Dev Blog 17/08/17

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[parsehtml]<p><img class="frame" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" lang="en-GB" src="http://www.taleworlds.com/Images/News/blog_post_03_taleworldswebsite.png" alt="" width="575" height="300" /></p> <p>Greetings warriors of Calradia! Gamescom is around the corner, and as you may have imagined, we will be there showcasing Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. We can’t tell you exactly what we will show just yet, but we can at least confirm that it will be something slightly different from the demo that we took to E3.</p></br> [/parsehtml]Read more at: http://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/21
 
I can respect developers who have the capability to say a game is done when it's done.  This is what Blizzard has done with so many of its games and the same with Rockstar.  In most cases it turned out to be the right answer.  This is really the ideal situation where a game can be polished until it stands out from the rest.  No artificial business pressure that we must ship the game in this quarter so our shareholders are happy garbage.  Many games can never recover from being released in a bug filled and feature incomplete state.  That said, I think there is good opportunity for a middle ground that will make a majority of people happy.  That is giving a date from the release of a paid beta or early access version of the game.  This both keeps the player base happy with getting to play what is available currently and as it develops and also allows TW to continue working on the game for as long as they need.  It could be 6 more months, or it could be 18 more months, but if you launched a beta or early access this fall it would take the pressure off giving a release date for the retail version of the game.  I would gladly pay $30 to get beta access to the game.  I normally am against the principal of paid betas but given this isn't really a story based game and how much I love M&B I really don't care about paying for an incomplete beta version.  The game is looking great in the gamescom video released and it shows us that it is coming along.
 
I have no problem with the lack of a release date. I'm confident nobody at Taleworlds is purposefully delaying the development of Bannerlord just to irritate his prospective customers.

I do have a question about how the development team is dealing with ever changing technology environment in which we live. Bannerlord has been in development for years, now, and my continue to be developed over the next year or more. Meanwhile, the technology available and acquired by your customers has changed, let's say, advanced. You are now offering demos at various conventions in places far away from me.

What sort of rigs are you using for the demos? Has the demos rig changed or been upgraded over the time that demos since started? What changes have the team made to Bannerlord over the lengthy development period to adapt to increased capabilities of the average gaming machine? How often are these upgrades implemented and can we expect more technology based upgrades between the current demo and whenever the release version is finally ready?

It's no secret that previous M&B products have been far less than current in terms of graphics quality upon their release. Is there any effort to bring Bannerlord's graphics quality closer to being current than it's predecessors?

Perhaps these questions could be addressed in a future blog.

- sj
 
Bannerlord use Direct X 11 and multiple cores support up to 6 if i remenber well, so it will be outdated in maybe 3-5 years :mrgreen: but maybe they'll improve it through time.
 
Armaury said:
In the future it would be great to see other game companies use Bannerlord engine, like Carribean did for M&B.

Why? Most even AAA studios use the unreal engine, cause it's the cutting edge. Bannerlord is not about the graphics. It already looks outdated if you look the videos, but it's about the game mechanics, which are something that only rare game can offer to players. Tho I believe that it would've been possible to do Bannerlord from start to end with some already existing engine. Why didn't they do it then? They wanted to keep the rich modding culture going on.
 
Ki-Ok Khan said:
Maybe this? :smile:
You may find a lot of similar videos about other engines. Such things are important part of communication between developers and rest of the world, they attract but do not answer questions.

MadVader said:
Good questions, perhaps you need a custom engine to optimize it for a large number of actors, their animations, AI and pathfinding, and it's not merely a vanity project…
Osvaldon said:
A custom engine, created for the needs of a specific game, can provide better performance…
Usually if you do approximately the same as others it’s impossible to win the race if you started significantly later. Time is very material.
Having less time you may try to be better in some of aspects but only sacrificing a lot of others. But comparing with competitors we usually have to aggregate and these few aspects may become negligible in the whole picture.
Working better with some parts of the scene and being poor with all others may leave no chance to achieve good quality and fps for overall scene.

DanAngleland said:
… why on earth nobody else is making games with anything remotely near M&B's NPC and real player numbers if that is the case- and player/NPC count is just one facet of M&B.
The question «why do not others do that» makes sense only under very specific conditions.
If they are not met the short and straightforward answer: they don’t want.
There are a variety of games that similar to different aspects of WB, some have horses, some have a lot NPC or players, some have melee fights, some are sandbox, and the fact that they are not copy of WB do not make them that unpopular.

DanAngleland said:
extensively modifying it before eventually running into brick walls.
Osvaldon said:
But the most important part of having a custom engine is that there are no limits to what you can do with it when developing your game.
Yes. That’s usually one of the main point of redevelopment — control over source code, no limit etc. Even opensource projects if they are huge do not give enough control and freedom. Understanding and changing the code that is not yours is a difficult problem. However developing from the scratch you also  may eventually run into a wall, because limits exist anyway. And if for a stable engine this wall is from shiny brick and well-documented, your personal wall will be from vague strained glass appeared suddenly from «nothing».

Harmi said:
Why didn't they do it then? They wanted to keep the rich modding culture going on.
Some of games on mentioned UE have very rich modding culture too.

kalarhan said:
which is better? Again that would be a boring business discussion, not something for a reply on a blog discussion.
Yup, that’s why I don't ask to compare new BL engine, UE and Unity from the point of whole business process. Reformulating my question I'm interesting how opinion of developers changed for 5(I'm not sure here) of developing. My question is not about business but about personal feelings.

It was the start of the way. And you took a hard decision. Now after a long way making final steps, what are the thoughts about the first steps? Are their now completely the same? 
 
Rongar said:
Ki-Ok Khan said:
Maybe this? :smile:
You may find a lot of similar videos about other engines. Such things are important part of communication between developers and rest of the world, they attract but do not answer questions.

No . He literally says why its good to have their in-house game engine.
 
Honestly in the end, I don't care about release date, as long as communication is there.
I love to learn about the team once a week.
I love to learn the team's feelings about various/current parts of the dev process.

Communication and openness is far more attractive than a release date or smooth development tbh. We love you!
 
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