Birthright News

* Added Server and Client version matching when trying to join a server
* Armor Data have been updated to better reflect quality change
* Old Merchant now has a special Loot Table spawning random loot every season it shows up. This also means more varied items instead of previous fixed table. Legendary and Epic weapons are replaced with their Recipe and more diverse variations.
* Fixed a bug when Crafting big batches of items
* Fixed Settlement Prosperity only updating every morning, now also when new Extensions are built
* Fixed server doing world save before pausing when last player logs out

When this project started it was only Singleplayer. But along the way a POC was made and proved Multiplayer will work having different Game Modes for World Map and Combat.

At the same time a lot of time has been spent on upgrading Unreal Engine since the goal was to settle on UE5, which it now does on a fairly stable release (UE 5.4) that has fixed most child issues of UE5.

This meant Multiplayer had not too much attention or optimization. But now it finally got some needed love and this patch has a heavy focus on improving Dedicated Server. Adding new features such as Local Chat and optimizing data in combat and world map.

So now is the time to start hosting a public server that everyone can try out. This will make it possible to gather more needed logs for further refinement.

And some QoL features for hosting Dedicated Server will be added in coming patches where Multiplayer will now get more focus than Singleplayer (still all comming features will be same in both).

[h3]Local Chat[/h3]

There are already Chat Bubbles in place for Local Chat, but now there is also a standard Chat window to handle local chat in a better way.

This is still just local in a radius around Players. If you can see another Player on World Map both will hear each other.
So for long range communication the idea is still that Messages has to be written and sent with Birds. Something that is still in the works.

[h3]Server Performance[/h3]

World Map CPU usage now takes less than 2% on a i9 CPU. And memory is down to 0.5-1.0 GB. This makes further optimization unnecessary and there is plenty of head room for the future features added to World Map and AI.
All AI Characters are still fully operating on the map regardless if any Player is nearby or not. This is not something that will be simulated to save performance.

Battles and Sieges have also been heavily optimized where 200 soldier limit is default in server configuration. And even though bandwidth have been reduced significantly for each connected Player this is an area that will be looked at more. But to do that will need much more Players trying the official test server.
So far testing has been made with 2-3 Players and the difference to 1 Player is not noticebale anymore in performance.

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

* 1h + shield now has 4 High Mode attack combos
* New Battle widget design
* Improved ragdoll
* Added Clock in combat UI
* Fixed a helmet issue with head mesh
* Settlement UI fixed quick buttons showing coins
* Settlement UI moved Back buttons to bottom for better mouse flow
* Settlement UI removed showing Loader when fetching initial data in MP
* Settlement UI fixed an issue with updating Visiting Lord total power
* Settlement UI fixed a rare race condition if opening UI same time as World Update started
* Settlement UI improved opening Character Panel while in Settlement
* Settlement UI fixed quick close from Market
* Multi Select widget in UI got better visuals and style fixes
* Recruitment and Daily Upkeep costs increased by 50%
* Fixed a bug where a built Extension could be available to build again
* Fixed Settlement Market price sometimes showing wrong Need
* Fixed a blocking volume on World Map
* Fixed World Map spawns using Troll spawn points
* Fixed weapon tracing for Ghouls and Wolves elite characters
* Fixed Ghouls sometimes using Human Taunt sound
* Fixed Kingdom Panel sometimes showing wrong portrait in Multiplayer
* Fixed an issue with Stamina Regen
* Changed Running Stamina Cost to depend on Stamina rather than Toughness
* Blocking a Hit with Shield now cost Stamina based on stats for hitter and blocker character
* Stamina regen now stops while Running and while Parry/Block
* Fixed Lineage Tree showing default placeholder when no family
* World HUD Top Panel showing materials got several fixes for showing big numbers
* Fixed updating total coins after being granted coins as rewards in Taverns for Multiplayer
* Changed early game Undead Bosses weapon sets
* Fixes to styling of Screen Loader
* Fixed follower Elysa dialogue when talking to her while in party
* Fixed speed on World Map set correctly after Settlement Event Dialogue
* Unit UI in Character Panel got reworked to be more clear
* Added Discord button at Main Menu
* Camera brightness is changed and now separated better between World Map, Battles and Dungeons
* Fixed Multi Select sometimes allowed higher amount than item in Crafting UI
* Fixed Overview Map showing Heralds on Settlements
* Fixed destructible fragments to not interact with Players

Another tech upgrade to run on UE 5.4 among several fixes and improvements.

