News Of The Realms - What We've Been Up To...
Greetings, warriors!
It's Christmas time, and the New Year is fast approaching... Yet there haven't been any proper updates from the Battle Realms Team for quite a while, let's find out the reason why together!
It is no secret that we've been developing a new update for perhaps too long, many of you are understandably becoming more and more impatient. We've stayed more or less silent in regards to the development, and it's becoming gradually more difficult to keep the exciting news within ourselves...
[h3]• What is this about?[/h3]
We want to come forward and state that this is one of the most important updates for Battle Realms: Zen Edition and it needs more time to be fully ironed out. That being said, the release date for the update is set to be somewhere around mid-January, 2022.
We'd like to point out that you can already experience a fraction of the update by switching to 1.57.9 - Open Beta of Battle Realms within Steam. You could also help us improve certain aspects of the upcoming update by leaving feedback regarding the beta version, that would be greatly appreciated!
[h3]• More on the changes[/h3]
The majority of the development time has been dedicated to updating the codebase to modern standards as well as switching from the ancient DirectX7 to its modern iterations (DirectX 9 and 12). This is the most important step as it allows us to completely fix any graphical glitches and serious rendering bugs, the performance of the game is greatly improved as well and is now smoother than ever. This also simplifies the process of including new features and integrations in the game, which is quite helpful.
Moving on... Battle Realms was never intended to work with widescreen resolutions, but would you look at that! 2K, QHD, and 4K are incoming! Those with keen eyes have probably already noticed the minor interface and background edits.
Improved textures accompany the higher resolutions: It's nothing too fancy, we've improved all game textures across the board with the help of neural upscaling technology. That has been in the works for quite a while and we're finally ready to unleash it.
Having trained and used multiple upscaling models for BR textures, we're ready to say that it looks good. Some of the more problematic textures, particularly interface-related, have been hand-edited by our artists.
Finishing our feature spotlight with a sweet sneak-peek of one of the upcoming new team colors. There are a lot more exciting changes to cover of course, but we will leave that until the actual release.
There's also talk on the team about refreshing many visual effects for the game for the sake of consistency, visual appeal, and overall gameplay. Possibly coming in the future!
[h3]• Streamlining the pipeline[/h3]
All in all, we've been very busy. There has also been a lot of work and effort put into miscellaneous things related to the development of the game. For example, as we're now seriously considering multiple balance changes across the game, we've collected a lot of in-game information in one document to make the development cycle easier for every team member involved. It will help us tremendously in achieving the more or less balanced gameplay combined with the feedback from our players.
We don't stop there however, there's a number of places we have to frequent and documents we have to dig up to ensure our development goes smoothly. There's also always user feedback that we carefully review at all times.
For example, German and French localizations! We hear you, and trust us, we're looking into it, we're still seeking the best way to make it happen within Steam. The localizations will be included in the game!
We're also working on our official site, which has been left largely unmaintained since release (it's difficult to maintain everything as a small team!), and the youtube channel - Battle Realms Network. If you haven't yet, please watch Ed's recent video for the community:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Besides Ed's appearances, there's a lot more planned for the channel, we're talking tutorials, gameplay details, and, of course, dev blogs.
Lastly, we would like to thank you, the community, for sticking with us since the very release of the game on Steam (Early Access). Your patience, belief in us, continuously provided feedback, and wonderful stories have all been a huge inspiration for our team.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! :)
Join the official server for the game, the universe, and the community if you haven't. Discord has proven to be a very helpful and fun program to use for us (as developers), so we're quite keen on maintaining our server.
Populated by more than 4000 warriors, it is a solid communication bridge between us and all of you.
If you're having issues, planning to report a bug, or just want to learn something new about the game and communicate with other fans or even developers -- we'd like to see you there, come around!
[h2]Battle Realms Fundraiser:[/h2]
[h2]Follow Battle Realms:[/h2]
[h3]Stay tuned for more updates!
