but changing any habits in life is a hard process and for working habits it is the same.”

“I am juggling a few things these days. I am finalising a very big refactor on the agent rendering system which improved our CPU performance by nearly 15%. I am at the polishing stage of contact hardening shadows for high-end configurations and along with this I am trying to find optimisations to shadow rendering. Also, I am working closely with one of our artist to improve our tree shading and I started to tinker with our editor to improve usability according to feedback we get from our artists.”


Contact Hardening Shadows (CHS)

“Battania because I really love the aesthetics of their architecture and moody atmosphere of their towns.”

“The main challenge in making an engine for Bannerlord was giving players huge battles with hundreds of characters and without sacrificing graphical quality or performance. But it is also the main reason that we created an engine in-house. Another of the main challenges was ensuring that all of our features support modding. Modding is very important for the Mount & Blade series so we needed to give modders the appropriate tools.”

“We are still making changes; we are constantly trying to improve visuals, performance, usability, modding etc. I would call the current state of the engine as almost finished, so you should perceive these changes as releasing updates and patches to it in-house. We built a very solid foundation over the years, so adding features and improvements is not disruptive to development. We will try to increase the quality of the engine even after release, and we will definitely use it for all projects for the foreseeable future.”

Discuss this blog post HERE



Facebook
Twitter


Website
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Twitch

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

One of the most important (and complicated) tasks during the development process of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord was to develop our engine. Using a proprietary engine instead of licensing an existing one might look like an unnecessary complication, but it’s actually vital for what we want Bannerlord to be. For a start, the game would not be a moddable as it is going to be without it! Our engine programmer Gökhan Uras explains a bit more about the engine of Bannerlord in this week’s dev blog.


Gökhan Uras

Ankara, Turkey

2012

B.S, Middle East Technical University, Computer Engineering.

Engine Programmer


“I am mostly at my desk, coding and debugging. My main focus is post effects pipeline, general shading and CPU performance. I also do lots of tooling for our editor. I constantly check our issue tracker to see if there is anything that needs tending to right away. I am also in constant communication with my team. We always strive to achieve higher quality in our engine, to that end we always collaborate with each other and the feedback from the rest of the team is always invaluable. On top of that, I am always trying to implement new features for our artists to achieve the visual quality that they desire from our engine.”


Temporal Scalable Ambient Obscurance (TSAO)

“The modding capability of the game. The modding community did wonders with Warband, I can’t even imagine what they will come up with our brand new editor and scripting system. Our editor is very feature rich! It contains smaller tools like a resource browser, particle editor, cloth editor, atmosphere editor, skeleton editor, flora editor, material editor and texture editor. We have a prefab system in place to easily reuse entity hierarchies across scenes. We have a very detailed terrain editing system for painting height maps, texture layers and floras, and you can also easily import height maps and layer weights from outside sources to modify in the editor. We also support real-time reloading of resources to ease our artists’ workflow. Aside from building scenes, modders can add C# scripts to any entity to create any mechanic they want to achieve mod specific behaviours.”

“It is not something I solved by myself but scaling from ~20 people to ~80 people was a really difficult process. We had to change things in order to work efficiently with that many people. We needed to change our version control system and issue-tracking system with our workflow throughout the office.

As an engine team, our code affects everybody in office, from gameplay teams to artists. So we needed to ensure that nobody is affected by our faults. To that end, we implemented an automated test system which rejects the work if anything breaks, before the change goes out to everybody. We needed to add visual tests to the system, which compares screenshots of valid ones and current ones, to catch shading bugs which can be easily overlooked and resurface weeks later. During this period we also established an extremely good QA team, and learned to work with them efficiently to minimise any issues that could affect workflow. It looks easier on paper, but changing any habits in life is a hard process and for working habits it is the same.”

“I am juggling a few things these days. I am finalising a very big refactor on the agent rendering system which improved our CPU performance by nearly 15%. I am at the polishing stage of contact hardening shadows for high-end configurations and along with this I am trying to find optimisations to shadow rendering. Also, I am working closely with one of our artist to improve our tree shading and I started to tinker with our editor to improve usability according to feedback we get from our artists.”


Contact Hardening Shadows (CHS)

“Battania because I really love the aesthetics of their architecture and moody atmosphere of their towns.”

“The main challenge in making an engine for Bannerlord was giving players huge battles with hundreds of characters and without sacrificing graphical quality or performance. But it is also the main reason that we created an engine in-house. Another of the main challenges was ensuring that all of our features support modding. Modding is very important for the Mount & Blade series so we needed to give modders the appropriate tools.”

“We are still making changes; we are constantly trying to improve visuals, performance, usability, modding etc. I would call the current state of the engine as almost finished, so you should perceive these changes as releasing updates and patches to it in-house. We built a very solid foundation over the years, so adding features and improvements is not disruptive to development. We will try to increase the quality of the engine even after release, and we will definitely use it for all projects for the foreseeable future.”

Discuss this blog post HERE



Facebook
Twitter


Website
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Twitch

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Last week, we had a look at the politics, history and personalities of the three imperial factions. Now we'll see how they'll be represented in-game.

Militarily, the Empire's troop types and equipment is drawn from ninth to eleventh centuries, a period of Byzantine resurgence. The Byzantines' best-known troops are their cataphracts, fully armoured cavalry who rode into battle with an arsenal of lance, sabre, and long-handled mace. But the Byzantines also had a full complement of medium and light cavalry, plus spearmen and skirmishers, not to mention whatever mercenaries they could get. They were masters of combined arms, authors of military manuals like the Strategikon that counselled patience over glory-seeking, pioneers of a more scientific approach to warfare.