[h3]UE 5.4[/h3]

With this version some optimization have started for Birthright with things that was added when upgrading to UE 5.

Nanite has been tested since UE 5 now and it does cost a lot of CPU when benchmarked. It does solve what it is supposed to, but having no real need for extremely complex meshes it cost much more than what you get from a games perspective.

This means moving forward Nanite is being completely disabled and removed, already with this patch most meshes has already been disabled.

Another big cleanup has been Foilage this patch. Several grass foilage had not been converted correctly to use Material Instances, hence cost a lot more than they should.
This has generated a good frame rate bump even on powerful hardware for high density foilage settings.

Lastly UE 5.4 now finally introduce multi-threaded rendering thread, similar to what Cyberpunks engine did to handle a lot of graphical effects and actors.
Demos from Epic maybe promise more gain on rendering thread than what most game developers report they get, but it is indeed a noticable improvement when benchmarked in Birthright.

[h3]Destructible Furniture[/h3]

During upgrade to UE5 all the destructible furniture in Dungeons was unable to auto-convert to the new Chaos destruction in UE5.

Now they are finally all back and converted to Chaos. This means that they all have proper anchoring for integrity (fence poles in the ground are bearing structurally etc).

Also using weapons now properly work on all items to smash and destroy.

This also include all breakable lootables such as Urns, Barrells, Vases (you still need to step on them after smashing to loot the coins they spill).

Next step with Chaos has been started on the final Destructible Sieges to use Catapults/Ballistas to take out the front or a wall. This already has an internal demo now (again, but don't miss the old PhysX crap) and will cook for a while behind the scenes until it's good enough for introduction.
But so far Chaos seems to be mature and ready for this.

[h3]Loot[/h3]

Another change, especially for Dungeons but active in all game modes, is that Player kills now directly make a Loot roll displaying loot in a new UI widget (showing the item and some stats such as Rarity).

This is additional loot meaning you still get the Victory loot after you won. For Dungeons this effectively doubles the loot on all enemies since you get two loot rolls per kill, if you finish the Dungeon.
But in large Battles it will give the Player some reason to not hang back and instead try get some kills yourself for some extra loot, especially the big ones that might have really good loot tables. But not being necessary since you still get scavenging loot like before on all dead opponents.
All game modes have this so even Siege, Skirmish and Arenas.

These loot rolls use the Characters personal Loot Table. Which is not the same as the Scavenging or Dungeon loot tables used for victory loot.

This makes loot more of a constant thing happening and can act as a driving factor, buffing early game a bit while having small impact on late game. And the game was always meant to be loot heavy, many items and micro-managed. This is a step in that direction.

[h3]Other notable fixes[/h3]

• Added a slight force backwards when hit blocking with a shield
  
• Max Speed on World Map has been increased by 50% giving more room for stacking buffs
  
• New Multi-Select UI widget when selling and buying part stacks
  
• Fixed clicking Accept Contract when promoting a family member to Lord (thanks to Jano)
  
• Increased eye adaption brightness in combat to better handle very dark Dungeons or Skirmishes
  
• Victory Panel after combat now plays a Positiive/Negative sound depending on outcome
  
• Fixed opening Map being blank until moving the map
  
• Several fixes around Loader and starting combat to streamline things
  

This patch introduce Vertex Animated Textures on Horses, new super performant accurate melee collision and tons of bug fixes along new items and characters.

Also upgraded to UE 5.3 and hopefully next patch will bring 5.4.

[h3]VAT[/h3]

Vertex Animated Textures was added as a new feature in Unreal Engine 5 to support bigger crowds. It's the most used technique to handle big crowds of characters that normally use expensive Skeleton Meshes for animations.

Horses have completely been converted using VAT, which was a heavy performance cost late game with many mounted soldiers. They have a complex expensive Skeleton bone structure so this is a huge performance save late game and for bigger heavy armies.

Soldiers generally are not planned right now to be converted due to unable to have free movement mixed with torso making attacks.

However Undeads will most probably be converted using VAT because there it would be fine for more static attacks that are in place. But would make it possible to have larger zergs of undeads.
So this is something being looked at for coming patches.

This will also make it easier to make animated characters on World Map and still be very performant.

Since dedicated servers do not use GPU, Horses will run using their Skeleton Collision Asset when needed instead on server side. But this is very performant and still makes Horses extremely cheap, not only for Clients.

