Brigador: Up-Armored Edition News

You probably know that each game on Steam has a community hub section where players can post their own artwork. What you probably don’t know is the vast majority of these types of posts for Brigador don’t ever appear on Steam or other spots on the internet like our Twitter account or r/brigador – they're on our discord server and we even have a hall of fame gallery channel dedicated to them called #becks_best.

Given just how many there have been over the years, we asked a few of our most frequent contributors recently whether we could showcase their various work on here. What follows is a list of community creations ranging from sketches, writings, videos, mods and scale models grouped mostly by category and author, reposted with their permission. Enjoy.

[h2]👩‍🎨ART[/h2]

[h3]TOURO-TAN[/h3] by Zi

[h3]DOROTHY-TAN[/h3] by Zi

[h3]PRISM-KUN[/h3] by Zi

Prism-kun
Light Mechanized Vidstar Platform
Hardpoints: 1x Heavy, 4x Micro

Supple synthetic skin, the best hair a vat can produce, bleeding edge multi-micro-camera optics, and more facial muscles than the original human body for that extra sadistic expression.
I want to say the braincase is for a real brain, but I feel like if that were a thing, we’d be seeing way more insane mannequins piloted by cephaloids. Probably just no expense spared for these physical models of beloved synchstars.
Looks light on its feet (if you can call them that) due to the agrav leg setup. In reality, these models are just about as armed as a Sledger. Drops any significant semblance of armor for the sake of a compact high-rating power plant. Shielding ends up fantastic, holds up to more than you’d expect for someone so small.
Arm-mounted HF blades and caseless submachine guns come baked in standard, but the heavy mount is clearly modular considering the variety of footage involving unruly worshippers getting pasted by so many different weapon types. Nothing quite like seeing someone get flashed with a healthy dose of radiation.
Oh, and the skirt’s a heat sink for the heavy. Naturally.

Do I like it? The hell do you think?

- MB

p.s. Annotations aren't mine. Neat, though.

Zi can frequently be found doodling in #design_bureau and takes commissions on Twitter.

[h3]C.C.'s CONSPIRACY[/h3] by Flyingdebris

Flyingdebris’ images frequently cause hysterics and can also be found posting mechs on Twitter.

[h3]ZED MINIMUS[/h3] by ceriseCisilipp

ceriseCisilipp is one of our moderators and is often seen in the #welcome_brigador channel.

[h3]ZEDS OF A FEATHER[/h3] by Flyingdebris (inspired by ceriseCisilipp)


[h3]MAN OF INTEGRITY[/h3] by Flyingdebris

Flyingdebris’ images frequently cause hysterics and can also be found posting mechs on Twitter.

[h3]MODESTO RECEIVES HIS CONTRACT[/h3] by Juntti

[h3]THINKER FROM VOLTA[/h3] by Juntti

[h3]COOKING WITH NORMAN[/h3] by Juntti

When Juntti is not depicting Norman as more miserable than the paparazzi photos of Ben Affleck, he can be found dropping sketches in #design_bureau.

[h3]TOUROS, MOG AND VARLET IN THE STYLE OF METAL SLUG[/h3] by Lowkek Ops

In addition to sharing sketches in #design_bureau, Lowkek Ops takes commissions on Twitter.

[h3]MOG M-841[/h3] by shoho

[h3]C.C.'s LECTURE[/h3] by shoho

[h3]ZED ON LEGS[/h3] by shoho

When not attaching legs to a Zed, shoho takes mecha commissions on their Twitter.

[h3]THE NEW PEOPLE'S ARMY MAGAZINE COVER[/h3] by ArcticST6

[h3]AUTOBALANCED TO TEAM: [CORVIDS][/h3] by ArcticST6

ArcticST6 is a server regular and can usually be found sharing WIP sketches in #design_bureau.

[h3]ALTERNATE VIDEO GAME CAPSULE ART[/h3] by ceriseCisilipp

ceriseCisilipp is one of our moderators and is often seen in the #welcome_brigador channel.

[h3]BRIGADOR KILLERS LORE CLARIFICATION[/h3] by SCOREGOBLIN

[h3]MARIUS BECCUS[/h3] by SCOREGOBLIN

SCOREGOBLIN is one of our moderators and is frequently sighted organizing community game and movie nights.

[h3]BRIGADOR KILLERS FAN TRAILER[/h3] by chasiubao
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]chasiubao’s antics became so powerful that we figured it would be safer to just hire them to help us make Brigador Killers.

[h2]📚LORE[/h2]
[h3]VAMOS A LA PLAYA[/h3] by mellonbread

Dennis purchased a cup of affogato from the JUST ICE vendor and walked, carefully spooning the gelato into his mouth, wary of backsplash from pieces that fell off the tiny spoon. There was one cloud in the sky and he wished it would occlude the sun, because his hands were full and he couldn't take off his jacket without putting his ice cream down. Which would have required him to awkwardly balance the cup on the boardwalk railing, or set it down on the ground, and he didn't want to do that. The wind might knock it over.

The tac rig came through the glass wall of the Companolo outlet. It burst out through the smiling dog's head and hit the boardwalk running. There was a long machine gun in its hands and before it hit the ground it was already firing. There were no appendages in that suit, Dennis knew by looking at it. A torso and a head suspended by powered armor, mechanical legs thrashing inhumanly, robot arms bouncing at the shoulders so the elbows and hands stayed perfectly level, holding the stream of bright colored tracers on the NOSPOL plainclothesmen exiting the DEALSLAVE. In a moment it was on top of them, then over them, turning briefly at the waist to hose down a straggler without stopping.

Faber wasn't far behind. They piled out of the prowler like spiderlings from an egg sac crushed under your thumb, wrapped in armored swaddling. The flinch reaction was well beaten out of them and they didn't cower under the hail of 8mm FMJ, counting on their rigs to protect them as they lined up their shots.

