Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog Q&A

The latest in-house developer Q&A for TaleWorlds Entertainment’s upcoming sandbox RPG Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is focused on Ümit Singil, one of the veteran TaleWorlds developers who was involved in a great deal of things over the years and is currently wearing the 3D modeller hat. Here are a few insightful snippets:

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Every single thing that you see when you look around in a 3D video game is a unique, painstakingly-modelled object. We are not talking only about the flashiest, most important things, such as warriors, weapons or impressive architecture: in order to be realistic, a 3D world needs to take care of its smallest details. 3D modellers do exactly that: they work like sculptors, giving shape to their imagination to create and populate the worlds we will “live” in when we play. In this week’s blog we talk with 3D modeller Ümit Singil, who takes care of such things – but being one of the most veteran members of the TaleWorlds team, he has a history of doing a good number of different tasks for the Mount & Blade games.

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WHAT DO YOU NORMALLY DO DURING YOUR DAY?

“I have been involved in a number projects and had many different responsibilities during my time at TaleWorlds, so my daily routine has varied quite a lot over the years. We were a small team in the beginning, so everyone pretty much had to do a bit of everything. I worked on animations for the first Mount & Blade and designed the previous TaleWorlds.com site. I helped out with the Turkish translation for all of the titles (up to and including Napoleonic Wars) and I checked the string tags for the French and Japanese versions to see if they were implemented correctly. I handled the support mail of TaleWorlds for some time and I was responsible for processing Mount & Blade: Warband Beta applicants (and made some great friends during that period!).

Currently, I am responsible for the architectural and prop modelling tasks for the Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord campaign map. I get a great deal of satisfaction from being able to make my contribution to bringing Calradia to life!

When I am asked about the differences between Bannerlord and Warband, I say that Bannerlord is bigger, better, stronger and faster in every way. The rural areas look gorgeous, with vast grassy planes, lush forests and majestic mountains. Cities are full of life and have beautiful authentic architecture. And the combat… THE COMBAT! Charging downhill into enemy lines with a couple of hundred of your fellow cavalrymen is a uniquely invigorating experience.”

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WHAT DO YOU CURRENTLY WORK ON?

“I am currently working on the settlement models for the campaign map which represent villages, castles, towns, etc. I mostly use existing scene object models for reference to create the polygon friendly map models.”

WHAT FACTION DO YOU LIKE THE MOST IN BANNERLORD?

“The Empire. The Byzantine empire, which our empire takes its inspiration from, is a hugely underrated empire!”

WHAT IS THE POLY COUNT FOR WEAPONS?

“The models for both weapons and armour vary a lot, since they come with several pieces. Polygon count for an armour set is usually between 8000-12000 triangles.

In the case of weapons (which are created in multiple parts so that they are compatible with our new weapon crafting system) I will use a sword as an example:”

• Blade: 120-1302
• Guard: 320-1396
• Handle: 96-928
• Pommel: 144-1244

Can we add particle effects to models/weapons?

“Yes, you can! You will be able to add particles to pretty much every entity in the game. However, adding dynamic lighting to your fiery sword could be slightly taxing on system resources.”