- The Battle Realms Team[/h3]
It's Christmas time, and the New Year is fast approaching... Yet there haven't been any proper updates from the Battle Realms Team for quite a while, let's find out the reason why together!
It is no secret that we've been developing a new update for perhaps too long, many of you are understandably becoming more and more impatient. We've stayed more or less silent in regards to the development, and it's becoming gradually more difficult to keep the exciting news within ourselves...
[h3]• What is this about?[/h3]
We want to come forward and state that this is one of the most important updates for Battle Realms: Zen Edition and it needs more time to be fully ironed out. That being said, the release date for the update is set to be somewhere around mid-January, 2022.
We'd like to point out that you can already experience a fraction of the update by switching to 1.57.9 - Open Beta of Battle Realms within Steam. You could also help us improve certain aspects of the upcoming update by leaving feedback regarding the beta version, that would be greatly appreciated!
[h3]• More on the changes[/h3]
The majority of the development time has been dedicated to updating the codebase to modern standards as well as switching from the ancient DirectX7 to its modern iterations (DirectX 9 and 12). This is the most important step as it allows us to completely fix any graphical glitches and serious rendering bugs, the performance of the game is greatly improved as well and is now smoother than ever. This also simplifies the process of including new features and integrations in the game, which is quite helpful.
Moving on... Battle Realms was never intended to work with widescreen resolutions, but would you look at that! 2K, QHD, and 4K are incoming! Those with keen eyes have probably already noticed the minor interface and background edits.
Improved textures accompany the higher resolutions: It's nothing too fancy, we've improved all game textures across the board with the help of neural upscaling technology. That has been in the works for quite a while and we're finally ready to unleash it.
Having trained and used multiple upscaling models for BR textures, we're ready to say that it looks good. Some of the more problematic textures, particularly interface-related, have been hand-edited by our artists.
Finishing our feature spotlight with a sweet sneak-peek of one of the upcoming new team colors. There are a lot more exciting changes to cover of course, but we will leave that until the actual release.
There's also talk on the team about refreshing many visual effects for the game for the sake of consistency, visual appeal, and overall gameplay. Possibly coming in the future!
[h3]• Streamlining the pipeline[/h3]
All in all, we've been very busy. There has also been a lot of work and effort put into miscellaneous things related to the development of the game. For example, as we're now seriously considering multiple balance changes across the game, we've collected a lot of in-game information in one document to make the development cycle easier for every team member involved. It will help us tremendously in achieving the more or less balanced gameplay combined with the feedback from our players.
We don't stop there however, there's a number of places we have to frequent and documents we have to dig up to ensure our development goes smoothly. There's also always user feedback that we carefully review at all times.
For example, German and French localizations! We hear you, and trust us, we're looking into it, we're still seeking the best way to make it happen within Steam. The localizations will be included in the game!
We're also working on our official site, which has been left largely unmaintained since release (it's difficult to maintain everything as a small team!), and the youtube channel - Battle Realms Network. If you haven't yet, please watch Ed's recent video for the community:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Besides Ed's appearances, there's a lot more planned for the channel, we're talking tutorials, gameplay details, and, of course, dev blogs.
Lastly, we would like to thank you, the community, for sticking with us since the very release of the game on Steam (Early Access). Your patience, belief in us, continuously provided feedback, and wonderful stories have all been a huge inspiration for our team.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! :)
Join the official server for the game, the universe, and the community if you haven't. Discord has proven to be a very helpful and fun program to use for us (as developers), so we're quite keen on maintaining our server.
Populated by more than 4000 warriors, it is a solid communication bridge between us and all of you.
If you're having issues, planning to report a bug, or just want to learn something new about the game and communicate with other fans or even developers -- we'd like to see you there, come around!
[h2]Battle Realms Fundraiser:[/h2]
[h2]Follow Battle Realms:[/h2]
[h3]Stay tuned for more updates!
- The Battle Realms Team[/h3]