The van behind them exploded. Their suits did not protect them against that. The armored phocomelus catapulted him(?)self over the edge of the boardwalk, down to the beach below. Dennis wished he had a gun, or some other way to participate.

Then he stopped wishing for that, disappointed with himself. Nothing he could do would improve this already perfect moment of catharsis.

mellonbread is a long time member of the discord and can also be found on Twitter.

[h3]LIBRARIES OF SOLO NOBRE[/h3] by Eschaton

Solo Nobre did have a few libraries. One of the best was the Vorebey Book Reliquary, which fulfilled a triple museum, mausoleum, and book-haus purpose. All quiet stone and death, like the Necropolis - I used to go there for a sleep when it was raining. Out in front of it, the Corvid moleques were usually hawking used books and samizdat, their wares laid out in blankets on the street - ready at a moment's notice to run. Later, we'd make a joke of gunning our engines when we turned that corner; watching them run, though none of us really cared to enforce anything. Inside, you could enjoy the echoes of fine heels on fine polished marble in the lobby; an enormous cross whose arms are the reliquary on the left, toward the west, and the library at the right.

I'm not much of a reader, but it wasn't that big a library, and they don't let someone like me leaf through the relics. After a while you start rereading the titles that are worth reading and thinking about all the stuff that's not in there. I hear back in the Center worlds, they have archival libraries going all the way down to the beginning of history, without lacunae. That's what happens, I guess, when your culture hasn't been repeatedly burnt to the ground and encrusted with new layers of censorship every changing of the guard. You could probably lob a balão in any direction down there and erase something priceless - culture steeped on culture, eons of memory suffocating the ability to feel anything new. Think of it. Maybe the real answer is in the middle. Some stuff's got to be forgotten, some kept. Someone has to decide.

The foot of the lobby's cross was a pre-colonial church; I have read when they picked apart the ruins after the “Noite Longa,” they actually found a congregation in there, bits of communion mixed with plaster still in their teeth.

- Griswold Ficke, "Brigadors of Solo Nobre"

Eschaton has an AO3 account containing more of their writing in addition to their many posts in #lore_boar.

[h3]SVATI VADEKAR[/h3] by heroin chic-fil-a

As Solo Nobre progresses through its economic and social rationalisation, I am reminded that not everyone is in tune with our mission. For those that recognise us as what we are - liberators, bringers of prosperity and stability - the fruits of Concern investment are eagerly harvested and enjoyed, the seeds replanted so that they may grow again and tenfold. But there are some among our native business partners who do not fully understand the purpose of the Concern's system, and their particular greed must be pulled by its roots before it can spread.

In the past few months I have become acquainted with certain high-profile natives who have extensive private investments in Solo Nobre, permitted under trade agreements and licensing fees with the SNC. While they have been a useful source of information and business opportunities, I and my fellow Informatics departments have noticed a disturbing trend of irrational economic activity among the local tycoons: IP infringement, unsanctioned trade and dividend evasion, to name but a few of their sins.

We do not work for individual profit. We are part of an organisation, and our first and foremost priority must be the wellbeing and prosperity of that organisation. Going into business only for ourselves makes us all weaker - do our limbs and organs fight each other for nutrition, or do they work in concert for the health and development of the whole body? I cannot fault anyone for private enterprise, but I draw the line at business which directly impacts the Concern's profits, and among the native investors I see that kind of business running increasingly rampant.

For the centralismos that continue to keep the Concern out of their business, I remind them that one man went into business for himself, and took this entire colony with him. I hope they remember how that ended.

-Svati Vadekar, SNC Informatics Division
-Operations Director, 2nd Station

heroin chic-fil-a is often found honing their craft in the #lore_boar channel.

[h3]OWN A ZWEENIE[/h3] by ArcticST6

Own a Zweenie for home defense, since that's what the 4 Founders intended. Four separatists break into my house. "What in Martim’s beard?" As I grab my tanker cap and Zweenie rifle. Blast a searing armor-piercing laser through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my Nobrelite on the second man and fire a burst off, miss him entirely because
"It’s an assault rifle
-MB"
and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the Parliament cannon mounted on my Betka loaded with canister shot, "For the NPA lads" the cluster shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off the district alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified Corvid. He bleeds out waiting on the MPs to arrive since district comms have been jammed, Just as the founders intended

ArcticST6 is a server regular and can usually be found sharing WIP sketches in #design_bureau.

[h3]WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE BLACK HAND CAN'T DEFEAT HARDSHIELDS ARE YOU DENSE[/h3] by Eschaton and ceriseCisilipp

That's it. I'm sick of all this "Masterwork Graser" bullshit that's going on in the War Council OpFor Threat Evaluation system right now. Black Hands deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.

I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine Black Hand from Clade Vocc for $20,000 dollars (that's about 400 of our “raincoats” to the SNC – you are keeping up on OpFor mercenary bonus programs, right?) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 planetary cycles now. I can even cut slabs of Ed's Solid Meat Product™ with my Black Hand.

Spacer weaponsmiths spend years working on a single Black Hand and fold its lens up to a million times to produce the finest grasers known to mankind, in any species.

Black Hands are thrice as deadly as dirt-eater grasers and thrice as focused for that matter, too. Anything tubarao can chemically disassemble, a black hand can melt better. I'm pretty sure a black hand could easily dissolve a Citadel sporting full ERA with a simple full-spectrum pulse.

Ever wonder why colonial militaries never bothered with space forces? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined Vidstars (you are watching OpFor holovids, right?) and their black hands of destruction. Even in the Siege of Andros, colonists targeted the spacers with the black hands first because their killing power was feared and respected.

