Would you like an option for unlimited/large amounts of corpses to be displayed on the battlefield?

  • Yes

    Votes: 107 80.5%
  • No

    Votes: 26 19.5%

  • Total voters
    133

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Please this is actually so important for a lot of us

This is actually quite important for immersion I'd say, and I admit I don't really see a reason to not make it an option. If your PC can't take it, fine, just disable it, but if your PC is good enough, why should you be forbidden to have a large number of corpses on the battlefield ?
Anyway, it will be made possible with mods two days after the release so in the end it's not that big of a problem.
 
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I assume so. They are programming in C#. But until it is released it is hard to know for sure what the tools and options will be.
The game may be programmed in C#, but if the number is buried in the executable file, rather than read in from an external data file that can be modified, it won't be accessible to modders. There are a LOT of games where some things are easily modded and others are simply not changeable without seriously convoluted tricks, if at all. I'm not too concerned about whether or not unlimited corpses are in the game or not, provided that the number can be accessed and changed relatively easily in some external file. My system probably won't run something like that anyway, although it would be nice to be able to tweak the number up or down according to system performance limitations.
 
The game may be programmed in C#, but if the number is buried in the executable file, rather than read in from an external data file that can be modified, it won't be accessible to modders. There are a LOT of games where some things are easily modded and others are simply not changeable without seriously convoluted tricks, if at all. I'm not too concerned about whether or not unlimited corpses are in the game or not, provided that the number can be accessed and changed relatively easily in some external file. My system probably won't run something like that anyway, although it would be nice to be able to tweak the number up or down according to system performance limitations.
Since the devs have said repeatedly that they are working to make everything as modular as possible I would assume that anything like this will be part of that. Like I said I could be wrong, but if they are making an honest attempt to make this game moddable things like this should be adjustable from a text file somewhere.
 
It could potentially be added but we haven't made a final decision on it just yet.
I thought this was a given tbh. You can already have 1000 vs 1000 battles, which I'd think is more taxing on performance than 10 vs 10 with 1980 corpses on the ground. I can't imagine Battles involving much more troops much of the time anyways, but if you have to start a second round it really would be nice for the corpses to remain, without physics there is absoluetly no reason not to. They don't even need to be there exactly like they fell, if that's the/a problem for implementing it, instead you could have a few set poses, maybe even some with a sword stuck in them and **** like that, maybe some scavenging birds, I think you could make it a cool feature...
 
I thought this was a given tbh. You can already have 1000 vs 1000 battles, which I'd think is more taxing on performance than 10 vs 10 with 1980 corpses on the ground. I can't imagine Battles involving much more troops much of the time anyways, but if you have to start a second round it really would be nice for the corpses to remain, without physics there is absoluetly no reason not to. They don't even need to be there exactly like they fell, if that's the/a problem for implementing it, instead you could have a few set poses, maybe even some with a sword stuck in them and **** like that, maybe some scavenging birds, I think you could make it a cool feature...

There are other things to consider when doing something like this.

if you have to start a second round it really would be nice for the corpses to remain

