I hope everyone is having a great weekend! I wanted to address the some comments popping up around UEBS2. I first want to assure you, we never planned to stop updating UEBS1. We will continue to release updates before the UEBS2 release. Over the years UEBS1 has grown a fair amount, much of which we have the community to thank. In the next paragraph, I want to go over some of the reasons it's been difficult to deliver on all requests for UEBS1, and why a sequel makes the most sense to us. Prepare for lots of technical stuff!
UEBS has a lot of potential for improvement, and the directions the game can go are infinite. During development of UEBS1, I was the only developer with very limited resources. Brilliant Games has since expanded into a team, and our capabilities, skillsets and budget have increased. The crowd tech in UEBS1 is one of the main systems that drive the game. At Brilliant Games we LOVE battles, and large battles are not possible without some seriously advanced technology. Believe us when we say, you can't just open an editor and throw a bunch of characters in, you won't get past 100 without issues in most cases. For those of you who don't know, UEBS1 crowd tech is actually 2 generations old here at Brilliant Games. The Black Masses crowd tech is the next generation of UEBS crowd tech, and was rewritten from the ground up. UEBS2 is the next after Black Masses, and it was also completely rewritten. So why am I talking about crowd tech? Because when developing something this advanced, it often comes with limitations and sacrifices as to what it can do. UEBS1 crowd tech is aging, and it's becoming difficult to squeeze much more out of it. One example of a brick wall limitation in UEBS1, is the ability to have more variety in animations, as well as unit types per battle. This is because each animation and character takes a serious amount of memory/ram. This issue was majorly improved in Black Masses, and now completely solved in UEBS2. UEBS2 animations now have almost no significant memory footprint.
So the next question is. Why not bring this tech into UEBS1? Simply said, the entire game would break. UEBS1 has been built around the old generation of crowd tech, and everything else would have to be re-coded and rewritten. And the biggest problem? The thousands of modded characters would no longer work, and years of work from the community would be lost.
At Brilliant Games, we are obsessed with creating and innovating. This new tech in UEBS2 is our greatest accomplishment yet, which we think may set some serious standards for the industry. With all the major limitations of UEBS1 gone (Including pathfinding), we now have the freedom to develop something truly massive and memorable. We can't justify a sequel unless it's 10 times better in every way! And that's what we aim to do. (Technically speaking the crowd tech handles 100 times more characters).
UEBS2 is our greatest undertaking yet. With the new generation of crowd tech, story/player driven campaigns, and greater support for community creativity and modding, we hope UEBS2 will be a benchmark in technology and creativity within its community.
Have a wonderful weekend everyone.
Robert, Brilliant Game Studios.