So what am I saying? Black Hands are simply the best weapon that the galaxy has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in the OFTE system. Please find enclosed a binary file attachment with the proposed changes.

- Colonel Travis Martin, NEP

Eschaton has an AO3 account containing more of their writing in addition to their many posts in #lore_boar. ceriseCisilipp is one of our moderators and is often seen in the #welcome_brigador channel.

[h2]🔧MODDING[/h2]
[h3]BRIG'ARDCORE[/h3] by the huanglong
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

BRIG'ARDCORE is a mod which aims to promote a more tense and tactical sandbox gameplay with more diverse enemies and weapons including flamethrowers, sabots, proximity mines and time bombs. Many aspects of the base game have been modified to achieve this. BRIG'ARDCORE plays best at difficulties 2-4 for light vehicles, and 5-8 for heavy vehicles. It's not even remotely fair and death can come suddenly, so long runs and campaign missions are not recommended for beginners.
FEATURES AND CHANGES:
[expand]
More than 30 additional player weapons
2 additional player abilities
All vehicles in Brigador made playable
Modified enemy vehicle destruction effects (faction/unit specific gibs, turret gibs, persistent wrecks etc.)
Modified weapon firing and impact effects (dustclouds, shockwaves, smoke trails, richochets, etc.)
Increased visual range
Increased enemy visual range and engagement distance
Health greatly reduced on all player vehicles
Altered loadout on some player vehicles
Weapons as horns for some player vehicles (Prowler, Rounder, Hound, Operator)
Unique fixed primary/secondary weapons for some player vehicles (Oxybeles, Prism, Butcherbird, Hun, Roadie, Actias, Operator)
Performance and functional changes to many existing player and enemy weapons
Rolling coal and burnout horns on certain player vehicles (Fatshoe, Propter, Hannibal, Rolston)
New enemies
New enemy weapons
Altered loadouts on several enemies
New enemy actions including taunts, sick burnouts and rolling coal
Revised spawnlists for greater enemy variety at lower difficulties
New Easter Eggs
Brother Cotton Boss fight mode
and much more.[/expand]

As of time of writing, BRIG’ARDCORE is in version 1.09 and can be downloaded via the #uploads channel in our discord server. Please be sure to pay attention to the installation instructions that come with the zip file!

[h3]WHATEVER THIS THING IS[/h3] by the huanglong
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]the huanglong has a habit of confusing our designer by showing off things they modded we weren’t sure were even possible in the #maps-and-modding channel.

[h3]AUDIO KINETIC PARP[/h3] by Loki
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]Loki frequently tinkers with various noises from the game in FMOD and can be found in #maps-and-modding explaining how to do so.

[h3]PLASMA LAUNCHER[/h3] by thedanyourmancouldsmelllike
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]ASSORTED VEHICLE PACKS[/h3] by thedanyourmancouldsmelllike thedanyourmancouldsmelllike has put together various vehicle packs over the years, such as this one for the Loyalist roster.

- Billman Assault Mech: An aggressive mech with modest aux/turret armament but a reinforced ramming prow and a boost ability instead of its stomp, ideal for ramming through enemies or obstacles alike.
- Antoninus Light Mech: The NEP's overliteral answer to the Chook, a durable but somewhat sluggish twin aux light mech.
- Scuttleray Powersuit: A recon powersuit that sits somewhere between the Mog and the Pellinore, faster than the latter and better armed than the former.
- Flathead Medium Tank: An astoundingly conventional MBT, main/small armament, decent speed, decent HP, just a capable, if unremarkable machine.
- Escorpião Light Tank: A better armed and armoured Betushka variant with poor speed but a powerful and long lasting boost to allow for burst agility.
Vicar Light Tank: A Betka with a Marlowe turret. Slightly worse handling and shields, but you can run a Galinha.
- Caçador Assault Gun: A boxy light SPG with a main/small armament. Durable for its size, but its fixed forward armament hurts it outside of gunnery duels and ambushes. Hit and run.
- Caesar Combat Car: A Loyalist ball-tread test bed based off an old armoured car. Fragile, but with high forward and reverse speeds and a twin aux armament it's still a capable combatant in the right hands.
- Throne Attack Agrav: A floating Monarch upper with twin aux, a devastating belly slam and deceptively high mobility, the Throne's a consummate brawler.
- Ravager Grav-tank: A Raider derived grav-tank, trading its long operational range, heavy armament and some performance for a turret and extra durability, better suited to the direct combat roles they find themselves in inside Solo Nobre.
- Viking Grav-tank: Another Raider variant, this one an intended outrider for the parent vics, with higher speed but a lighter aux/tur armament in a turret.
- Hussite Heavy Grav-tank: A massive combat vehicle intended for infantry support and assault across broken terrain, the Hussite uses a heavily modified and up-armoured Huss chassis as its basis, switching the two fixed forward Heavies for a casemate Main hardpoint in the lower hull and an Auxiliary weapon in a dorsal, fully traversable turret.

The vehicle packs by thedanyourmancouldsmelllike can be found in the #uploads channel. Be sure to follow the installation instructions.

[h3]BRIGADOR SCRIPTING[/h3] by chasiubao

Stellar Jockeys note: The following two videos were made possible in-engine because chasiubao had been given access to a fork of the engine and could (re)write parts of the game's code as needed. This is why things like spawning in new units at runtime, faction infighting, weapon switching and various other things not achievable with the modkit are possible.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]chasiubao’s antics became so powerful that we figured it would be safer to just hire them to help us make Brigador Killers.

[h3]SATELLITE MIND[/h3] by Briggs

Satellite Mind is a large and fairly difficult map set in a high-end district that also just happens to contain one of the NEP's largest communications arrays. You've been contracted to destroy various NEP structures in the district because they are ruining the client's view.