[h3]Melee Collision[/h3]

Finally we have a multi-threaded and super performant solution for all combat collision. Which scales way beyond the future needs. It is also very accurate even with high velocity like horse riding.

This system is now regarded as feature complete and production ready. A big important feature moving forward. The backbone of combat.

[h3]Dedicated Server / Multiplayer[/h3]

There has been a heavy focus on honing multiplayer and lots of bugs have been fixed. And the next step now will be to try test with much more players on server than 3-4 which has been the max so far.

Reconnection for Players in Combat should now work properly.

Performance in Combat with several players have been heavily refined and tuned with congestion control of resources (bandwith) when replicating larger battles and several players.

[h3]Other[/h3]

Some minor things to be mentioned:

• Character Dialogues has a new UI
  
• Settlement Extensions has a new UI design with new filter buttons
  
• Selling prisoners in Arena now correctly update UI widget prisoner counter
  
• Settlement Markets now show a Sell Junk (all) button for Players
  
• Tropical battle levels have had several fixes to the grass and water
  
• Spawns of all kinds on World Map have increased slightly for Players
  
• Added animation effect on new contracts in World HUD
  
• Fixed a naked neck issue on characters
  
• Player Horse when dismounted now stays around rather than start running
  
• Unreal Engine updated to v5.3
  

Plus too many changes/additions to be listed in Data (items/characters/missions/titles etc)

[h3]Dismemberment and Gore[/h3]

Mesh Merging is finilized this Patch by now also include Horses. At the same time several optimizations were done on Horses, and like Humans same equiped models share instances for best performance and memory footprint.

Now when we are done introducing Mesh Merging, Dismemberment of Limbs is back for more Gore! As of now only on Humans but will add for Horses and more in later Patches.

[h3]New Food System[/h3]

The food system has revamp all food and ingredients. Previously some complex food required 4-5 ingredients which is extremely hard to maintain for little benefit. And Bread was the king of foods to maintain your army.

Many ingredients now have been cut down to reduce the clutter (example only 2 types of fishes now exist + 1 very special, the Gold Eel). While making the cooked food easier to make it overal feels like there are much more Food options now compared to before.
To balance this one new ingredient were added: Salt. (Mines produce Salt in various degree depending on Upgrade).

Now each of the better cooked food require 2-3 ingredients only and each give a unique Buff to everyone eating it.

Beer Barrels also give a hefty combat Buff if Soldiers consume it with Food. But ifthere is no food, they will get a bad debuff because of drinking on empty stomach.

[h3]New Spawn Systems[/h3]

On World Map spawning was previously based on Pathing to Player which was not reliable enough for many scenarious. So now it strictly use placed areas on the World Map for all types of spawns to make sure it is controlled (example nothing can no longer spawn in the vicinity of The Citadel unless it's a special City POI's that should spawn there).

Combat Spawn is also heavily changed because the previous way could not handle the Chaos that errupts when you push to the extreme with several Lords/Players entering on both sides for Battles/Sieges. Or if anyones army is camping on spawn positions when Reserves spawn, eventually something would go wrong.
Now it will properly probe a grid of 100 possible spots simulating insertion of a Character + Horse to find a safe spot, for each character.

[h3]Other fixes[/h3]

Fight Pit has been rebalanced to better increase the difficulty when joining the tryout quest. And with it the rewards are much greater
Arenas now pay more for sold Prisoners

• Initial Start Story has changed all Food the Player can get at start
  
• Changed minimum Spawn in combat from 5 to 20 regardless of Spawn Ratio
  
• Fixed MP server event when a Player joins the server to display Long Title
  
• Fixed rider immdeiately falling to ground when Horse is killed
  
• Fixed a bug in arena/fight pit where Player could loose army
  
• Fixed a bug when Player used Bow
  
• Fixed Weekly event Wheel of Fortunes spawn point in The Citadel
  
• Fixed MP fetching childrens families in Family Panel
  
• Fixed several issues with Siege Progress marker
  
• Fixed a spawn point issues in WestmarkVillage2 map
  
• Fixed several issues in Fight Pit/Arena thanks to reports from Rigo1
  
• Fixed Red Sea (Desert) Tax to be properly saved when changed
  
• Fixed Desert random Battle Maps does not include Village maps
  
• Fixed UI bug when talking to Follower from Character Panel