The Empire will also deploy powerful heavy cavalry, sturdy spearmen, and skirmishers, and our upgraded command system should give players a chance to experiment with combined arms. Improvements to the morale calculations, such as a shock effect from taking down a large amount of troops at once, can make tactics such as flank charges more effective. Imperial cataphracts are also designed for opportunistic attacks that benefit from being timed more carefully than the Vlandian steamroller. We've given them two-handed kontos lances - a slight anachronism, as these are more late ancient than early medieval weapons, but we think it will add interesting variety. Without the shield, a frontal charge by cataphracts might more easily be disrupted by missile fire, but if the enemy doesn't have supporting missile troops, then the extra reach of the kontos can be devastating. Their heavy maces, swung from a fast-moving horse, can also deliver a crushing blow.

As with the Romans, the Empire is assumed to have imposed a form of Pax Calradica - at least on its heartland, if not on the ever-embattled frontiers. Peace and stability has allowed cities to grow, so the empire is assumed to be slightly more developed than the outer kingdoms. In Bannerlord we've introduced a number of new ways to show this kind of accumulated investment. We can vary a city's economic muscle with the amount of workshops it has, and its defensive might is shown by outer walls that can be one of three levels, with different scenes for each.



As in all the realms of Calradia, regional variation throughout the empire will be shown largely through minor factions. Imperial border areas tend to be rougher and more chaotic than the heartland, and in the game are represented by frontiersmen. Though fiercely loyal to the empire, they adopt many of the ways of the warrior-tribes they face, from weaponry to a preference for blood feud over courts of law. The Watchers, in the northern hill country, represent the Akritai, the famous Byzantine borderers of Anatolia. In the south and east, colonies of fugitives and free-spirited wanderers have learned to live and ride like the steppe peoples they fight, forming the Eleftheroi. These are based on the Cossacks -- Third Rome rather than Second, admittedly but probably not much different than those who guarded the Byzantines' Black Sea frontiers. And of course we have a faction based on the Varangians, the fearsome Nord guardsmen of the Emperor, who in the tumult after Arenicos' death have formed a mercenary outfit.

An adventurer may make his or her name in the outer kingdoms, but to rise to the pinnacle of power in the game, a player will need eventually to deal in one way or the other with the Empire and its legacy. You may be an Attila who humbles it, a Justinian who restores it, or a Charlemagne who remakes it in a new form in a new land. Don the purple robe, or trample it into the dust under the hooves of your horse: that is your choice.



In next week’s blog we will be speaking to one of the programmers from our engine team, Gökhan Uras. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer.

Discuss this blog post HERE



Facebook
Twitter


Website
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Twitch

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Last week, we had a look at the politics, history and personalities of the three imperial factions. Now we'll see how they'll be represented in-game.

Militarily, the Empire's troop types and equipment is drawn from ninth to eleventh centuries, a period of Byzantine resurgence. The Byzantines' best-known troops are their cataphracts, fully armoured cavalry who rode into battle with an arsenal of lance, sabre, and long-handled mace. But the Byzantines also had a full complement of medium and light cavalry, plus spearmen and skirmishers, not to mention whatever mercenaries they could get. They were masters of combined arms, authors of military manuals like the Strategikon that counselled patience over glory-seeking, pioneers of a more scientific approach to warfare.



The Empire will also deploy powerful heavy cavalry, sturdy spearmen, and skirmishers, and our upgraded command system should give players a chance to experiment with combined arms. Improvements to the morale calculations, such as a shock effect from taking down a large amount of troops at once, can make tactics such as flank charges more effective. Imperial cataphracts are also designed for opportunistic attacks that benefit from being timed more carefully than the Vlandian steamroller. We've given them two-handed kontos lances - a slight anachronism, as these are more late ancient than early medieval weapons, but we think it will add interesting variety. Without the shield, a frontal charge by cataphracts might more easily be disrupted by missile fire, but if the enemy doesn't have supporting missile troops, then the extra reach of the kontos can be devastating. Their heavy maces, swung from a fast-moving horse, can also deliver a crushing blow.

As with the Romans, the Empire is assumed to have imposed a form of Pax Calradica - at least on its heartland, if not on the ever-embattled frontiers. Peace and stability has allowed cities to grow, so the empire is assumed to be slightly more developed than the outer kingdoms. In Bannerlord we've introduced a number of new ways to show this kind of accumulated investment. We can vary a city's economic muscle with the amount of workshops it has, and its defensive might is shown by outer walls that can be one of three levels, with different scenes for each.



As in all the realms of Calradia, regional variation throughout the empire will be shown largely through minor factions. Imperial border areas tend to be rougher and more chaotic than the heartland, and in the game are represented by frontiersmen. Though fiercely loyal to the empire, they adopt many of the ways of the warrior-tribes they face, from weaponry to a preference for blood feud over courts of law. The Watchers, in the northern hill country, represent the Akritai, the famous Byzantine borderers of Anatolia. In the south and east, colonies of fugitives and free-spirited wanderers have learned to live and ride like the steppe peoples they fight, forming the Eleftheroi. These are based on the Cossacks -- Third Rome rather than Second, admittedly but probably not much different than those who guarded the Byzantines' Black Sea frontiers. And of course we have a faction based on the Varangians, the fearsome Nord guardsmen of the Emperor, who in the tumult after Arenicos' death have formed a mercenary outfit.

An adventurer may make his or her name in the outer kingdoms, but to rise to the pinnacle of power in the game, a player will need eventually to deal in one way or the other with the Empire and its legacy. You may be an Attila who humbles it, a Justinian who restores it, or a Charlemagne who remakes it in a new form in a new land. Don the purple robe, or trample it into the dust under the hooves of your horse: that is your choice.



In next week’s blog we will be speaking to one of the programmers from our engine team, Gökhan Uras. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer.

Discuss this blog post HERE



Facebook
Twitter


Website
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Twitch