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

UE 5.4

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.

Destructible Furniture

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.

Loot

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.

Other notable fixes

• 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