You imply there that a considerable amount of the corpses would remain (it sounds like all of them). Some quick points:
  • How's the pathfinding going to handle them (if there truly are many of them)? If the pathfinding uses the pre-baked navmesh of the scene (which they have confirmed it will), then all characters would try to go over/through the bodies constantly. Is the navmesh going to be updated after every dropped body? Or maybe after there are more than two dropped bodies piled up? Updating a navmesh can be costly and if the fights are in the magnitudes of 500v500, there would be considerable amount of updates, often within short intervals. This could eat up the ms budget of the frames.
  • How are the collisions going to work? Do the characters go through the bodies or do they step (or even climb) over them? The latter would be pretty hard to program and would probably be a lot of unnecessary work for very little to show for it. This combined with the pathfinding problem is going to be a big headache, however skillful the team tackling the problem.
  • Continuing with the previous point, are they going to be static? If, say, a horse would ride fast over a sea of bodies and hit it, would the bodies move? If not, would the horse then fall down like you would expect (if there truly are many bodies, not a couple ones spread around)? Or would it go through the corpses like it was air? Any of the options would ruin either the immersion of the moment OR the fun of the core loop (i.e being constantly tackled by corpses). No winning scenario here unless there would be massive overhauls on the locomotion logic both without a mount and with one.
  • The psychology of a player tinkering with the settings: If there is an option for the persistent bodies but together with all the other things that eat up the processing budget it would considerably lower the average fps for most, so majority of the players would feel like they are missing out. Maybe it bums them out, maybe not, but it will affect the psychology of someone who has to either set the setting low, or maybe he will lower some other settings in order to allow for a higher setting on the corpses. Now this can lead to many other complications such as if people feel like the corpses are essential for immersion (provided that a proper way to deal with hundreds of bodies on the ground is even discovered), they will turn the corpse setting up and other settings down, resulting in for example, worse looking clips on youtube or streaming platforms. That could be bad for the public profile of the game, especially so if they use the graphics as a selling point (not sure if they will, but who knows).
This is all to say that having some bodies but cleverly removing them unintrusively will be A) way more efficient in terms of work hours and results and B) visually more immersive if indeed done well and unintrusively. If there are a lot of bodies on the ground and our eye registers a lot of the alive characters just passing through them (which would likely be how it works now?) it will break immersion. This is not to say that disappearing bodies isn't breaking the immersion, it's just that in the heat of the moment, if done correctly, the player would not actively register that there are bodies disappearing. But other characters constantly clipping through bodies would be an eyesore (as opposed to clipping through a single body in passing, which our eyes likely can deal with provided that around the body there's enough free space that the movement looks natural after passing the body).

I mean it would certainly be cool. In my eyes I can imagine an intense fight with visuals akin to the GoT battle of the bastards. Is it likely to be successfully implemented in a game that has a million other things going on at the same time in a dynamic, open-ended battlefield? Not right now, no.

Edit: The reason why they might not want to expose that to players/modders is maybe they have a very finely tuned clever solution to the above problems that also partly exist with limited amount of corpses. Maybe they have realized through testing that they can keep a certain specific amount of bodies before either the disappearing starts to break the immersion or the other problems would start to break it.
 
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There are other things to consider when doing something like this.



You imply there that a considerable amount of the corpses would remain (it sounds like all of them). Some quick points:
  • How's the pathfinding going to handle them (if there truly are many of them)? If the pathfinding uses the pre-baked navmesh of the scene (which they have confirmed it will), then all characters would try to go over/through the bodies constantly. Is the navmesh going to be updated after every dropped body? Or maybe after there are more than two dropped bodies piled up? Updating a navmesh can be costly and if the fights are in the magnitudes of 500v500, there would be considerable amount of updates, often within short intervals. This could eat up the ms budget of the frames.
  • How are the collisions going to work? Do the characters go through the bodies or do they step (or even climb) over them? The latter would be pretty hard to program and would probably be a lot of unnecessary work for very little to show for it. This combined with the pathfinding problem is going to be a big headache, however skillful the team tackling the problem.
  • Continuing with the previous point, are they going to be static? If, say, a horse would ride fast over a sea of bodies and hit it, would the bodies move? If not, would the horse then fall down like you would expect (if there truly are many bodies, not a couple ones spread around)? Or would it go through the corpses like it was air? Any of the options would ruin either the immersion of the moment OR the fun of the core loop (i.e being constantly tackled by corpses). No winning scenario here unless there would be massive overhauls on the locomotion logic both without a mount and with one.
  • The psychology of a player tinkering with the settings: If there is an option for the persistent bodies but together with all the other things that eat up the processing budget it would considerably lower the average fps for most, so majority of the players would feel like they are missing out. Maybe it bums them out, maybe not, but it will affect the psychology of someone who has to either set the setting low, or maybe he will lower some other settings in order to allow for a higher setting on the corpses. Now this can lead to many other complications such as if people feel like the corpses are essential for immersion (provided that a proper way to deal with hundreds of bodies on the ground is even discovered), they will turn the corpse setting up and other settings down, resulting in for example, worse looking clips on youtube or streaming platforms. That could be bad for the public profile of the game, especially so if they use the graphics as a selling point (not sure if they will, but who knows).
This is all to say that having some bodies but cleverly removing them unintrusively will be A) way more efficient in terms of work hours and results and B) visually more immersive if indeed done well and unintrusively. If there are a lot of bodies on the ground and our eye registers a lot of the alive characters just passing through them (which would likely be how it works now?) it will break immersion. This is not to say that disappearing bodies isn't breaking the immersion, it's just that in the heat of the moment, if done correctly, the player would not actively register that there are bodies disappearing. But other characters constantly clipping through bodies would be an eyesore (as opposed to clipping through a single body in passing, which our eyes likely can deal with provided that around the body there's enough free space that the movement looks natural after passing the body).