This map was also very much built with powersuits in mind, and more or less functions as my love letter to the Juke, which I would very highly recommend using here (regular boring non-Juke loadouts are included too). Or, if the Juke isn't your thing, feel free to play it in Freelance with your powersuit/small vehicle of choice instead.

[h3]BLACK FAIRY 2.0: JUST IN TIME FOR HALLOWEEN EDITION[/h3] by Briggs

This zip contains two maps, Black Fairy and I'm Not In Love - both have been improved on since their original versions last year, such as a slightly larger map, a new area, changes to enemies, new enemies, and even a playable version of one of the new enemies, complete with custom sprites. Of course, this time around there are more than just Spacers lurking in the forest...

Briggs’ maps can be found in the #uploads channel. Please be sure to follow the installation instructions. When not making maps, Briggs can also be found making other things. Speaking of…

[h2]⚒MODELLERS[/h2]
[h3]LEGO BUILDS[/h3] by Briggs Briggs has also recreated a number of Brigador vehicles in LEGO form. Can you name them all?


[h3]3D PRINTS[/h3] by themerchantofbenis
Last and by no means least are the 3D printed works of themerchantofbenis

themerchantofbenis can usually be found in #design_bureau sharing their latest work



Many more such posts can be found in the #becks_best channel on our discord server. You can join it by clicking here.

[Teen Spacer Squad cover image thumbnail by flyingdebris, ED’S header image banner by ArcticST6]



https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/Brigador_UpArmored_Edition/

You may notice a brief download for Brigador: Up-Armored Edition if you are on Windows. This is because we have marked the Visual C++ Redistributable 2022 (also includes 2019, 2017 & 2015) on the backend for download. Previously we marked the Visual C++ Redistributable 2019 (also includes 2017 & 2015) on the backend for download.

A redistributable is a library of components required to run Windows applications developed with Microsoft Visual C++, such as the Brigador engine.

Assuming Brigador already runs fine on your computer, no action is required on your part.

No changes to Brigador: Up-Armored Edition have been made (sorry).

In this article a number of words are linked to Wikipedia’s glossary of computer graphics so that you can follow along without too much interruption.
[h2]👨‍🏫A BRIEF LESSON IN COMPUTER GRAPHICS[/h2]
Often we get feedback from players who wish the camera in Brigador could be moved to see different angles of the various models of the vehicles or buildings seen in the environment. We don't wish to disappoint those players but within the game engine this isn't possible because what you are seeing rendered in the game is not a 3D model that can be rotated along any axis. Instead, what you are seeing are sprites (more specifically, you are looking at 2D quadrilateral shapes, and what you are also looking at right now is a flat, two-dimensional screen upon which is a moving image that can create the illusion of depth through particular techniques).

Ironically, how we even make these sprites is initially by creating 3D models, typically through the process of kitbashing (this part of the process we won't go into, and we'll ignore animation rigging too, but feel free to check out this timelapse video for the Pantry Boy vehicle from several years ago that you may not have seen before) usually in 3DS Max. The part we're concerned with comes after a 3D model has been decimated, which is a process that reduces the size of the polygon mesh. Once this happens, we can give the mesh a texture map, which is the point where the model starts to more closely resemble the final product.

Before we do that we'll need UV maps first. A quick way to explain UV mapping is to imagine an animal that has been skinned: our 3D model is the animal and the skin that has been removed from it and can be laid flat is our UV map. Or if you refer to the cube below.



The program we'll use to do this to our 3D model is called Houdini.

To give our UV maps texture information what we then do is take them from Houdini along with the 3D model that was made in 3DS Max into another powerful program called Substance Painter that allows us to detail the materials of the model (for example, how rough a stone looks or how glossy a metallic surface is). We don't have footage of us working on Substance Painter but you can get a good idea of what it's capable of just by looking at this short official video that touches on a lot of what we've just written.[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]At this point we have crafted the shape of our model, peeled off its skin, given it materials to make it resemble the final object, and now we have to take it into a fourth program: Blender. Why we take the textured model into Blender is to do three things. The first is lighting, which we only do a little of. Blender allows us to influence the light-matter interaction, or how 3D models are illuminated – a process that is often referred to as baking. The second thing we do in addition to this is framing the 3D model from an angle of our choosing – in other words we recreate the same view frustrum that the player will see when playing Brigador. The third and final major thing in the Blender step is we also get depth buffer information, which tells us how far away the model is with respect to the camera's perspective.
[h2]🔀FROM MODELS TO SPRITES[/h2]
We said at the top that in the game you were technically looking at sprites, not 3D models. The basic reason for that is because the game engine is told to display sprites, which in turn spoofs the appearance of 3D models in an apparent isometric perspective. How we get from 3D models to sprites is via open source software – a version of which comes included with the Brigador Modkit & Map Editor called SJSpritePacker. What this does is takes the original 3D model and (depending on the model's level of detail) captures up to 64 rotations of all that model's positions and animations at a particular resolution and creates not one but two sheets of sprites along with the XML data for the sheets. Below you will see the sprite sheets for the loyalist infantry NPC (AKA loy_foot_01 AKA “Dave”), which if you own a copy of the game you can find in the folder Brigador\assets\units\loyalists\foot.



This is where things start to get complicated. In addition, the purpose of the second sprite sheet is it provides z-depth information. The XML data that's outputted for both of these sprite sheets by SJSpritePacker is "pointer data" - this is information that tells the sprites to face the correct direction but before it can do so, it's fed into a .json file, which is the file type the game engine reads for the majority of the game's data.

Let’s use another example of how we both use pointer data and slip in an optimization while we’re at it. Here’s a gif of the Arlo agrav from Brigador at twice the usual zoom seemingly turning 360 degrees on the spot. Every single angle of this shot is its own individual sprite, but it is *not* a 3D model rotating in space despite appearances.



