Ok...My hamster wheel is spinning. This can be a very important addition, and bring a new level of quality to campaign map if modders can add to the amount of biomes, and of course, define associated scenes.
So what this means is, imagine if you will, playing a mod and you are on your way to siege Rome for example, a modder can set it up to where the town center is ringed with layers of biomes ever expanding around the town center, so that Rome, or any other notable landmark can appear on the map, or in the backdrop, even outside of actual 4k center scene itself. They can be expanding rings, so that as you fought battles outside of the town center in ever expanding distances, the backdrop of Rome would shrink, as you would expect. You could also fragment up the ringed "biomes" so that you could even make how you approach Rome consistently trigger the appropriate backdrop of the city in correlation to the direction from which you approached. So, you would see the NW facing of Rome in the backdrop, if you engaged in a battle on the campaign map that geographically was actually NW of the city.
Think of biome quadrants broken up in something resembling the old game Simon, to be able to pull off that effect.
Another example could be a Lord of the Rings mod. How much would it contribute to the immersion, if you had Pelennor fields as its own biome, and if you fought there, the backdrop on one side of the map has Minas Tirith and its mountain range, and on the other side could be Osgiliath.
These can be labor intensive things, but modders that would have a passion to bringing their work to another level would take advantage. I certainly would.
Another aspect this can bring for me for example, would be the ability to create historical battle locations that would always be accessable on the campaign map. So, Zama, Raphia, Lake Trasimene, Thermopylae, etc. would always spawn their corresponding battlemap if within the biome.
I’m interested in single player mods where battle sizes vary. However, I am looking forward to large scale battles and do not believe this will require a major downgrade in graphical quality on a current generation high-end pc.
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord relies even more on CPU usage than Warband. Hundreds of characters, more advanced animations, an Inverse Kinematics system, individual AI, formation AI, combat calculations, (which do not change in respect to distance or visibility,) and many other requirements really increase the burden on the CPU. In order to accommodate this, our optimisation efforts are more heavily focused on the CPU. We generally try to use Data Oriented Design, which enables us to achieve high amounts of parallelism and core usage. Currently, 60-70% of the frame is fully parallel, which means it can, and will, use all of the cores of current and next gen CPUs for the foreseeable future, (the old engine generally used to use 1, or at most 2 cores.) This means that as new, higher core count CPUs begin to emerge, Bannerlord will scale well with the new hardware and players will be able to test bigger and denser battles. Currently our aim for battle sizes on current generation high end gaming CPUs is at 800 characters, at 60FPS.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/261550/announcements/detail/3244137880934579683
Average texture size is 2k. You can add 4K textures to the game.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/261550/announcements/detail/1464090667824385857
Polygon count for an armour set is usually between 8000-12000 triangles.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/261550/announcements/detail/1457340983216971711
IIRC they use 6 levels of LODs but one of them is for the campaign map so map icons wear the same armour as the characters.
Thank you, that's all very useful information. It even scratched a few itches I didn't know I had.
BIGGER Kentucky James XXL said:
There isn't a tradeoff between graphics and battle size in warband, and there probably won't be in bannerlord. The things that cause games with lots of agents to run slowly are mostly CPU actions while graphical fidelity (even if it could be quantified) is all on the GPU. In warband you could basically switch off the renderer by making the window tiny, or by looking straight at the ground to avoid rendering more than a few things, and it wouldn't really affect the framerate.
Both GPU and CPU processes were contributors to diminishing performance in regards to larger battles, in Warband (modded anyways), and i'm sure this would be the case for Bannerlord, as any other game for that matter. Although, reading into one of those links provided by NPC, I see that with Bannerlord, it would lean far more intensely into CPU than with the previous title, which is more to your point.
To make a short story long, with warband, as I scaled up the size battles it became a case of whack-a-mole between GPU and CPU, to keep ratcheting up the scale;
The first order of business for any sensible modder implementing custom meshes, is to make and implement lods' along with the custom meshes to take burden off GPU, which for me was always a priority. 268 B.C., in its latest iteration also had custom scripts for formations (had to have sarissa phalanx formations of course), so I had to tweak some characteristics about the ai calls in the code, to then take burden off the CPU. After that it went back to GPU, in that as the battle size went up the reinforcement waves were causing a periodic stutter when they popped in, having to suddenly load lots of meshes and textures for a bunch of new troops in a largely still filled battle. I think the workaround I had for that it was to make more frequent, smaller wave sizes to absorb in without the periodic stutter.
