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
[ 2022-06-28 16:22:35 CET ] [ Original post ]