Within the game’s own data you’ll find rotations of the Arlo, aka spc_agrav_05. However, the sprites below only point to the right. Why? Because we mirror the left-hand side to save on those frames.



Meanwhile what the XML data itself looks like is a list of coordinates that tell which parts of the images above point to where.



Fun fact: at one point early on in development all of this data had to be manually inputted. Fortunately, our artists nowadays have scripts that export the required rotation data automatically.

[h2]🤔WAIT, WHY DOES IT LOOK 3D THEN?[/h2]
Careful readers might be asking why did we go to all the trouble of putting together 3D models, give them detailed materials for their textures, bake in some lighting and not just use those models in the game instead? This question was asked many years ago and was finally answered around the winter of 2012. While Brigador does have a 3D look, it is not 3D. Games that are true 3D are extremely complicated because once you go 3D, now you really are in a situation where the player can view a model from every conceivable angle in a game's environment. Creating such a thing is a considerable undertaking for any studio's engineers and technical artists to deal with, who essentially have to figure out a way for models that are exported in a particular format to be understood by their game engine and also be optimal (i.e. not grind to a crawl and run at single digit FPS). In other words, everything we've talked about so far took five different programs alone: 3DS Max > Houdini > Substance Painter > Blender > SJSpritePacker – and that was only for 2D sprites. So, knowing this, and with respect to the amount of time, people, money and energy it would take to make a true 3D Brigador game, hopefully it's clearer now what some of the reasoning was for Brigador's look.

So Brigador's not true 3D and yet visually the game still looks impressive - so what else is going on? Recall the sprite sheets from before that look black and white. Let's look at another one that's only ever seen at one rotation - the orbital cannon (AKA battery_01 in the game data).

The first variant of the orbital cannon you can think of as the diffuse version, while the second is the z-depth information visualized as a grayscale image (where the brightness can be considered as an indication of how close the model is to the camera). The purpose of the latter is to inform the lighting of the Brigador engine against the sprite, which you can see in the final version of the game itself.


Or in motion...



What should be apparent from the above image and the gif is there is additional lighting being displayed on the sprite itself. As it turns out, the Brigador engine is doing two specific things: deferred shading and with it dynamic lighting and this is what we've been building up to this whole time.

We encourage you to read up a little on both topics, because it's a rabbit hole of its own, though we will point out here how even for the mid-2010s, applying deferred shading and dynamic lighting to 3D models was a very expensive thing to do in terms of hardware... except we are not using 3D models in the engine! Remember: the sprites are fundamentally just two-dimensional quadrilateral shapes – they are not polygons where every facet would have to be lit properly and because we are able to decouple a scene's geometry from its lighting. Also, because we have the depth information from the z-depth sprite sheet in the XML data, this allows us to put in a bunch of lights into the levels without causing major performance hits and allows the engine to apply dynamic lighting to those sprites. Or, in other words, we can do things like this such as when the effects of an EMP wear off...



Or dynamically light up the player when they fire a railgun shot with the Zeus...



*This* is where the payoff is and why so many people have asked over the years “is this 3D?”. This might also prompt the question of why other developers don’t do this nowadays if it’s so visually effective. The main culprit is the games industry’s pursuit of graphical fidelity in the early 2000s, which meant most people moved on from sprites in favor of full 3D.

So, in summary:

• Nothing is 3D in Brigador – we make spritesheets out of 3D models instead
  
• Brigador's custom game engine draws 2D quadrilaterals on screen which are inexpensive to light
  
• Sprite z-depth information informs the lighting and helps spoof a sense of 3D despite the fixed isometric view
  

[h2]💭WHERE DO YOU GO FROM HERE?[/h2]
What you've read so far is an abridged version of what goes into what you actually see on your screen when you play Brigador and why it looks the way it does. For our next game, Brigador Killers, what we are changing about the visuals is we are doubling the output resolution of all sprites from their 3D models. In the next two images you will see the first game's masthead Touro Loyalist mech. The first image is from Brigador with the camera set to a 3x zoom...



While this is an image of the Touro at the doubled output resolution at 1x zoom.



...And together in the same scene within an early dev build of Brigador Killers.



We realize that this article may not end requests from people asking for different camera angles, but we hope players will be able to better enjoy a new level of detail that goes into each art asset in both our sequel and our current game. Speaking of which, Brigador is currently on sale.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/

Thanks for reading.


[N.B. This article is based on a previous newsletter from September 2021 and a Twitter thread on the same topic from June 2022.]

One of the lesser discussed aspects of Brigador: Up-Armored Edition but what has had a subtle impact on its reach is its localization, so we’re going to take a look at how Brigador was localized from a technical and linguistic standpoint, and what sort of challenges were posed by doing so.

[h2]📝SOME THINGS TO NOTE[/h2]

For those unfamiliar, the term “localization” is often used interchangeably with “translation” – for our purposes when we refer to localization we are talking about the process of both translating a text from its source language into its target language (e.g. from English into French) AND having that translation make sense in the target language. Another way to think about this is localization is not a verbatim, or literal “word-for-word” process of translation – it is the communication of the message of the original text using the target language. We will look at a few examples of this later on.

Second, Brigador was never conceived with localization in mind. The game runs on a custom engine and spent several years in development, first appearing as a closed alpha in 2014, then Early Access in 2015 followed by the initial 1.0 release in June 2016. That whole time it was only ever in English with a very simple menu system. Between 2016 and the 2017 Up-Armored Edition re-release, however, the game was localized into five languages: German, Russian, Japanese, French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese and several more languages would follow in subsequent years.

Third, the word count of Brigador: Up-Armored Edition sits at about fifty thousand words, which, very broadly is about 200 hours worth of work for a single translator, not counting however many hours editors would spend going over the work.

