Birthright News

[p]This small patch brings over the Animation optimizations for large scaling from the ongoing work of revamping combat to use Mass Entity system (next Major update). This gives a good reduction of CPU load. [/p][p][/p][p]Logs, Timber and Planks have been rebalanced. This means Tropical and North regions are now the Logs producing powerhouses as they were meant to be.[/p][p]Also Timber and Planks will be more evenly produced. Some consuming items for further production have switched to make Timber not only needed for production of Extensions, but now also for producing Splints that is an important part of healing armies.[/p][p]Extensions producing Eggs have been boosted and heavier scaling betwen tier 1-2-3 buildings. This reduce a choke point for producing Pirogi and Farmers Pie. Food giving good buffs to your hungry army.[/p][p][/p][p]New Game will be needed to take full effect on this rebalancing.[/p][p][/p]

• [p]Bow animation is fixed[/p]
• [p]Added click sound on World Map for Settlements and NPC widgets[/p]
• [p]Clicking Castle in World UI now opens Family Panel[/p]

[p]While the next big Major patch is cooking this patch fixes many bugs and optimization, polishing the core gameplay.[/p][p]And also adds 50k more translations of dialogues. But localization is still a Beta feature and more UI fixes will follow coming patches to accomodate Russian and Simplified Chinese texts.[/p][p][/p][h3]Important Notes[/h3]

• [p]Main Menu now shows latest Character and Family[/p]
• [p]Several rebalancing of what production each Region can have[/p]
• [p]Combat Animations now use LOD and CPU budget, depending on hardware range, to scale animation much better in Battles and Sieges[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug where Player could loose inventory (Big thanks to Rigo1 for reporting this)[/p]
• [p]Settlement Dialogue Market now close market when clicking background[/p]
• [p]ESC now closes a Story Dialogue while in Settlement Dialogue[/p]
• [p]Character panel has several UI changes to free up space and make things tighter[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug with scrolling army[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug with Army leveling panel expanding[/p]
• [p]WM fixed persistent camera position when coming back after combat[/p]
• [p]WM Camera now only collide with Terrain and nothing else[/p]
• [p]WM Camera when moving with WASD now follows Terrain[/p]
• [p]WM made several optimizations of Meshes becoming ISM[/p]
• [p]Fixed Unit Battle marker widget and positioning[/p]
• [p]Added several new UI sounds during Character Creation[/p]
• [p]Fixed horses brightness of saddle bags and eyes[/p]
• [p]When opening Settlement Dialogues in SP it will now wait for World Update to finish before pausing if happening at the same time[/p]
• [p]Options Panel have reworked Dropdown and keybinding inputs[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug when sorting dead Soldiers after Battle finished[/p]
• [p]Desert Temple Dungeons got several Texture fixes[/p]
• [p]Combat fixed a bug with Followers Charging when in Formation[/p]
• [p]Combat Characters updated for the upcoming Mass Actors to work seamlessly[/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue when loading World Map showing the map before everythign had loaded[/p]

[h3][/h3][p]Meanwhile the next Major patch is cooking well and already Mass Actors work as Soldiers for all weapons and formations. And the performance improvement is very good so really looking forward to release this overhaul of everything with Combat Characters.[/p][p]A great side effect of AI/Perception/Movement becoming fully multi-threaded is some complex things to calculate suddenly works fine and scalable. Like advanced Boid Flock movement where they now have understanding of density around them of Enemy/Allies, forming loose formations of 2-4 nearby Allies in a natural way etc[/p]

[p]This is yet another minor patch while the next big patch is still cooking something big and yummy.[/p][p]There are tons of bug fixes, performance optimizations, Quest system improvements and new tutorial quests, but also a Beta release of Localization.[/p][p][/p][h3]Quests[/h3][p]So far there have not been any in-game help what to do except discovering things yourself. And finally we have a new quest chain that takes your thru the most important steps (building a house, marriage and conquering settlements).[/p][p][/p][p]The quest system has also been heavily updated and modified like better cleanup of spawned things and better failed/abort handling.[/p][p][/p][p]There is also new events sent when quests progress, or are added to Player. Almost all quests and events have had updates and fixes.[/p][p][/p][h3]BETA Localization - Phase I[/h3][p]This has been something that was planned to wait until production phase is further along. But we now have a full translation pipeline established with Unreal Engine where new texts can automatically be translated. So it is time to start releasing the changes now. [/p][p]Next up will be to create a tool for handling human correction authority and minor changes to Dialogues to be better cut into paragraphs. [/p][p]Changing language can already be tested in Options -> Game -> Language [/p][p]Currently it is not 100% complete but will be coming patches (and change font to support Chinese and Russian characters natively). The supported languages for now are: [/p]

• [p]English[/p]
• [p]Spanish[/p]
• [p]French[/p]
• [p]German[/p]
• [p]Chinese (need special font installed)[/p]
• [p]Russian (need special font installed)[/p]

[p][/p][h3]Important fixes to mention[/h3]

• [p]Optimization round for Stones and Mountains placed in levels, now instanced static meshes[/p]
• [p]Fixed a random head bug for soldiers[/p]
• [p]1h (no shield) Right attack is fixed and not so short[/p]
• [p]Fixed updating follower counter when recruiting them on the road[/p]
• [p]Character Creation panels now show Avatar in fixed position and during the whole flow[/p]
• [p]Undeads got OnHit cooldown[/p]
• [p]Fixed a hard cut in music when changing Terrain on World Map[/p]
• [p]Character Panel and Settlement UI now use ESC better to step back and close[/p]
• [p]Character Panel got a new closing sound[/p]
• [p]New hit animations as interrupt when hit for all characters with a cooldown of 2s[/p]
• [p]World Events for quests now show Task description instead of Quest description[/p]
• [p]Fixed a broken Temple Dungeon in Desert with bad navigation[/p]
• [p]Fixed Player camera at start position when coming back to World Map[/p]
• [p]Combat healing got new floating icon and better abort logic[/p]
• [p]Fixed Minotaurs attacks[/p]
• [p]Fixed World Events showing big ui widget to queue them and pause in multiplayer when Player opens other UI (time stil goes on in multiplayer)[/p]

[p][/p][h3]Next Major Patch[/h3][p]There are several projects going on in parallell now. AI is helping to build a lot of code and tools that are needed (translation pipeline for example).[/p][p]And to prepare for expanding the studio I have created several AI agents that fill certain roles. For example there is already a Project Manager AI running the Trello board, keeping track of what changes in Progress and comments on tickets. It has deep understanding of Birthright as a project and what plugins and technologies it is built on.[/p][p]Because of this new AI help with deeper technical discussions, and super fast probing of Unreal Engine source files, the foundation of a new battle character structure that is very optimized is on it's way.[/p][p][/p][p]So for the next Major patch it will include a new completely custom built character used in Combat, for superior scalability.[/p][p]Unreal Engines Mass Entity system is fully used both for custom Movement pathfinding and full AI multi-threaded batch processing. Removing most of the CPU bottlenecks currently in game.[/p][p]
While the plan is still to use Skeleton Meshes for Players and Humanoids/Monsters (might change in future), for Undeads the plan is to use VAT (Vertex Animated Textures).
Currently Horses use VAT to remove the cost of Skeletons and Animations.[/p][p]For Undeads this would mean they can scale up to massive amounts and be more of a zerg than armies.[/p][p][/p][p]This is an exiting project cooking and very much needed for performance in larger Battles and Sieges. And of course multiplayer replication is a core of it, much more performant though and with new better ways to solve things.[/p]

* 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