Monthly development blog December news - The Old Realms mod for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

It feels like an eternity since we created our last blog post. We are sorry about it! It’s been a busy time as we continue to maintain our mod, push updates and during that time time new complications led to us not being able to progress on new content and not being able to produce meaningful status updates here on moddb.

We have a lot to talk about, and a lot of good news. With of course a look into what we have in our works and will be soon released (December) as well as what we are doing in future.

Changes that are coming soon:

Shader loading Improvements

A huge shout out to Taleworlds for their 1.2.5 beta update. They allowed us to create a prebuilt shader cache. After some internal testing, we feel we can give it out to the community. For those who already downloaded and built their shader cache not much will change, but in future the second shader loading process will be gone! Unfortunately, we can’t get rid of the first loading screen. But in our testing, a usual 20-minute shader cache loading on the first screen and a 40-minute shader compilation from the menu went down to 20 minutes loading plus 1-minute loading in the shader cache sack. Meaning: The Shader loading is cut to 1/3 of the previous time.

Snow map

With the same update of Taleworlds, we will also manage to implement the snow map. Very fitting for Christmas time.

Translatability

We are aiming to provide the ability to have our mod translated into any language using additional translation modules. Everything like popup texts or the adventure texts you see from time to time in-game have the required codes. We suggest those who are interested in providing translation into a foreign language, should use the template we will release together with the update.

The mentioned changes will roll out soon on Moddb, and the steam workshop.

We also worked on several maps, here of our environment team.

Blood pine woods.

Shrine of ill omen.

The Future.

We are pleased to announce, we finalized the sketching of new plans for the next big update targeted somewhere in the future.

Summarizing our big goals for the next update: Season of Doom.

- Introducing the new faction: the woodelves

- Fill troop rosters, assets, and scenes for existing factions.

- expand the world map and finalizing Empire and Bretonnia.

- Adding at least 2 new lores of magic.

- Adding several new careers for the TOR Career system, for existing and new factions.

- balancing and gameplay improvements as well as QOL improvements.

Is this a lot? Yes. How long will it take us? We can’t make any comments. Changes of plan? Maybe. But we are progressing, and we will deliver it.

In the following, we want to show a few creations that are already in the making as well as concepts.

And a big Shoutout to Samuel Alexander-Ford for profiding his Ghorgon model to use for the mod.
Artstation.com

Concepts

Finally, we were confronted with a big problem. There is not a lot of material, that describes or even depicts the way of living of the forest elves of Athel Loren. More problematic, for the proper depiction, we are lacking many custom environment assets. So we started on conceptualizing how Wood elf halls could be represented.

We are thrilled to work on the new content and hope we can keep you up to date more frequently again.