Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

[Turisas]

It's a shame War of the Vikings doesn't have singleplayer, MP circlejerking gets boring real fast.

 

[Metro]

Shoe-string budget MP only game with microtransaction cash grabs -- Fatshark and Paradox make an awful combination.

 

[Cursed Platypus]

It's a shame War of the Vikings doesn't have singleplayer, MP circlejerking gets boring real fast.

Shoe-string budget MP only game with microtransaction cash grabs -- Fatshark and Paradox make an awful combination.

Indeed. But it does make for beautiful wallpapers.

 

[Space Satan]

fuck this fantasy medieval stuff. i want a 30 years war setting and integrated rape/schwedentrunk mods.
i hope this time around there finally will be a pike and shot mod that is worth a damn. wanted to like fire and sword, but the setting and the barebones implementation just didn't do it for me.

Pike and shot will require shitload of men. AI handled cavalry charge pretty bad in M&B - iven with formations infantry used pikes like poorly and allowed them tobe stomped. As for tasteful rape and tortures - strange that no modders even done it.

 

[Cursed Platypus]

Rape should be prevalent in any setting that aims at being credible. When you're an adventurer that's what you do. Good or evil.

 

[Space Satan]

But in medieval marauding warband simulation rape is mandatory.

 

[Metro]

I said rape. I r funny.

 

[Merlkir]

Now there's also going to be War of the Vikings, which looks even dumber than WotR, so in theory that's direct MP competition to Bannerlord. Good, if it's anything like WotR, Taleworlds have nothing to worry about. Plus their game will have the singleplayer campaign.

War of the Viking does look better than War of the Roses. Visually at least. Environments are really superb.

It makes me wish Mount and Blade was set in a real historical setting, because you will always get superior environments, due to you just having to copy the work of the geniuses of yore.
That's also true for a story/lore standpoint.

Spoiler

Anglo Saxons and Norse cultures clashing near old Romans/Celto-Romans ruins. Beautiful.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Dunno, I find it quite ridiculous. I mean, look at the mushrooms. Thanks, but no, I'll keep playing the Vikingr mod, which is far more historically accurate and not a massive arcadey hacklusterfuck.

 

[Cursed Platypus]

Now there's also going to be War of the Vikings, which looks even dumber than WotR, so in theory that's direct MP competition to Bannerlord. Good, if it's anything like WotR, Taleworlds have nothing to worry about. Plus their game will have the singleplayer campaign.

War of the Viking does look better than War of the Roses. Visually at least. Environments are really superb.

It makes me wish Mount and Blade was set in a real historical setting, because you will always get superior environments, due to you just having to copy the work of the geniuses of yore.
That's also true for a story/lore standpoint.

Spoiler

Anglo Saxons and Norse cultures clashing near old Romans/Celto-Romans ruins. Beautiful.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Dunno, I find it quite ridiculous. I mean, look at the mushrooms. Thanks, but no, I'll keep playing the Vikingr mod, which is far more historically accurate and not a massive arcadey hacklusterfuck.

Disregard the mushrooms. Now what?
They are much more visually accurate than any game out there.
M&B multi, WotR and chivalry are all three arcadey hacklusterfuck. There's nothing historically accurate in their gameplay. I've yet to see the game that does multiplayer right. Maybe M&B 2?

Unless you're speaking about singleplayer, which I would agree, is far more accurate (still sucks visually).

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Those mushrooms do exist, you know.

 

[Merlkir]

Try the Vikingr mod:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/vikingr

It's accurate equipment/troop type wise and changes the MP gameplay a TON. Its servers may be a bit empty at times, but the regular community events are awesome.

 

[Brinko]

http://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/2

Mount&Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog 1 - Hairy Artists
Fans of the Mount&Blade series and passing readers, this blog is intended as a source of insight to our world of game development and the TaleWorlds family. Our offices are a series of rooms on a long corridor. Each room physically hosts a different team with a different focus, mirroring our actual team based development structure. This week's blog will discuss the artists' team, known to us as artist takımı (Turkish).

