Renown News

Greetings and salutations, Mr. Z here with a small update on our progress currently.



We've been super busy behind the scenes preparing the game for launch, so we apologize if things have seemed quiet lately.

The biggest thing to report is that the engine upgrade has been completed and we're now on UE5.5. This version of unreal came with a lot of optimization improvements and stability fixes that we've been needing, as well as some new features we're making use of.

Generally speaking the engine just runs a little faster, but we'll be making use of some new features that will make the character rendering a bit more performant.



Unfortunately combat had to be put on hold to do this upgrade, which is why we haven't been seeing much progress on that front recently. It took a little longer to upgrade the engine than expected but we're back on track now.

In the last demo, we had a lot of complains about performance, and the combat gameplay. These two things are actually intrinsically tied, if the performance is bad, the combat noticeably suffers.

Going forwards to launch these 2 things are the top priority. I'm going to start putting out regular patches with combat tweaks, new animations and possibly new/overhauled combat mechanics.



If you would like to help test the combat mechanics before launch now is the time to jump in and start giving feedback. As soon as we've reached a good level of combat improvements we'll be getting ready for more large scale playtests.

We give our thanks to our backers, both new and old who have helped us get this far. Early access is only just the end of the beginning for us at RDBK, we still have a big journey ahead of us.

Alpha 1.7.5

Added Brick textures on Brick external models
Added new Window that tells clients why they lost connection
Fixed upgrading buildings skipping tiers
Fixed Torch particle performance
Fixes for optimized buildings not being transmitted

Hi everyone, Mr. Z here.

I've just pushed out a fairly large patch that contains major optimizations to the biggest problems we encountered during the previous demo. The building system has had a major rewrite to enable large player bases to no longer cause so much lag on the server and the client. What this means in layman's terms is that we're quickly approaching the kind of performance targets needed for Early Access release. Tomorrow the servers will be wiping so I highly encourage people to come play this new patch so we can gather good performance data for it and find those final issues causing lag.

Going forwards we'll be working on fixing the most serious exploits, an engine upgrade, an overhaul of the combat system/animations and preparing the last few things for launch. There is even more than that happening behind the scenes so stay tuned for more updates.

Alpha 1.7.4

Fixed triangle pieces not snapping properly
Fixed Gate collisions
Fixed winterhold doors
Updated crafting cost of siege weapons

Alpha 1.7.0

Fixed Recipes causing lag on the server
Fixed broken collisions on the port model
Tickrate is back to 30
Disabled bench inventory
Optimized building snapping
Fixed issue with loading screen
Fixed default settings
Reworked building repair
Fallen founder cloak is a mail coif skin now
New Backer's Sallet
Fixed clipping issues with Plaster floors
Fixed Mail bevor
Remodeled the Gauntlets
Bucket Hat added
Reworked Building Damage so Rams and Petards are less useful against walls
New Optimized Buildings

Mr. Z here with the news! As you may have noticed, our world has been rocked by some pretty big events lately. We concluded a very large playtest a few weeks ago, we've also done a send out of Steam keys so all our backers can play the game before early access, and not to forget we've been hard at work in the background fixing many of the issues found in the playtest and working on additional new content.



One of the new pieces of content in the works is new external walls! We decided to split external walls into two categories. Low Walls and High Walls. Kz has been hard at work making the additional models.



We noticed during tests that the External walls had a lot of issues because the wooden walls would turn into a giant stone wall when upgraded. Now when you place external walls you will have to choose from the beginning whether they'll be Short or Tall and as you upgrade them they'll have the same footprint like how all other building upgrades work.



During our playtest we had 40 thousand people playing in total and we peaked at 1800 co-current users, a quite large number especially considering the playtest wasn't advertised heavily. We launched many additional servers as practice for launch day and many were booted on demand. We also had a series of very high performance servers launched by our Winterust partner. We took a lot of performance metrics on those servers as people were playing and found out that with a few more optimizations we'll be able to hit our cpu budget for launch. We've haven't had so many people playing survival with the servers running so fast and the player counts being so high before, so it was every encouraging to see the performance numbers we achieved during the playtest.



Optimization has been a huge focus before and since the playtest. We've done a lot of work on optimizing the physics of the game. The cost of simulating the world had become a lot more expensive on the server when we expanded the size of the map and added more complex POIs to the map. One very major optimization I've been working on lately is a system that essentially works as an LOD for large bases, as we were getting a lot of lag on the server and client when groups of players would roam around the map and come close to very large player bases. Although the game servers were running relatively fast, there were some really bad lag spikes that made the experience very unstable. I've been carefully identifying and fixing the cause of each lag spike so we can achieve true stability, as any amount of server instability can make the combat extremely volatile.




A large part of the work we're doing lately is in preparation for another Open Stress Test. While we can't yet say when this next Open Stress Test is scheduled, we are working diligently to get it ready as soon as possible, that being said, our goal is to reach a more much stable build than before. The last test, while fairly unstable, gave us a lot of crucial data that we needed to help us fix many issues. You can expect for our next playtest some significant optimizations to be done, additional new content and the combat system to get some much needed love.



We did a large key send out to all backers recently that had a fair few hiccups. We're still working on resolving the issues with the backend and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. As a thank you, for our communities awesome patience, Kz has created a new helmet skin for all our backers. We present the "Sorry Sallet" Helm which will be given to all backers as an extra cosmetic.




If you still have not gotten your keys, please check our the support services on our discord: https://discord.gg/Tr2DxFh
We've got a channel called "steam-key-faq" with tips for how to get a quick resend.

As always, we cannot thank our backers enough for helping us get this far. Renown would not have been possible without you and we hope to see everyone playing the game on early access launch.