The last hurdle I hopped was CPU. I kept getting instances where some battles run fine, and others wouldn't. I noticed that the slowdown in performance was happening occasionally on the random maps, but never on scenes I created. That was a head scratcher for a minute, but I had deduced that on the random maps it was happening on, they tended to be heavily forested. Thinking it was GPU related, I took a nerf bat to the tree meshes and textures, but didn't work. Then I decided to open scene editor on a random map, and realized yeah.. there's no AI mesh here. Pockets of troops were getting hung up on objects such as groups of trees and rocks, and going AI dead/AI crazy trying to process a path to their next enemy. So it then made sense why the big custom scene battles, where I spent hours making AI mesh to cover every nook and cranny were running much better than some of the random gen maps.
If the typical vanilla game size parties were around 60-120, 268 B.C.'s were up to 400-600 or more, last I left it. I can't remember what that translated to in regards to, in battle numbers.
DanAngleland said:
Ealabor, nice to see you around again; I was a keen follower of the progress of your mod for quite a long time.
Well, I haven't created a mesh, opened python, or so much as painted a single pixel on a texture sheet since I stepped away. Also, there are going to be a bunch of new systems to learn with Bannerlord... how much work could it possibly be?
As far as mod scope goes, if I do commit to returning, its going to be something sensible that one person can handle workload wise, though whatever im working on i'd like to leave room for expansion. If there are any contributors along the way, that's well and good, though I don't think that I will be trying to create a small team this go around. Well, let me say if that does happen, joining members would be thoroughly vetted to avoid any... travesties, like with happened with the latest 268 B.C.
Rodrigo Ribaldo said:
The worst case are cluttered SP siege scenes with corpses all around the player, so lods are not used much. You still need to make sure that some potato laptops are able to run this too, or you lose some audience.
Yep, even if she or any other of the few that I had lengthy debates with were still here, I wouldn't bite. I'm not compelled to spend any lengthy time in those off topic threads. I'm just here for the pixels this go around
If in regards to the poll, I think its pretty telling that they have. Well at least we know they certainly aren't here for Assassins Creed Bannerlord, and more about the battle immersion. A median of the two highest choices gives a good sense of whats wanted, and where I, or any keen modder could spend poly count and texture quality, and where to save.
DerGreif said:
Voted for option A.
I am only interested in singleplayer.
If there were a coop campaign multiplayer (where I could play with a friend or two) I would be interested in that, but definitely not the classic multiplayer.
In general I found multiplayer games, if it is not coop with close friends and nobody else, to be a very bad experience, because of an incredibly high rate of immersion killing children and/or trolls squatting on the servers.
I don't know about that. I guess it was entertaining now and again to trip a few members up in their counter arguments, on whatever politics related thread we were arguing in at the time, but thinking back now, I think it was more aggrevating and a waste of time than anything.
Jhessail said:
Not long, that's for sure. The incessant need to have the last word and the utter inability for any kind of self-reflection or even awareness are strong arguments for that. Oh and the massive chip on his shoulder and the persecution complex. Classic case - remember ealabor?
Hello folks, I once modded here, and as of late, Bannerlord has given me a itch to jump back in. I'm trying to ping the general population, and get an idea of what people's ideal experience would be when it comes to playing M&B.
Are you the type of person that would want to play battles...
Ohh, a topic that was about the 2016 Presidential election. I managed to dodge a bullet by being inactive for this, as it would have been a rabbithole without end
As with the software piracy on the net, the only thing people need is a compulsion for it to exist. People's desire to own firearms wouldn't go away on any level of banning, and they would certainly seek them out even on the means of today's industry abilities, but factor in the capacity to shortly down the road be able to print them out using materials bought off the shelf? forget about it, as then it would be beyond control.
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