I mean it would certainly be cool. In my eyes I can imagine an intense fight with visuals akin to the GoT battle of the bastards. Is it likely to be successfully implemented in a game that has a million other things going on at the same time in a dynamic, open-ended battlefield? Not right now, no.

Edit: The reason why they might not want to expose that to players/modders is maybe they have a very finely tuned clever solution to the above problems that also partly exist with limited amount of corpses. Maybe they have realized through testing that they can keep a certain specific amount of bodies before either the disappearing starts to break the immersion or the other problems would start to break it.

This explains pretty much everything. Thanks.
 
I don't think any of this is a big problem.
  • How's the pathfinding going to handle them (if there truly are many of them)? If the pathfinding uses the pre-baked navmesh of the scene (which they have confirmed it will), then all characters would try to go over/through the bodies constantly. Is the navmesh going to be updated after every dropped body? Or maybe after there are more than two dropped bodies piled up? Updating a navmesh can be costly and if the fights are in the magnitudes of 500v500, there would be considerable amount of updates, often within short intervals. This could eat up the ms budget of the frames.
  • How are the collisions going to work? Do the characters go through the bodies or do they step (or even climb) over them? The latter would be pretty hard to program and would probably be a lot of unnecessary work for very little to show for it. This combined with the pathfinding problem is going to be a big headache, however skillful the team tackling the problem.
No collision for corpses. Fixed. Having it that way is a lot more preferable than not having the corpses at all. So those are moot points.
  • Continuing with the previous point, are they going to be static? If, say, a horse would ride fast over a sea of bodies and hit it, would the bodies move? If not, would the horse then fall down like you would expect (if there truly are many bodies, not a couple ones spread around)? Or would it go through the corpses like it was air? Any of the options would ruin either the immersion of the moment OR the fun of the core loop (i.e being constantly tackled by corpses). No winning scenario here unless there would be massive overhauls on the locomotion logic both without a mount and with one.
It's more immersive for corpses to vanish before your eyes than your feet (which you don't see most of the time anyways) just walking through them? That's just absurd.
  • The psychology of a player tinkering with the settings: If there is an option for the persistent bodies but together with all the other things that eat up the processing budget it would considerably lower the average fps for most, so majority of the players would feel like they are missing out. Maybe it bums them out, maybe not, but it will affect the psychology of someone who has to either set the setting low, or maybe he will lower some other settings in order to allow for a higher setting on the corpses. Now this can lead to many other complications such as if people feel like the corpses are essential for immersion (provided that a proper way to deal with hundreds of bodies on the ground is even discovered), they will turn the corpse setting up and other settings down, resulting in for example, worse looking clips on youtube or streaming platforms. That could be bad for the public profile of the game, especially so if they use the graphics as a selling point (not sure if they will, but who knows).
Easily the worst point. WIth that logic you shouldn't have any options at all. That is just insulting to the players. But even if you think people are stupid, you can give them a text warning with the option.
B) visually more immersive if indeed done well and unintrusively.
This is all to say that having some bodies but cleverly removing them unintrusively will be A) way more efficient in terms of work hours and results and B) visually more immersive if indeed done well and unintrusively.
There simply is no way to do this unintrusively. You see a corpse at one place, in the ideal system the corpse vanishes when you don't look there, but when you look back it will be gone...
Is it likely to be successfully implemented in a game that has a million other things going on at the same time in a dynamic, open-ended battlefield? Not right now, no.
So this is a good place for a little rant. I don't know why people do this (maybe to get some brownie points from the devs, or to be contrarian, whatever), but I have seen it on every game forum ever. TaleWorlds knows best why they implement a feature or not, but everytime you talk about a nice feature that is not 100% safely in the game, some shining white developer knight has to give his damndest (most of the time not very much) to argue against it. It's annoying. It would be different if there was a legitimate reason, but imo there just is non not to have the warband unlimited corpses option.
 
