A 90-employee studio with ONE actively-maintained product is releasing only ONE THREE-LINE bug fix patch per week. Unbelievable.

[musashii89]

Here's an interesting tidbit that kind of proves your point:

Bannerlord uses a rendering technique which is at the cutting edge of graphical optimisations. Instead of animating stuff the normal way by using the CPU, they're writing all the animations to the GPU at runtime which I don't think I've seen a single game, not even a big budget title, accomplish thus far. It effectively allows them to spawn thousands and thousands of animated NPCs without impacting the tick rate of the game, which is what usually happens when you try to animate a lot of guys.



To put this into perspective, it's only in around 2014-2016 that compute shaders were even widely discussed, and finding stuff about compute shaders for animation is pretty hard. I think gkx and other developers at Taleworlds might have invented this method from scratch. In comparison, "modern" techniques like raytracing have been discussed and documented since the 1960s and you can effectively copy and paste code from the internet to get it working in your engine.

But what makes this so sad is that despite all this, the game still runs poorly in big battles because of the pathfinding, despite troops still getting stuck everywhere. There are pathfinding algorithms which have been optimised to hell and back for over 70 years. The skill level of the staff seems really uneven. You have people like gkx doing stuff that surpasses any triple A game, meanwhile the ingame weapons look really terrible and the AI is braindead.

The problem is no one seems to be leading this wet bag of cats. It IS apparent there are some amazing people working on this game. However, it is also apparent that TW is woefully mismanaged. There is no hard set direction on any aspect of the game. This is a great idea for a game and it has/had promise, but however many people working semi independently on their own ideas wont give us anything worth playing (as even your own fans sadly admit is usually TWs business model).

They may have coders with beyond triple A skills, but they are wasted when the management of this game has been far worse then many indie developers.

 

[eddiemccandless]

The problem is no one seems to be leading this wet bag of cats. It IS apparent there are some amazing people working on this game. However, it is also apparent that TW is woefully mismanaged. There is no hard set direction on any aspect of the game. This is a great idea for a game and it has/had promise, but however many people working semi independently on their own ideas wont give us anything worth playing (as even your own fans sadly admit is usually TWs business model).

They may have coders with beyond triple A skills, but they are wasted when the management of this game has been far worse then many indie developers.

Hard to disagree! I think that this is indeed the main issue. Probably compounded by the fact that it's no longer a small team and so good management skills are actually necessary.

 

[MostBlunted]

Leaked footage from the studio:

 

[Virthuss]

Being an IT engineer myself, I can't blame them for the many issues linked to balance and so on as this needs long-term profiling and debugging.
However for smaller bugs like broken perks, I must admit that I don't understand how such small yet important details haven't been fixed yet...

 

[cjc0552]

Being an IT engineer myself, I can't blame them for the many issues linked to balance and so on as this needs long-term profiling and debugging.
However for smaller bugs like broken perks, I must admit that I don't understand how such small yet important details haven't been fixed yet...

Being an IT engineer myself, I can't blame them for the many issues linked to balance and so on as this needs long-term profiling and debugging.
However for smaller bugs like broken perks, I must admit that I don't understand how such small yet important details haven't been fixed yet...

cuz .. no need modder already did it fixed by Community p**** mod
and Banner lord is already bestseller

 

[Virthuss]

cuz .. no need modder already did it fixed by Community p**** mod
and Banner lord is already bestseller

And everybody will be so pissed that a new game provided by another company and listening more to it's community will rise.

The strength of Warband was it's flexibility and it's community gathering around a small game made by a small team which contributed greatly to make the M&B franchise famous. Even if I have great respect for TW, I have to say that for me their strategy with bannerlord is either too rushed or not so much listening to it's community regarding the multiplayer.

Nonetheless; I do have to say that the game shows great potential and for this, hats down.
Greatly looking forward for the full release ( and TW, please think about south american and pacific asian players for MP )

 

[el_miguel42]

You guys must all have been playing different early access games to me. There are 2 types of "early access" games that are available these days. The first type is when a massive company like EA releases a game a couple of weeks early. The game is already completed and tbh its just a marketing gimmick. The second type is when the early access is designed in such a way to essentially beta test the game. The bannerlord early access release is obviously the latter, they also made it rather clear that this was the case beforehand.