Lastly, we were extremely fortunate to be able to work with some absurdly talented translators without whom this article would not come to be.

[h2]🚧THE TECHNICAL HURDLE(S)[/h2]

Remember how we said Brigador was never conceived with localization in mind? Here are a few important things you need to be aware of if you ever intend to localize a game that doesn’t have any sort of localization:

• What fonts and alphabets are currently supported by the game’s engine?
  
• What are the character limits in the user interface?
  
• Is there any text that gets used in multiple places?
  

In order for Brigador’s localization to be a success, we needed to answer the above questions, but before we can even do that, part of the game’s engine had to be altered to allow for interface language switching to even happen. For those more familiar with computing terminology, the localization for Brigador is a form of shimming to integrate a set of translation libraries.

In more plain terms, everywhere you find text in Brigador – with the notable exception of “hard” art assets like signage in levels or on some loading splash screens for certain locales – behind the scenes all of it got ripped out of its original spot and replaced with a string. For example, instead of this equipment entry’s title and body:

EMP Grenade

Launches a small yield EMP warhead at low velocity in a high arc. Detonation temporarily disables shielding and drive mechanisms of all vehicles in the blast zone. Anti-grav units with overloaded drives are known to plummet into the ground and nearby friendlies, and radio communications are also rendered inert for a duration.

Particularly effective when used in tandem with artillery or high hull impact munitions.

-Efi

In their place now sat:

abilities.special_ability_emp_01.name

and

abilities.special_ability_emp_01.description

Or visualized side by side in a spreadsheet

A lot of the text entries follow this sort of string-naming scheme and there are roughly 1200 strings that contain Brigador’s ~50k word count. What we haven’t yet explained is why we had to go about ripping out all user interface text and replace it with these string IDs.

In most modern applications, places where text is visible to the end user don’t actually contain the “raw” text. Instead, it’ll contain some kind of variable (in our case a string or, as can be seen from the screenshot an “msgid” or Message Identifier) and this is the thing that points to something else that contains the text we want to display. In Brigador’s case that “something else” is what sits in the game’s \Brigador\assets\text directory:

Seen above are a dozen folders with language codes. Each folder contains an MO file and, unfortunately for the lore hounds out there that want to read all the game’s text in one go, MO files are not human readable. Fortunately, these files are Brigador readable. They are what the game points to at runtime when you launch Brigador, depending on either your operating system’s current language or if you have already switched the game’s language to something else. To get to this point, a text goes through the following abridged steps starting from the translator:

1. Translator receives English source text as a document
   
2. Translator translates English source text into target language
   
3. Translator sends translation back to Stellar Jockeys as a document
   
4. Stellar Jockeys copies and pastes the translated text from the document into an alltext master spreadsheet
   
5. Alltext master spreadsheet is converted into a csv file, and then into a PO file and then into an MO file
   
6. Brigador build is compiled with new MO files included into the packfile and pushed publicly for players to enjoy
   

This process was repeated for every language. In other words, if we had to hit copy and paste a few hundred times for a language, we had to repeat that copying and pasting ten times more to cover all the current languages. Our producer doesn’t have a picture of their old keyboard, but the Ctrl, C and V keys on it were thoroughly worn out by this process.

In addition, it was not trivial to bolt on the localization feature to Brigador because:

1. No groundwork existed for this feature beforehand – it all had to be written fresh which was made harder by the fact that
   
2. The game engine is entirely custom written in C++, unlike established industry engines that already boast localization support such as Unreal or Unity, and
   
3. At the point of its creation our original engineers had since departed Stellar Jockeys making codebase changes more difficult
   

Ultimately the localization feature “works”. We won’t dwell too much on the problems, save for answering these questions we posed at the start now that you’re armed with some knowledge about the process:

What fonts and alphabets are currently supported by the game engine?

We only supported the Latin alphabet with our set of fonts at 1.0. Nowadays we support Chinese, Japanese and Korean alphabets. Most fonts that support the Latin alphabet usually support characters like diacritics which covers most European languages, even alphabets for Russian and Polish. The fonts used in Brigador are Rubik, Iroha Maru Mikamki and Noto Sans. Rubik supports Latin & Cyrillic, Iroha Maru Mikamki supports Japanese, and Noto Sans supports Simplified & Traditional Chinese and Korean.

What are the character limits in the user interface?

The bulk of Brigador’s text is found in the INTEL/ACQUISITIONS lore entries which have plenty of space. Places that had space constraints like the objective counters in a level or SETTINGS menu labels were limited between 10-25 characters including spaces. To know how much space that is at most, type out twenty-five Ws on your keyboard like so:

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

(Capitalized, the letter W is the widest letter in the Latin alphabet)

Remember, this is including spaces. That short sentence you just read was 34 characters including spaces. It is not a lot of room.

Those of you that are experienced in this field might be saying something like “Wait, couldn’t you just resize the UI elements independently?” and if our game were like a lot of other applications, the answer would be “Yes, of course we could”. Unfortunately, given how simple the menu system is, the localization feature is such that the chosen size for the UI text ends up being global. What that means is attempting to change the size of the text in one place affects the size of all text. Please refer to the GIF below to see this problem visualized.

For languages that are typically 10-20% longer in translation like German or Polish this entailed a lot of truncation in multiple places (usually the SETTINGS menu) because left untruncated the translated text would be illegible either due to running out of bounds or overlapping text on the line below it.

By contrast, Chinese, Korean and Japanese had the opposite problem in that they were typically very compact, which tangentially was a problem for a lot of older generation video games from Japan being localized for Western audiences because their UIs would require significant reworks in order to accommodate an English localization.

Is there any text that gets used in multiple places?

