Welcome back, I am Jingcheng and I will be responsible for June's Development Report.

Map System

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1ET41137Nu

We have recently uploaded a video demonstrating some new features of our map.



First, we updated the political map to represent a more realistic and detailed situation of Ming right after the Tumu Crisis. A lot of vassals states and tribes are not represented correctly or at all in other games, this is something we want to change in Mandate Eternal.



We have also expanded the regions in South East Asia and Japan, this is most of the regions that the Demo will cover. Our content team is already working on filling out the specific names for regions.



We also solved some issues with the map borders, currently, the borders are consistent and smooth.




Graphically, the biggest improvement over the month was the water. We replaced the previous shader with a completely new one that supports reflections and refractions to show details of underwater terrain. The waves will also flow to the ocean current, which will be shared in a future video.



Speaking of oceans, lakes and rivers are an essential part of the map too. We tried to do something differently with our lakes and rivers are rendered, some games do not consider the effect of terrain height on the rivers and lakes, thus resulting in them being on the same level as the ocean. In high altitude regions, this results in very steep descends, turning lakes into craters. Our approach is to dig up a path of the terrain, and lift the water at that region to the height through tessellation.



We are also actively working on the rivers, because our game requires rivers to change dynamically, we have to work our a way to render them dynamically. This is a lot of work that we would have to do in the background thread.



In our map update video, we shared how precipitation and temperature changes can reflected on the map in real time. All of the data is calculated by a per region basis by our Geo System, instead of simple texture transitions. This is also a testament to our Map System's capabilities, paving a solid road for much more complex visualizations which would be required for the Population & Economy System.

Population & Economy System
The Pop & Econ System is perhaps one of the most developed system so far. In the past month, we have completed the mechanic for Farmer populations to change their social status, and we are almost done with serialization. Because of the peculiar workings of ECS architecture, we don't have an easy way to read and write data. We have developed our own serialization system to solve this issue, once this is done, we can expect to connect this system with other systems. This is also why we have a much more optimistic deadline for the Demo.

RTS System

We have also shared a video of our RTS system a while ago, and we have received a lot of constructive feedback to guide our development.

We have completely rewritten the moving mechanics for individual units, taking in consideration of acceleration and deceleration.

Soldiers will now rotate based on the degree of rotation, if the angle is greater than 180, then the army will simply swap as a whole, with the first row becoming the last row.

We have also rewritten sampling of unit heights on terrain, this should make movement on steep hills much more natural.





We have increased overall development effort towards the RTS system to ensure by the time we release the Demo, the RTS will be playable and enjoyable, with quality that can match up to other systems and mechanics. We plan to reintroduce other units into the system throughout July.



The RTS system was actually done a long time ago, with support for various unit types (infantry, archer, light calvary, heavy calvary etc). But because we had to migrate towards a different architecture that allowed for far more units, reintroducing the units takes time. This is something our RTS team is actively working on.

Political System
The political system is almost done with both content and framework, currently, we are implementing interactions with other systems (like introducing a new law that would effect the economy).

Every country will have its own political system, that is a completely different set of code written specifically for this country. It allows for 100% flexibility to represent any form of political system.

Military System
The Military System includes both the Army and the Navy, this system is different from the RTS system as it controls all military affairs on the large map. We will support auto resolve of combats, which does not penalize players but rather try to keep in parity with the RTS system.

We are only done with the design of this system in the past months, because it involved a very complex supply system. We are currently in active development of the military system and this will be the last system to be made before the Demo.

https://discord.gg/PnuftWBwEZ

Hello again, I am Jingcheng, the community manager for Mandate Eternal on Steam and Discord for our International Audience. I apologize for the lateness of the dev log as we are not fully committed yet to making ourselves public for the larger global community. However, we are working on syncing our Dev Diaries and all sorts of updates on Steam in English soon, and we have set up a Discord Server which you can join through the link at the end of this report.

Map System

In our last development report, we shared a new 3D Map System with a fully GPU based LOD system. In the past month, we have made lots of improvements to the style of our map, as you can see from the front cover of our report today, the political boundaries are much more vivid and saturated, we believe this helps with visualization. Borders also blend based on distance and type (region borders, prefecture borders, provincial borders and national borders).

Here is a video that demonstrates our seamless transition between levels of detail, and camera movement.



We have a new texture for the ocean too, soon we plan to rewrite the ocean shader for support of HDR reflections that will make the water look better. Elevation based rivers and lakes, weathers and other map modes (like rebellion) will be supported soon.