Secondly, I dont think ive ever come across a game which allows modding and has an active modding userbase, where modders do NOT fix problems before the devs. Infact I would go so far as to say that the larger the company that is doing the release, generally (although this is anecdotal) the slower the rate of patches that are released. Games developed by very large companies which are moddable will frequently go through months and months with the simplest bugs not being patched. Hell you even get user fixes in games which are not meant to be modded before the devs put a fix out.

I have never bought an early access game where the volume of patches was similar to what taleworlds are pushing out (very small indie devs aside). Perhaps you'd prefer if they did what most big studios do, and basically do nothing for half a year and then drop one larger patch? You know what happens when that occurs? Player complain about not being part of the process and that decisions and balance are being done counter to what they suggest. Every single early access ive seen the playerbase complain about not getting enough information, and not seeing roadmaps. Just go and play another game, and in future dont buy stuff in early access. The amount of whinging and whining is so tedious.

 

[guiskj]

You guys must all have been playing different early access games to me. There are 2 types of "early access" games that are available these days. The first type is when a massive company like EA releases a game a couple of weeks early. The game is already completed and tbh its just a marketing gimmick. The second type is when the early access is designed in such a way to essentially beta test the game. The bannerlord early access release is obviously the latter, they also made it rather clear that this was the case beforehand.

Secondly, I dont think ive ever come across a game which allows modding and has an active modding userbase, where modders do NOT fix problems before the devs. Infact I would go so far as to say that the larger the company that is doing the release, generally (although this is anecdotal) the slower the rate of patches that are released. Games developed by very large companies which are moddable will frequently go through months and months with the simplest bugs not being patched. Hell you even get user fixes in games which are not meant to be modded before the devs put a fix out.

I have never bought an early access game where the volume of patches was similar to what taleworlds are pushing out (very small indie devs aside). Perhaps you'd prefer if they did what most big studios do, and basically do nothing for half a year and then drop one larger patch? You know what happens when that occurs? Player complain about not being part of the process and that decisions and balance are being done counter to what they suggest. Every single early access ive seen the playerbase complain about not getting enough information, and not seeing roadmaps. Just go and play another game, and in future dont buy stuff in early access. The amount of whinging and whining is so tedious.

Large company that allows mods going months between patches and still not fixing a plethora of really simple bugs? I miss you Skyrim... Time to start a new playthrough.

 

[TheGrainMan]

You guys must all have been playing different early access games to me. There are 2 types of "early access" games that are available these days. The first type is when a massive company like EA releases a game a couple of weeks early. The game is already completed and tbh its just a marketing gimmick. The second type is when the early access is designed in such a way to essentially beta test the game. The bannerlord early access release is obviously the latter, they also made it rather clear that this was the case beforehand.

Secondly, I dont think ive ever come across a game which allows modding and has an active modding userbase, where modders do NOT fix problems before the devs. Infact I would go so far as to say that the larger the company that is doing the release, generally (although this is anecdotal) the slower the rate of patches that are released. Games developed by very large companies which are moddable will frequently go through months and months with the simplest bugs not being patched. Hell you even get user fixes in games which are not meant to be modded before the devs put a fix out.

I have never bought an early access game where the volume of patches was similar to what taleworlds are pushing out (very small indie devs aside). Perhaps you'd prefer if they did what most big studios do, and basically do nothing for half a year and then drop one larger patch? You know what happens when that occurs? Player complain about not being part of the process and that decisions and balance are being done counter to what they suggest. Every single early access ive seen the playerbase complain about not getting enough information, and not seeing roadmaps. Just go and play another game, and in future dont buy stuff in early access. The amount of whinging and whining is so tedious.

"which allows modding" That's a very strong statement with BL. In case you're not aware, any modding is done by decompiling the game, LOL! 0/negative support by the devs. The fact that people are managing to fix bugs without source code or documentation is pretty incredible.

And if it's taking them a long time to develop/test patches that's because the structure is too complex and not modular enough. I would say after going through the DLLs this morning BL is very complex.

 

[dukester]

cuz .. no need modder already did it fixed by Community p**** mod
and Banner lord is already bestseller

WTF Forum? How is "p-a-t-c-h" a bad word now? And on a game forum, no less! Admittedly, not a native English speaker, so could someone enlighten me, please?
Or did you, @cjc0552 , write something else here?
Let me try:
You f-ing patch, you!

Edit: working fine, nothing to see here.

 

[Bannerman Man]

But what makes this so sad is that despite all this, the game still runs poorly in big battles because of the pathfinding, despite troops still getting stuck everywhere. There are pathfinding algorithms which have been optimised to hell and back for over 70 years. The skill level of the staff seems really uneven. You have people like gkx doing stuff that surpasses any triple A game, meanwhile the ingame weapons look really terrible and the AI is braindead.

