Early Access Confirmed

[Lemondude]

WHEN THOOOOO

 

[Noudelle]

yes

 

[Rabies]

it's probably more a matter of - do we want to divert resources to [any] EA or move towards release asap?

I vote for the first one

 

[NPC99]

I definitely think this title should be in EA as soon as possible.  Bug-hunting, figuring out what modders actually want, etc. will take a year or so. 

Yes, a year.  Not a couple of months to basically just beta-test.  I hope they're wise enough to do it slow and go for the long game, sales-wise.

Just based on the features we now know are in, I'm a little worried that they don't know what the modding community's expectations are; too much stuff sounds like it's hard-coded, there's been no coherent discussion of callbacks, no real explanation of the workflows for many things that need to be clear at release (like, putting in a new custom sword that will show up in the shops should be a specific tutorial, same with armor workflows, imo) etc., etc.

I could care less about game-wipes, although I honestly expect the engine won't have all of the issues we saw in Warband, where (for example) data objects couldn't be merely re-ordered in the bytecode without causing a problem, because they used ints to store object references, instead of being sensible and using a string (even back when the engine was made, that was Premature Optimization at its finest).  Things like this need to be caught early and fixed, if they want the game to be a hit with dozens of big mods supporting sales into the far future (which is what we'd all like to see). 

I know I'll buy it when it comes out, but honestly, based on what we've seen thus far, I'm afraid it'll be Warband, but with fewer ways to mod it deeply and a much more complicated asset workflow, which sounds like a Fallout 4 type of game (that I wouldn't want to mod; pretty much all of the big mods here are effectively TCs or major conversions of Vanilla).

My biggest concern about full conversion mods is the time required to create unique scenes of the standard Bannerlord requires. I doubt that we'll see many conversions to non-medieval/ancient settings unless TW issues some more modern DLCs. Any mod that requires different types of scenes from native faces a considerable workload. Mods don't have the manpower available to TW, who have themselves struggled with Bannerlord's scenes workload:

Armagan, at his university talk at ODTU Teknokent University in December 2017, was quoted as saying that only 10% to 15% of scenes had been completed.
https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,373745.0.html

Prior to Gamescom Armagan warned us that the demo would only use two placeholder town scenes per culture (not faction - all three empire factions share the same culture) in the demo.

隐藏

Many thanks to everyone for their comments. The team here is working really hard to get the demo ready for Gamescom and we really appreciate your support.

Just to clarify a few things, the build we'll have in the booth will be different from the current development build in that, some features and pieces of content have been disabled. There are mainly two reasons for this. First, we want to focus our efforts on polishing the features that will be of most use in the demo. Disabling the rest allows us better manage our resources and time. Second, we do not want to reveal all the features and content in a single demo. We'd rather leave a good portion of the game as a surprise.

Here's a list of some of the things that are missing/disabled: 
Sieges
Crafting
Character generation
Kingdom and town management
About 2/3 of town scenes. We selected 2 town scenes per culture and all towns will be showing those.
Most companions are disabled. There will be around 10 that are available.
About 2/3 of planned perks are not yet implemented.

The suggestion to release this version as a demo sounds interesting, but that doesn't fit any existing model and it would take a lot of time and effort to hammer out the details and make this work. I would rather put that effort into development and do a proper early access version.

After Gamescom, gkx advised us that some of the scenes didn't look up to standard as they hadn't time to bake global illumination into all of the demo scenes.

隐藏

Being compelled to have a light source (lamp, torch or whatever) could be fun though!

In some other videos, the indoor lightings are much better (despite some issues, still): https://youtu.be/98gxehJeYAI?list=LLR7FmUSA2jKfBHY-l6evjsQ&t=2337

This one is better because it has global illumination we did not have time to bake our global illumination solution to all scenes used in demo. Also for some videos there is weird compression issues in videos which can seen in some taverns and lord's halls, which causes dark colors to become more darker and artifacty.

Baking global illumination takes time on complicated scenes. https://forum.unity.com/threads/poll-how-long-does-it-take-you-to-bake-lighting-baked-gi-in-your-scene.381133/

Bannerlord has more towns and castles requiring scenes than Warband. TW have abandoned random battlefields for hand_crafted scenes (random battlefield code may no longer be within the engine). All walled centres must have three levels of fortification upgrades included using TW's new layer masking system.

TW developers can't rely on the tool for automated ai meshing and prefer to create ai meshes manually.

隐藏

20. How does the AI pathfinding work? Will sceners have to create AI meshes for their scenes?
Yes, scene makers will need to create navigation meshes. The scene editor has a tool to create the nav-mesh automatically but results vary and we generally prefer to create them manually.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/261550/announcements/detail/1464090667824385857

The rumours from journalists attending Gamescon suggest that Bannerlord will not be available for EA until 2019. All of which, indicates a workload that will be extremely difficult for part-time unpaid modders to replicate. Accordingly, I expect most mods to remain rooted in Bannerlord's era and to reuse a significant proportion of its native scenes. The number of OSP resources available to Warband modders were built up over a number of years. Nothing comparable will be available for Bannerlord on its release other than assets of a similar quality in mods of other games, provided permission is available to port them.