This was another headache. A common trick when creating a user interface is the reuse of the same piece of text in multiple places (for example, the word “YES” in a confirmation window) meaning you only ever need to create one instance of that text. While we can get away with this in English – because “YES” means a positive response regardless of the question being asked – it doesn’t always work in other languages. This is because answers to particular questions can vary depending on language (in the sense that translation of the word shouldn’t be “YES” but instead something like “CONFIRM” or “ACCEPT” in the target language). Unfortunately, we weren’t able to give such elements in Brigador their own separate strings, though to the best of our knowledge we largely got away with it, probably because such buttons are rarely encountered in the game.

Despite the localization work being a significant slog, let’s try to end this segment on a positive note: it all ends up as text data in binary so the “cost” of adding localization to Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is ludicrously small, from 550 KB for Traditional Chinese on the low end to 904 KB for Russian at the high end, or about 7.4 MB in total for 50 thousand words repeated 12 different times.

[h2]🗣 THE “VOICES” OF BRIGADOR[/h2]

The process of translating the text was the least of our problems due to Stellar Jockeys’ producer already having experience in localization. This meant we knew what sort of behavior to expect from our translators and how to provide them with what they might need. With a few exceptions, most of our translators across various time zones were able to reach us via a private channel on our Discord server that we’d specifically set up for them. This was where we’d answer questions about Brigador’s terminology and provide gameplay screenshots or footage where needed.

Projects like these typically end up with a lot of frequently asked questions so it’s usually a lot more efficient to have everyone in the same room rather than repeating yourself up to eleven times, and often times our translators ended up brainstorming together, even if their target languages were different.

The main task for the translators – aside from coming up with “cool phrase in target language for a thing” – was handling the lore entries in Brigador, which are mainly written by three fictional characters who are also unlockable pilots in Freelance mode: Efi (Efigenia Tseng), MB (Marvin Beck), and m.p.C.C. (Cephei Chatfield) and sign off as such at the bottom of each text with a signature. Efi is a gearhead that predominantly writes the weapon descriptions in strict technical detail, MB is a breathless nerd that talks about vehicles in a laidback and sardonic manner, while m.p.C.C. is a spacer putting out dossiers on the pilots for the SNC. Despite appearing in text format only, they are individual characters in their own right, which needed to be reflected in their writing in translation.

The other big challenge boiled down to answering the question of “Do we leave it as is or translate it?”. This is because terms like "Touro" (literally, Bull), "Novo Exercito de Povo" (New People’s Army), "Solo Nobre" (Noble Soil) are Portuguese in origin. We left it up to the translators to decide whether such terms be left as is, transliterated or crafted anew. There are ups and downs to whichever choice one makes, but the important thing was to communicate the notion that Novo Solo is a planet that has its own language and culture that was not Anglocentric. This question also extended to campaign mission names that are direct references to actual songs, and to weapon names with nouns like “Donkey”, “Carlos” and “Otomo”. Generally speaking, the further a translation was from English geographically, the more these things tended to be given targeted translations.

Lastly, each language varied in how many translators and editors worked on that language, ranging from just one for French, German and Italian, to almost a dozen on Chinese.

[h2]🎭ANECDOTES FROM THE TRENCHES[/h2]

A number of amusing things from all languages came up during Brigador’s localization. Here are a handful.

[h3]FRENCH[/h3]
The original text for Moerbeke Quarter’s lore description reads in English:

lol yea ve ben to the bek. best ploid n lyears lmfo 100 top ben 2 lng tho try gin soonon

^ dt, som fkin mtdor r sm sht rket th HOLE bek NO bek newer fkn l2pilot knai

-anonymous synchnet postings

To first translate this, we needed to translate what the message even is into plain English. The entry is two comments written on a message board of sorts, but written in SMS-style shorthand. Expanded into normal speech, what Moerbeke is meant to read is as an exchange between two users.

Yeah, I've been to the Moerbeke Quarter. Best I've had in years. I should go back.

About that, I just went - some goddamn pilot wrecked the WHOLE place. No Moerbeke Quarter left! He should learn to drive. Haha.

How this ended up in French was thus:

put1, ete a bek. meilleur ploid dpui D ané. imfao top 100. essèrè 2 revenir bi1to

fépaça. 1 enculé de mat a tout KC. ny retourn pa. Apren +to a piloter

- messages synchnet anonymes

We hope this clears up any confusion about what this entry was about for the French native speakers reading.

As for some of the achievement titles in French: Through a Scanner became Substance Mort which is the French title of the Philip K. Dick book; When I’m On The Road, I’m Indestructible became Je n’ai besoin de personne en Harley Davidson which is the title of a very famous song by Brigitte Bardot penned by Serge Gainsbourg, and the now-unused Your Own Supply (an achievement for killing yourself with Tubarão but was removed because we can't accurately track damage sources) became Tu payes pas le gaz (literally “You don’t pay for gas”, which is a popular saying in French when someone farts in public).

Our French translator also noted that they didn't translate most of the faction names and left them as is, except for Spacer which became Spacien in French, because it would be more familiar to a French science fiction reading audience. Also, “Spacer” is the title of a somewhat embarrassing disco effort from a French pop singer back in the late 1970's:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][h3]SPANISH[/h3]
Our Spanish translators recalled that translating the Loyalists faction name was a particular bugbear:

“The most direct translation Realista was a term used during colonial times in South America and it has the implication of monarchic rule so it was both old-fashioned and misleading so that was a no-go. We then went with fieles al regimen which was closer in spirit but as you might imagine, replacing an adjective with a whole phrase presented some logistical difficulties in some sentences, which ended up extremely ungainly. There were a few scenario briefings where ‘loyalist’ would appear many times and a longer phrase made the repetition very evident. We spitballed a few alternatives until a few days or so before the deadline, when we were re-reading to check everything was okay. The other translator made the comment that, if you think about it, the 'loyal' part of the term sounds kind of redundant in Spanish, especially since these are the regime's forces after all. So, we went with del regimen, which sounded much better, was as invisible as 'loyalist' in terms of lexical density and repetitions, and it fit perfectly in every single sentence. We went through the whole text again and replaced every instance of fieles al regimen with del regimen – and that's how the main enemy faction in Brigador got its localized name like a week before the deadline after months of struggling with finding a good alternative."