Can you give an example of a game that calls for a similar pathfinding solution as the sieges in Bannerlord that's well done? I'm not a software developer, but it seems like a pretty tough problem to me.

I guess I just don't understand why you acknowledge that animation rendering required a novel technique on one hand, but seem to imply that any old pathfinding algorithm could be adapted for Bannerlord's (relatively unique) situation on the other. I don't mean that in a contrarian way either, I'm genuinely curious.

However for smaller bugs like broken perks, I must admit that I don't understand how such small yet important details haven't been fixed yet...

I think designing/programming the perks is generally a much bigger task than people are giving them credit for. We're talking on the order of 600-700 different perk effects that they're probably going to implement. Looking at the old Community Patch files, it seems like it took them over a month to get the ~90 perks they've fixed so far working, and that only represents <20% of the eventual number of perk effects that we'll likely get. Obviously there will be some overlap between perks and the devs won't be writing a unique block of code for each one, but it's still going to take a lot of work.

Once they realized that a big code refactor was on the horizon it's understandable why they would be in no rush to fix the old perks or implement the new ones.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Can you give an example of a game that calls for a similar pathfinding solution as the sieges in Bannerlord that's well done? I'm not a software developer, but it seems like a pretty tough problem to me.

I guess I just don't understand why you acknowledge that animation rendering required a novel technique on one hand, but seem to imply that any old pathfinding algorithm would work for Bannerlord's (relatively unique) situation on the other. I don't mean that in a contrarian way either, I'm just genuinely curious.

Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator uses some alien-tier pathfinding algorithm that I don't understand at all, which basically ignores half the calculations you usually need to do by reusing them a bunch of times. But that's a game with literally a billion gazillion troops in it so it doesn't have to be precise. Planet Coaster does something similar:

Game Design Deep Dive: Creating believable crowds in <i>Planet Coaster

"10,000 guests was what we targeted, and simulating each seemed like a challenge. This was where using flow/potential fields became very appealing." - Owen McCa

www.gamasutra.com

http://www.gameaipro.com/GameAIPro/GameAIPro_Chapter24_Efficient_Crowd_Simulation_for_Mobile_Games.pdf

AssCreed Unity is another interesting case because they use a drastically simplified system (literally just NPC IDs and positions in a grid) for NPCs who were too far away to care about, and for all the collision. I'm doing something similar in my own game and you can essentially have millions of AI in a map because if you can't see them, only a tiny tiny amount of data has to be saved. You can watch the entire 40 min talk here, if you have the time (it's fairly easy to understand and quite interesting even if especially if you're not a programmer):

Massive Crowd on Assassin's Creed Unity: AI Recycling

In this presentation, we will introduce a new technique of AI level of detail that has allowed us to create thousands of replicated, persistent, interactive NPCs for Assassin's Creed: Unity. We will go over how we created a pooling system that...

www.gdcvault.com

Bannerlord could benefit from something like this because unless you're right in the face of the enemy, it doesn't matter at all that their hits are being calculated exactly the same as if they're actually fighting the player. This could also apply to pathfinding depending on how their system works (I haven't looked into it).

There is a lot of leeway with pathfinding since only a donkey doodoo brain would calculate all the paths in every frame, or for every individual. In Total War they generalise the pathfinding for everyone in a unit with some individual pathfinding if they collide with anything. Or in Hitman they just ignore collision and have an animation for NPCs pushing past each other.
Basically pathfinding algorithms can be extremely fast, I mean at the end of the day it's just node maths which you could teach to a 10 year old, but if you have to do thousands of them every few seconds you'll run into compounding issues, and when you include movable obstacles it becomes even harder.

The reason I expected Bannerlord to have better pathfinding is because the maths is relatively straightforward and there has been loads of research into optimising it (because it has lots of uses outside of video games). Meanwhile rendering techniques are usually only discovered or developed by people who are actually working on games, or jerry-rigged from stuff Pixar or whoever else was using back in the day, and as a result it's a gamble even attempting new stuff.

 

[Virthuss]

Can you give an example of a game that calls for a similar pathfinding solution as the sieges in Bannerlord that's well done? I'm not a software developer, but it seems like a pretty tough problem to me.