 

[lolbash]

隐藏

I definitely think this title should be in EA as soon as possible.  Bug-hunting, figuring out what modders actually want, etc. will take a year or so. 

Yes, a year.  Not a couple of months to basically just beta-test.  I hope they're wise enough to do it slow and go for the long game, sales-wise.

Just based on the features we now know are in, I'm a little worried that they don't know what the modding community's expectations are; too much stuff sounds like it's hard-coded, there's been no coherent discussion of callbacks, no real explanation of the workflows for many things that need to be clear at release (like, putting in a new custom sword that will show up in the shops should be a specific tutorial, same with armor workflows, imo) etc., etc.

I could care less about game-wipes, although I honestly expect the engine won't have all of the issues we saw in Warband, where (for example) data objects couldn't be merely re-ordered in the bytecode without causing a problem, because they used ints to store object references, instead of being sensible and using a string (even back when the engine was made, that was Premature Optimization at its finest).  Things like this need to be caught early and fixed, if they want the game to be a hit with dozens of big mods supporting sales into the far future (which is what we'd all like to see). 

I know I'll buy it when it comes out, but honestly, based on what we've seen thus far, I'm afraid it'll be Warband, but with fewer ways to mod it deeply and a much more complicated asset workflow, which sounds like a Fallout 4 type of game (that I wouldn't want to mod; pretty much all of the big mods here are effectively TCs or major conversions of Vanilla).

My biggest concern about full conversion mods is the time required to create unique scenes of the standard Bannerlord requires. I doubt that we'll see many conversions to non-medieval/ancient settings unless TW issues some more modern DLCs. Any mod that requires different types of scenes from native faces a considerable workload. Mods don't have the manpower available to TW, who have themselves struggled with Bannerlord's scenes workload:

Armagan, at his university talk at ODTU Teknokent University in December 2017, was quoted as saying that only 10% to 15% of scenes had been completed.
https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,373745.0.html

Prior to Gamescom Armagan warned us that the demo would only use two placeholder town scenes per culture (not faction - all three empire factions share the same culture) in the demo.

隐藏

Many thanks to everyone for their comments. The team here is working really hard to get the demo ready for Gamescom and we really appreciate your support.

Just to clarify a few things, the build we'll have in the booth will be different from the current development build in that, some features and pieces of content have been disabled. There are mainly two reasons for this. First, we want to focus our efforts on polishing the features that will be of most use in the demo. Disabling the rest allows us better manage our resources and time. Second, we do not want to reveal all the features and content in a single demo. We'd rather leave a good portion of the game as a surprise.

Here's a list of some of the things that are missing/disabled: 
Sieges
Crafting
Character generation
Kingdom and town management
About 2/3 of town scenes. We selected 2 town scenes per culture and all towns will be showing those.
Most companions are disabled. There will be around 10 that are available.
About 2/3 of planned perks are not yet implemented.

The suggestion to release this version as a demo sounds interesting, but that doesn't fit any existing model and it would take a lot of time and effort to hammer out the details and make this work. I would rather put that effort into development and do a proper early access version.

After Gamescom, gkx advised us that some of the scenes didn't look up to standard as they hadn't time to bake global illumination into all of the demo scenes.

隐藏

Being compelled to have a light source (lamp, torch or whatever) could be fun though!

In some other videos, the indoor lightings are much better (despite some issues, still): https://youtu.be/98gxehJeYAI?list=LLR7FmUSA2jKfBHY-l6evjsQ&t=2337

This one is better because it has global illumination we did not have time to bake our global illumination solution to all scenes used in demo. Also for some videos there is weird compression issues in videos which can seen in some taverns and lord's halls, which causes dark colors to become more darker and artifacty.

Baking global illumination takes time on complicated scenes. https://forum.unity.com/threads/poll-how-long-does-it-take-you-to-bake-lighting-baked-gi-in-your-scene.381133/

Bannerlord has more towns and castles requiring scenes than Warband. TW have abandoned random battlefields for hand_crafted scenes (random battlefield code may no longer be within the engine). All walled centres must have three levels of fortification upgrades included using TW's new layer masking system.

TW developers can't rely on the tool for automated ai meshing and prefer to create ai meshes manually.

隐藏

20. How does the AI pathfinding work? Will sceners have to create AI meshes for their scenes?
Yes, scene makers will need to create navigation meshes. The scene editor has a tool to create the nav-mesh automatically but results vary and we generally prefer to create them manually.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/261550/announcements/detail/1464090667824385857

The rumours from journalists attending Gamescon suggest that Bannerlord will not be available for EA until 2019. All of which, indicates a workload that will be extremely difficult for part-time unpaid modders to replicate. Accordingly, I expect most mods to remain rooted in Bannerlord's era and to reuse a significant proportion of its native scenes. The number of OSP resources available to Warband modders were built up over a number of years. Nothing comparable will be available for Bannerlord on its release other than assets of a similar quality in mods of other games, provided permission is available to port them.

This amount of effort will be needed if you want to match the quality of Native, but I don't think many modders are going to stive for that level quality, and much rather would see their full conversion mod come to life first before worrying about lighting effects and realistic shaders.