RTS System

In our last development report, we mentioned the RTS system being able to handle 50K units of pure calculation, while the GPU supports up to 100K models with full animation support. In the past month we have made ground breaking optimizations that allows a final system with GPU rendering and CPU calculation of 100K units.



100K units with 4K 60FPS, tested on M1 Max

This includes most of the resource intensive calculations for RTS, (excluding terrain rendering, which may have additional GPU overhead that we will have to optimize). Although we are able to reach 100K or theoretically more for high end devices, we do not want to make it impossible for mid-end devices to run. Thus, we have capped the in game unit count to around 60K until we make further optimizations.



As seen in the difference between last month and this month, where most of the threads are greatly under-utilized, this month, all the threads are occupied with fully native code calculations, which allows for large improvements in performance.

Current RTS on Terrain






We are beginning to make terrain specific behaviors for units, such as climbing and shortest paths algorithms that take in account of additional cost of climbing and moving up slows (and less cost for moving down slops.)

Other Systems

We have done a thorough performance test for our Population System, by adding in Async Calculations that can span between two updates, we can execute calculations that take multiple frames to complete, but not effecting player experience as they only update per every x frames. (So using the frames between for calculations too). Currently, we can support up to 1 million pop units (a pop refers to a specific group of population that occupies one region and separated by religion & culture). Compared to what we need for the Demo (which includes half of Asia) which ranges around 80K to 20K pop, we can ensure a very optimized experience even for the low-end devices.



27ms of calculation done between multiple frames (since population calculations are done between per day basis, and assuming the game runs at minimum 60fps, we have about a few hundred frames or a few seconds to calculate everything).

The refugee subsystem for the population system is also complete. We will be refining these systems and adding relevant UI in the upcoming months.

UI

In the last development report, we have mentioned about a plan to redesign all of our UI, currently, we have some examples to show. (We will support English among many other languages)



We believe this UI style is much more efficient, clean and visually appealing compared to before. However, it's only a draft and we are open to any suggestions and feedback.

A major problem for the game currently is the lack of UI, since we devoted almost all of our development team into the game code itself, that is why we have difficulty showing a lot for our systems (as most interactions and feedback is displayed via the UI for Grand Strategy Games).

Our plan for June and July is to develop a robust UI framework that will greatly accelerate our development efforts regarding to UI. So we can at least have a presentable game before September.

I am happy to answer all of your questions. You can join our discord here:

https://discord.gg/PnuftWBwEZ

Hello, I am JC and I will be the community manager for Mandate Eternal on Steam. We have not yet fully introduced ourselves to the larger global community, but we very much plan to do so at a later date we deem fit.

We are a group of hobbyist from China developing a Grand Strategy Game focused on the Ming Dynasty. Our Steam page went online around the mid of March and had gained significant momentum & attention within the Chinese gaming community. Enough said, we will simply brief you on our updates in the past month like usual.

Secondary Detail for the Map System
In the previous development report (not available in English yet), we shared a new method of using tessellation to generate incredibly detailed and realistic terrain. But we still haven't solved the problem regarding texture fidelity when the terrain is zoomed in.

Through creating multiple new texture layers and bringing some of the tessellation concept to the textures, we have managed to create a second level of detail for closeup view of the terrain. It now looks more than ever realistic.





Coastlines, forests, deserts, mountains and many more details are now vividly rendered on the terrain, by using more advance sampler states, we have also managed to smooth out edges such as the coastlines.

Fog of War

Adjusting a traditional Chinese map of the world, we have created a very unique fog of war texture that blends seamlessly with the real terrain.



Map Generator
To ensure the uniqueness of every RTS battle, we have developed a map generator that could procedurally generate a wide range of terrains, combining this with a complete day-light-cycle + weather system, we have developed the ultimate stage for warfare.





Volumetric clouds, 24 hour day light cycle system.

RTS GPU Optimizations
We made many graphical optimizations regarding utilization of the GPU, by converting regular bone skinning framework to vertex animation on the GPU, we have managed to support 100K fully animated and rendered soldier model while reaching performance above 100fps.



100K unity grid100x100x10GPU stress test.

RTS CPU Optimizations
CPU wise, we have made many optimizations to RTS calculation regarding the use of multithreading. By converting as many code to Burst and Jobs, we are but a few changes away from reaching complete satisfactory performance (50K minimum). We are highly optimistic about demo footage by next month.



Our optimizations can handle 50K units on the CPU, and we hope it will reach a similar level to the GPU in the future.

We have not yet opened any communities like Discord, but we very well plan to do so. For the moment, you can contact us through Steam Community.