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I don't know why people do this (maybe to get some brownie points from the devs, or to be contrarian, whatever), but I have seen it on every game forum ever. TellTales knows best why they implement a feature or not, but everytime you talk about a nice feature that is not 100% safely in the game, some shining white developer knight has to give his damndest (most of the time not very much) to argue against it. It's annoying. It would be different if there was a legitimate reason, but imo there just is non not to have the warband unlimited corpses option.

Cool talk. Very classy.

Yeah I'm just fishing for "brownie points" from "TellTales", that's what this is all about. You got me there buddy.
 
Don't know about you but having less bodies and having them vanish is way more noticeable compared to a pile of 500 bodies vanishing slowly.

Also, corpses should work as in warband. Don't know why AI would have to navigate around the bodies since as clearly seen in the beta, you can't interact with death bodies.
 
Cool talk. Very classy.

Yeah I'm just fishing for "brownie points" from "TellTales", that's what this is all about. You got me there buddy.
It was less about you than just a general thing I notice, at least you tried to make some points. Nice counter points though. The being butthurt card trumphs everything, well played.
Also, corpses should work as in warband. Don't know why AI would have to navigate around the bodies since as clearly seen in the beta, you can't interact with death bodies.
yep
 
Everything is a tradeoff, and dedicating computing resources to one thing means taking them away from something else.

Not necessarily. Some things affect the rendering speed far, far more than others. For instance you could literally have millions of highly detailed, swaying trees in a game world with a fairly minor hit to performance, while having characters with lots of differently textured pieces of armour on them (like in bannerlord) causes a large hit. It just depends on whether its a task which the GPU can calculate easily, and for some things that just isn't possible.

If you don't believe me, I'm currently making a game in unreal engine where I stress tested a map with half a million trees and tens of millions of blades of grass which all sway in the wind and change colour depending on the season, and I comfortably get 30fps in the editor (which is slow).
Yet if I add a few hundred soldiers with lots of different weapons to the map, I get stuttering. I'm currently trying to "pack" dozens of different outfits and items onto one texture to mitigate this slightly, but it's just a limitation of GPUs.

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In warband this was a problem too: having lots of soldiers on the map, even dead, unmoving ones, is far more stressful for the GPU than the rest of the game combined. It's just a limitation of how animated characters are rendered, and how differently textured items affect render times.
 
Fair enough. Being completely honest my points probably were moot. I had earlier spent considerable amount of time dealing with a similar problem (specifically from the immersion viewpoint) and the topic stole my attention for the moment so I thought to add to it. Maybe it is not jarring, then, to clip through a ground filled with bodies, at least not to the extent that fewer, cleverly disappearing bodies would be.

Nice counter points though. The being butthurt card trumphs everything, well played

Well what do you expect after you throw words like "brownie points" and stuff like this towards someone:

some shining white developer knight has to give his damndest (most of the time not very much)
 
There are other things to consider when doing something like this.