[h3]GERMAN[/h3]
Our German translator told us:

“I put big emphasis on trying to not make it sound like a translation from English, which is sadly very common in German video game translations nowadays. Leaving most terms and names in English, sentences that clearly still carry the English syntax and going for a lot of the Latin loan word equivalents instead of ‘proper’ German words... I tried really hard to avoid all of that, and I think as a result the translation did end up having a very peculiar character. Also trying to differentiate the different character voices was fun. Sometimes I wondered if the result was actually good, but whenever I read back the translated text or checked stuff in-game, I found myself pretty captivated and couldn't stop reading it, so I guess at least I think it's good. I do recall a German Let's Play where the guy laughed out loud at my translation Deppenbus for the Shortbus and then called the German translation in general ‘eccentric’. I think that's a success!”

[h3]ITALIAN[/h3]
Our Italian translator reminisced the following:

“I loved translating the mission names! As they're all song titles, sometimes I got creative and spun them around into other music references that, while maintaining the meaning of the original title, also meant something else in Italian. 'I'll Be What I Am' became 'Son Chi Sono' (I Am Who I Am), which is a line that really stuck with me from the Italian version of Cyrano de Bergerac. Also the achievement 'Lore Boar Wants More' became 'Mike of Solo Nobre' in translation, which is a reference to someone called 'Sabaku No Maiku' or 'Mike of the Desert', who is basically Italy’s VaatiVidya.”

[h3]JAPANESE[/h3]
Our Japanese translation was handled fantastically by a couple of workhorses from an established Japanese translation agency. We don’t have any comments from them, but we did receive occasionally amazing reviews from Japanese critics, such as this one excerpt from this blog which we enjoyed via machine translation but was kindly translated properly by a twitter user:

Have you ever eaten lasagna made by an American?

What is this clump of lard shaped like the heart of a titan? The Americans call it "lasagna." It's 30% meat and 70% oil and cheese arranged like sediments from 300,000 years ago the color of disgust. The smell, the weight, the size, the sheer look of the thing should tell any sane person that it is not safe for human consumption. It's so fattening you can feel yourself gaining weight just by looking at it. Ramen shot-through with lard and chemical preservatives stands next to lasagna and hangs its head in shame, practically a health food by comparison. That's how rich it is. It goes without saying that I couldn't eat it. It is not a thing that could be eaten. The Americans looked at me sympathetically, devastated that I could not partake in this delicious thing. I did not understand… until I played Brigador. Recommending someone play Brigador is like trying to explain why lasagna is actually good to a Japanese person.

[h3]CHINESE[/h3]
The first pass on Chinese that we put out was unfortunately of subpar quality, which we weren’t aware of until a few negative reviews appeared. Luckily, someone within our community emerged to help us fix the translations and gave everyone else involved some fascinating insights into a number of topics while they were at it.

Regarding their translation of the Johnny Five Aces entry, in Chinese J5A was renamed to 五星王牌莊尼 (Wǔxīng Wángpái Zhuāng Ní) or “Five Star Ace Johnny”. This had a couple of cultural references to boot, because in Hong Kong, the ace card in poker is called "煙" (a cigarette). So having four aces would be called "四條煙" (or “four smokes”). Meanwhile the fifth ace here calls forth imagery from a scene in the 1990 Stephen Chow action comedy God of Gamblers II.

The translation for the vehicle name "Propter" ended up something of a conundrum for some of the translators as there was no explicit idea or meaning behind the name, but instead chosen as a just-so articulation of style and how the word sounded. Our Chinese editor christened it「派頭」or, approximately, “Pài Tóu”.

“This phrase carries the meaning of 'style' and 'panache'. The Propter is built out of classic cars, so this name should fit with its stylish appearance. Also, the way it's pronounced ("Pài Tóu") should be a phonetic match to ‘Propter’.”

Lastly, our Chinese editor was very proud of their work on Luis Leng who ended up with a proper Chinese name.

“It gave me an idea: what if I assign him an actual Chinese name? Leng, 冷, became the surname. As for the first name... Luis is usually translated as 路易斯 (Lùyìsī), but a Chinese person’s name is mostly two to three characters long (one character for the surname and a two-character first name being the most common) so I needed to twist it a bit. His name ended up as 冷路移 (Lěng Lù Yí). I gave the same treatment to Efigénia Tseng as well so that she’d be called 曾愛菲 (Céng' Àifēi), and 愛菲 (Àifēi) would also take care of her nickname "Efi".

[h2]📚THERE'S A CONCLUSION?[/h2]

Despite numerous hitches we’re immensely proud with how the Brigador localization turned out. It’s helped the game reach audiences we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to if it remained as English alone and it’s heartened the team to know the appeal of the game is wider than we might have once thought.

For the sequel Brigador Killers (consider wishlisting and following!) we intend to work with many of the same translators again, though we will be retooling the user interface of the next game to better serve localization.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/903930/Brigador_Killers/

Brigador: Up-Armored Edition is on sale this week as part of the War Child Armistice 2022 Steam Sale along with several other titles. The promotion will run until 10:00 PST November 16th and a percentage of each copy sold will go to War Child UK to support children affected by war in Yemen, DRC, CAR, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine.

War Child’s statement can be read here and the full list of participating games can be found here.

Even if you’ve already acquired a copy of Brigador, please consider telling a friend.



https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/