Hello mates, The Baron here with a little sneak peek at a cool bonus surprise being added to U11 that we didn't mention before. As it relates to graphics, this news is exclusively for PCVR (sorry Nomad folk).
As we have mentioned in the past, we are always striving to push the limit when it comes to PCVR. Whenever I would read anxiety comments from people concerned Nomad could mean the abandonment of PCVR, I was bursting to reveal this secret project because I knew it was being worked on these past months and that it is pure PCVR goodness. ːpraisesunː
As always, the following preview images are WIP and some things may change / not be final.
I present to you, the B&S U11 graphics makeover:
To really understand the impact, have a look at this comparison before and after of the iconic "Dungeons" photo as you would all know well. The top image is as it currently is in B&S, and below is the new and improved graphics.
And another before-after comparison - the top image is the old U10 Watchtower as you know it from U10, and below is the U11 rework. I should note, these changes are only impacting Dungeons right now, with plans to expand into the Arena maps at some point the horizon.
One of the most major changes has been to the lighting tech used; in short, everything in the environment now receives dynamic, realtime lighting from a much bigger variety of light sources. Before this change, static objects had their lighting fully "baked-in", and received dynamic lighting from
only a few sources such as hand-held torches.
In the new update, static objects receive beautiful dynamic lighting from nearly every light source in the game, most notably from the sun, and the result is much more vibrant and crisp than ever was possible before. To keep performance high, most shadows are still baked in and static.
Brick and stone architecture have received a big upgrade. Throughout Dungeons, you’ll feel a much greater sensation of 3D detail. However, this is not simply tessellation; these are individual bricks that are true 3D and can be interacted with, collided with, climbed, etc.
The Warpfrog environment team worked their butts off to make all this possible, so huge thanks to big brain Chris for all his work on this the past months, and to Kaou and Drags for their tireless asset and integrations work.
In interior assets, stone columns and many other elements have been upgraded, optimized, or rebuilt to increase visual quality.
Outdoor environments in Dungeons were improved also; rocks and cliffs assets have been swapped for higher quality ones and majorly improved.
This is about the point that your GPU starts sweating about performance hits. Don't worry! Everything that was reworked is significantly more optimized than the old versions.
Bits of cave rock that protruded out of the map and beyond the player's vision have been removed to reduce overhead. There were some cases where the total polygons and lightmaps for rocks were reduced by as much as 70%. In layman's terms it translates to simply better optimization for Dungeon rooms while still having it look awesome.
On top of the aforementioned big and obvious improvements, there are also tons of little graphical and environmental optimizations that you can experience for yourself soon enough.
Not so fast - one secret bonus is cool, but two are even better! Also coming to U11 PCVR, KospY has added support for post-processing profile options. This would be things like visual filters, such as "Filmic", "High Contrast", etc.
If you ever messed around with the "ACES" setting in U10 then you might have an idea what it is like already. This is super cool on it's own, but even better is that it will also be moddable. ːsteamdanceː That means modders could get in and make custom 'looks' for the game. This may be very appealing for modders making maps that want a complimentary unique look, or for players who want things like darker/scarier dungeons for example.
So that's the news, guys!
Great, but when is all this released??
I feel you! I'm afraid it is the same news as last week; The team are compiling all their U11 work (today!) to make a playable internal build. With that, we will bug-test and make sure nothing is flat out broken, like the game crashing.
It's hard to say how long this will take because it is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string, and for that reason we decided it is best not to set any exact release date, just in case there is something unforeseen that pops up during bugfixing and delays things. It is better to have you guys be pleasantly surprised to discover U11 has released than be disappointed that a deadline was missed.
Today is April 1st...
If you are reading this news the day it was posted, you might notice the date is April 1st... April Fools Day... How angry would you be if I told you it was all a joke? ːsteamlaughcryː Well don't worry, it's very much real, haha!
We wanted to do something for April Fools Day though, so my good friend Lyneca ("the magic man!") has whipped up something fun for you guys - a whacky April Fools Day mod. You can grab it on nexus here (pcvr only):
https://www.nexusmods.com/bladeandsorcery/mods/5921
What the mod does is for you to find out! Remember the mod is just a joke, and crammed with silliness that is not meant to be balanced in any sense.
The world modifier will change every 20 seconds for a range of weird and whacky status effects, including a few that are hidden - can you discover them all? It would be recommended to run this mod solo so that you can be sure to know what strange bizarro behaviors are being attributed to this mod.
Cheers!