You imply there that a considerable amount of the corpses would remain (it sounds like all of them). Some quick points:
  • How's the pathfinding going to handle them (if there truly are many of them)? If the pathfinding uses the pre-baked navmesh of the scene (which they have confirmed it will), then all characters would try to go over/through the bodies constantly. Is the navmesh going to be updated after every dropped body? Or maybe after there are more than two dropped bodies piled up? Updating a navmesh can be costly and if the fights are in the magnitudes of 500v500, there would be considerable amount of updates, often within short intervals. This could eat up the ms budget of the frames.
  • How are the collisions going to work? Do the characters go through the bodies or do they step (or even climb) over them? The latter would be pretty hard to program and would probably be a lot of unnecessary work for very little to show for it. This combined with the pathfinding problem is going to be a big headache, however skillful the team tackling the problem.
  • Continuing with the previous point, are they going to be static? If, say, a horse would ride fast over a sea of bodies and hit it, would the bodies move? If not, would the horse then fall down like you would expect (if there truly are many bodies, not a couple ones spread around)? Or would it go through the corpses like it was air? Any of the options would ruin either the immersion of the moment OR the fun of the core loop (i.e being constantly tackled by corpses). No winning scenario here unless there would be massive overhauls on the locomotion logic both without a mount and with one.
  • The psychology of a player tinkering with the settings: If there is an option for the persistent bodies but together with all the other things that eat up the processing budget it would considerably lower the average fps for most, so majority of the players would feel like they are missing out. Maybe it bums them out, maybe not, but it will affect the psychology of someone who has to either set the setting low, or maybe he will lower some other settings in order to allow for a higher setting on the corpses. Now this can lead to many other complications such as if people feel like the corpses are essential for immersion (provided that a proper way to deal with hundreds of bodies on the ground is even discovered), they will turn the corpse setting up and other settings down, resulting in for example, worse looking clips on youtube or streaming platforms. That could be bad for the public profile of the game, especially so if they use the graphics as a selling point (not sure if they will, but who knows).
This is all to say that having some bodies but cleverly removing them unintrusively will be A) way more efficient in terms of work hours and results and B) visually more immersive if indeed done well and unintrusively. If there are a lot of bodies on the ground and our eye registers a lot of the alive characters just passing through them (which would likely be how it works now?) it will break immersion. This is not to say that disappearing bodies isn't breaking the immersion, it's just that in the heat of the moment, if done correctly, the player would not actively register that there are bodies disappearing. But other characters constantly clipping through bodies would be an eyesore (as opposed to clipping through a single body in passing, which our eyes likely can deal with provided that around the body there's enough free space that the movement looks natural after passing the body).

I mean it would certainly be cool. In my eyes I can imagine an intense fight with visuals akin to the GoT battle of the bastards. Is it likely to be successfully implemented in a game that has a million other things going on at the same time in a dynamic, open-ended battlefield? Not right now, no.

Edit: The reason why they might not want to expose that to players/modders is maybe they have a very finely tuned clever solution to the above problems that also partly exist with limited amount of corpses. Maybe they have realized through testing that they can keep a certain specific amount of bodies before either the disappearing starts to break the immersion or the other problems would start to break it.
as someones who plays the beta i can confirm your feet go through bodies. Once corpses stop rag-dolling in bannerlord they are no longer treated as solid entities. I can tell you for certain this is much preferable to just not having them at all because in a huge battle how often do you look at peoples feet? On top of all that when the battle ends the characters stop moving so its not like you'll even have that issue after the battle. As far as them staying during round 2 that I don't really care to keep because thats a little overboard but plenty of games that are more demanding mind you have persistent bodies and run with no issues. No excuse bannerlord shouldn't either.
 
Well what do you expect after you throw words like "brownie points" and stuff
Counterpoints.
I made an observation about a phenomenon,wondering about it's cause, giving some flippant explanations for it. All of which you alone decided were about you. All of which you decided to reduce the answer to. BTW, sarcastically repeating your point is not a counterpoint.
Once corpses stop rag-dolling in bannerlord they are no longer treated as solid entities. I can tell you for certain this is much preferable to just not having them at all because in a huge battle how often do you look at peoples feet?
Exactly...
 
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Counterpoints.
I made an observation about a phenomenon,wondering about it's cause, giving some flippant explenations for it. All of which you alone decided were about you. All of which you decided to reduce the answer to. BTW, sarcastically repeating your point is not a counterpoint.

Exactly...
I don't understand how people can oppose the idea of an optional setting? It's not like it'll effect you if you decide to not let it so why remove the option for others?
 
I don't understand how people can oppose the idea of an optional setting? It's not like it'll effect you if you decide to not let it so why remove the option for others?
This is what's so annoying about it. Even if it is hard on the hardware, let the people decide their preferances...
 
Aaaaah, the "zero communication" politics of Talesworlds... I can understand that devs don't want to communicate that much on some aspects of their game but at this point, it is kinda weird that they refuse to tell us anything about such a minor, yet really important, feature.
 
Aaaaah, the "zero communication" politics of Talesworlds... I can understand that devs don't want to communicate that much on some aspects of their game but at this point, it is kinda weird that they refuse to tell us anything about such a minor, yet really important, feature.
well callum has responded to this thread but we still have no idea why it would even be a no. Guess we'll have to see.
 
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