The artists have the most varied professional backgrounds in the office. Some formally studied classical art, art history or graphic design, while others are hobbyists turned professional. Both industry veterans and fresh graduates fill the large, comfortable chairs. You'll find preened moustaches, pretentious glasses, a range of characters and personalities. Every desk has a tablet of some sort, the most impressive of which are the underwhelmingly named “pen displays”; large, high resolution screens which can be drawn on directly using an accompanying pen-shaped input. This simulates drawing or painting on a real canvas, with the comforts of digital painting: saving, zooming and smudge-free hand positioning.

Any character, weapon, building in the game is modelled by an artist within virtual space. The artists manipulate the geometry using the tools provided by the software to create the desired 3D shape (a shield for example). To bring colour to this shape, texturing is required. This effectively involves painting a realistic picture of any exposed surface on the object and overlaying it onto the 3D shape or “mesh”. Artwork is also necessary for game menus, icons and interface elements. Animators share the same space as the artists, using motion capture and hand-crafted animations to bring life to the living and moving objects in the game. These disciplines are discrete from writing code and require different individuals with different skill sets.

In the artists' room, the largest room in the TaleWorlds offices and host to the weekly company meetings, there is a white board, typically decorated with an array of sketchings rather than plans or goals. The work itself is pasted on a board with post-it notes and held in shared online documents. Tables are positioned, not for optimal communication but for preferred lighting conditions. The blinds are generally drawn and lamps are used to provide the correct ambience and minimal screen glare. It's quiet with most work done headphones-on. Something like a giant egg incubator.

In addition to directly working with modelling and texturing programs, artists take on the roles of in-game sceners and are familiar with the documents required to add items into the game. Applying these additional skillsets improves the efficiency of an artist's work; they are able to go away and create a new prop or building, while modelling a scene, if they feel the need for it. Being able to place items into the game also allows them to directly view their models as they will appear in the product, enabling them to adjust materials and textures for the best visual result. This is a niche aspect of working within the games industry, and something that needs to be learnt upon joining the company, for those only versed in the more general aspects of 3D art or design.

One of the current focuses of the artists is on character hair. Hair is a great challenge for all games; simulating realistic movement and texture when you have so many individual strands moving separately is incredibly resource intensive, when done in real time. Some games use certain techniques to improve the simulation, while saving resources but in a game like Mount&Blade, where you may have 100s of characters on screen, the balancing act becomes significantly more difficult. Our current working method is: a textured base (something like a hair coloured swimming cap) with groups of hair strands (rendered onto polygons with alpha channels) moving in various directions to give a natural look. This adds more depth than the method used in warband, which relied on the texture to give depth to the hair. You can see the difference below (Left: Warband, Right: Mount&Blade II: Bannerlord):

It goes without saying but what you're seeing is the game in its current state and the hair will likely see further changes and improvements. That means, if there's something you don't like about it, feel free to let us know via an ALL CAPS tweet with several exclamation marks but there's a good chance we're not completely happy with it either... just yet. The most important thing is that it's something which can be used en masse without heavily impacting on performance, a possiblilty achieved by the strength of our new game engine.

Hopefully you've enjoyed the first installment in our developer diary series and remember you can always like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to get the very latest news on Bannerlord.

Join the conversation and comment on the forums!

 

[Dickie]

God damn graphics. Will my computer be able to run this with more than three guys on the screen?

 

[Turisas]

You need to download more RAM, duh.

 

[Space Satan]

Do you see that little village?
There we go to Loot & Pillage!
*sings along*
Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage!
Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage!
Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage! Loot & Pillage!

 

[Metro]

Clearly we need hair tessellation for large scale battles.

 

[Zewp]

Who the fuck cares about hair in a game that isn't The Sims? Not to mention that it's going to get covered under a helmet anyway.

 

[Abelian]

I know there's no chance of this happening, but I'd appreciate it if they'd allow you to import your character from Warband.
What would be even more cool is to import the savegame like Europa Universalis IV allows players to import their Crusader Kings 2 final save.
But, yeah, I realize this could add a lot of overhead and might not be possible if they want to completely redesign the map.
I just found the caravan escorting, cattle escorting, looking for bandits running around the amp, and other such low-level quests to be a grind until you could equip an army that actually had a chance against lords.

 

[Turisas]

I know there's no chance of this happening, but I'd appreciate it if they'd allow you to import your character from Warband.

It's a prequel.