I guess I just don't understand why you acknowledge that animation rendering required a novel technique on one hand, but seem to imply that any old pathfinding algorithm could be adapted for Bannerlord's (relatively unique) situation on the other. I don't mean that in a contrarian way either, I'm genuinely curious.

I think designing/programming the perks is generally a much bigger task than people are giving them credit for. We're talking on the order of 600-700 different perk effects that they're probably going to implement. Looking at the old Community Patch files, it seems like it took them over a month to get the ~90 perks they've fixed so far working, and that only represents <20% of the eventual number of perk effects that we'll likely get. Obviously there will be some overlap between perks and the devs won't be writing a unique block of code for each one, but it's still going to take a lot of work.

Once they realized that a big code refactor was on the horizon it's understandable why they would be in no rush to fix the old perks or implement the new ones.

Note that I talked about the BROKEN perks, not the unimplemented ones.

 

[Gambles]

Note that I talked about the BROKEN perks, not the unimplemented ones.

I know next to nothing about game development, sure I've been in a lot of alphas and what not but still no real idea. However even knowing very little I can't help but be perplexed at how much time and effort they seem to need to fix perks. It just seems... crazy... for what they do, and what mods manage to do with tweaks.

 

[Virthuss]

I know next to nothing about game development, sure I've been in a lot of alphas and what not but still no real idea. However even knowing very little I can't help but be perplexed at how much time and effort they seem to need to fix perks. It just seems... crazy... for what they do, and what mods manage to do with tweaks.

For me a perfect example is the perk allowing to use every bow on horseback. It's technically a bunch of if conditions. How can it be so hard to implement?

Perhaps the priority is not there though and the devs are busy on something else.

 

[Cochus1]

For me a perfect example is the perk allowing to use every bow on horseback. It's technically a bunch of if conditions. How can it be so hard to implement?

Perhaps the priority is not there though and the devs are busy on something else.

They said they were refactoring most of the perks. It wouldnt have any sense to fix perks which wont be ingame later.

 

[KSHMR]

I also believe that most of the people working at TW are talented. This game has a lot of potential and could become one of the greatest games we ever played.

However, the fact is that TW is indeed horribly mismanaged. The strategical decisions of the management of TW seem to have zero focus and this whole situation is basically turning into a sh*t storm.

 

[Virthuss]

I also believe that most of the people working at TW are talented. This game has a lot of potential and could become one of the greatest games we ever played.

However, the fact is that TW is indeed horribly mismanaged. The strategical decisions of the management of TW seem to have zero focus and this whole situation is basically turning into a sh*t storm.

And perhaps they suffer from their own success after Warband. From small independent team to one of the most expected steam game producer...

 

[Bannerman Man]

Snip.

Thanks for putting together those examples! They were interesting reads/watches. By the sounds of it, most of those games required innovative techniques to achieve what they were aiming for. I'm sure some of those methods could find some application in Bannerlord in some respect (if BL isn't doing something similar already). However, I don't know how much the lack of cost saving measures of pathfinding really factors into the core issue, considering how much performance has already improved since launch (though I don't play full 500 vs 500 battles).

Traditional pathfinding methods are probably fine for 90% percent of game's needs, but I'm not sure how suitable they are for the more complex situations in the vertical mazelike environments of Bannerlord sieges. Total War games would probably be the closest analog, and I know Creative Assembly has had a lot of issues with their seige towers through the years (look at this, for example [at 13m15s]). Even then, they abstract away a lot of the complexities that BL faces, such as using portals to get on and off the walls rather than actual stairs. Bannerlord also has a lot of individual troops crisscrossing back and forth along the ramparts and gatehouses that I'm sure can screw with the targeting priorities of the opposing troops trying to figure out if the optimal path is up the ladders or through the gate.

I guess I'm just giving the developers the benefit of the doubt that it's a much harder problem than it might appear on the surface, and it's not just that some junior level programmer couldn't properly apply an A* algorithm or something.

(Also, I made the assumption that we were mostly talking about sieges, because I generally haven't seen any issues with the pathfinding in field battles)

Note that I talked about the BROKEN perks, not the unimplemented ones.

Right, but I don't think they were ever planning on implementing those ones in the first place (or at least not most of them). They aren't broken, they're placeholders; just meant to tease what the perk system would eventually look like. Any time spent working on the "old" perks is time not spent working on the actual perks. Like I said before, the Community Patch took a over month to get 80-90 perks working, so it wasn't just a snap of the fingers like some are implying (I don't know how many people worked on those for how long though).