 

[AstroZombie]

Bla bla bla hair, whatever guys. Just release the game so I can do this:

 

[Space Satan]

Mount&Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog 2 - Painted Plants
As a preamble to this blog entry, we would like to extend our sincere thanks for the incredible response to the previous blog. We expected excitement and we know (because you rarely take a break from telling us, which is great!) that you want information from Bannerlord but the feedback certainly exceeded our expectations. The blog was our most liked, shared and far reaching post on Facebook, the forums went crazy (more so than usual), on Reddit we had a great interest on /r/mountandblade as well as reaching the front page of /r/Games and on Twitter... well predictably everyone had a lot of fun with caps lock.

Avid blog followers and newcomers to the series, in this, our second blog, we're talking about our team of engine programmers and their role in our development process. It is fitting that the engine team sits in the centre of the office, developing the core of the game. The room is generally busy with the comings and goings of demanding developers, the hardware is powerful and the attitude is relaxed and open. Inside dwell the gremlin exterminating gremlins. The light masters. The engine engineers.

A game engine is effectively the framework behind the game itself and its development. The workload of our engine team covers the development tools used by our artists and programmers, graphics programming (lighting and shading) and control of various core behaviours like collisions between objects and physics simulation. Things beyond the comprehension of lower sentient beings.

One delight of Bannerlord's development toolset is the scene editor, which is used for placing all the objects like trees, and houses in a scene, editing the terrain, sky and lighting. It has taken large strides in the new engine and now has all the workings of a professional application with a great degree of control and polish. Not only does this massively improve the efficiency and quality of the scenes that artists can produce but it will be completely available for modders. As something that became a huge part of the previous games, modding is a primary consideration when developing Bannerlord.

Much of the engine team's work is done on a request basis from the artists and other programming teams, so the tools progress alongside the game. Developing our own tools and engine in this manner means they can be catered for our specific needs. A simple example of this is flora painting. In Warband's scene editor, all objects including plants had to be added one by one but in Bannerlord, clumps of grass and small rocks can be painted with the sweep of a virtual brush stroke. They'll automatically sit nicely on the ground and rotate/rescale randomly within changeable parameters for a natural flow.

The images you are seeing are the engine running in DirectX 11. The final release will also support DirectX 9. This will make sure that the game makes the most of your PC and runs as smoothly as possible on high and low end systems. Of course, running the game in DirectX 11 will allow for tesselation and other advanced techniques to optimise performance and visual quality.

In the screenshots you can see examples of different atmosphere settings used in the same scene. It's not possible to list here, the extensive improvements and additions that our atmosphere settings have seen. What is worth noting though, is that although in the examples here we have created realistic visual effects, all of the variables of the fog and the lighting are completely customisable with effects, giving endless options to those interested in playing around with them for their mods or maps.

Enjoy looking at the pictures and scouring the writing in the editor for hidden treasures. Keep up with the blogs for more details on the other teams in the office and some juice about the gameplay itself.

 

[Turisas]

Looks good. Hope it performs well too, and doesn't choke anymore when there's hundreds of troops in a battle simultaneously.

 

[Spectacle]

Looks good. Hope it performs well too, and doesn't choke anymore when there's hundreds of troops in a battle simultaneously.

So far we know fuck all about what their goals for the gameplay are. They could be aiming for larger battles than the original with several hundred per side, or smaller warbands with a few dozen at most.

 

[Space Satan]

I, really, do not want to see ultramassive battles of 800 x 800. the game is one of the most random i've ever seen. Which is why people love it. Start a battle and catch lucky arrow headshot 10 seconds later is a possability. But with massive battles player life expectancy becomes way too short. Standing all battle behind all your troops is not a fun experience. So better there would be smaller warbands with better empathis on individual skill and levels of your warriors.

 

[Turisas]

So far we know fuck all about what their goals for the gameplay are. They could be aiming for larger battles than the original with several hundred per side, or smaller warbands with a few dozen at most.

Yeah it's fine if they go with smaller skirmishes, nothing wrong with that. The engine should still support larger battles too, just for mods' sake if nothing else. It very quickly can turn into a total clusterfuck like SS mentioned (improved sieges is another must have for the sequel btw., I'm sure the armies could use more than one ladder), but if someone wants that, why not give them the opportunity?