Its Americas week! I wanted to do a bit of a deep dive this time and show everyone just how much our techniques have improved…and all thanks to our generous supporters who allow us to spend time on this 🙂
But before we get to that, a quick summary of what to expect with this weekend’s Americas release. Of course there were a huge number of new uniforms and assets introduced for 1700 last week which we will bring across – most notably the tricornes, powdered wigs, rank insignia, and some of the new Italian uniforms.
But we also have a number of new assets including a new “cane knife” for Maroons and slaves, as well as some new civilian clothing (more on that below):
The general theme of this release is around the plantations, as we are delivering our first in-house custom scene. This is a remake of the hillfort scene that Levente gave us, and which first debuted for 1100 at the start of the month: https://www.patreon.com/EmpiresofEurope/posts/empires-of-1700-166798445
The reason I was so excited about this scene is because I could see the potential…and just how easy it would be to turn it into multiple other scenes such as a fortified Algonquin village, or in this case a Spanish sugar plantation:
Changing the terrain and scenery is really quite easy, so as long as the fortifications, siege, points and navmesh are all in place, we can churn out variations like this really quickly:
Best of all, I already have both castle and town variations of this scene…so we can really go to town with it (pun intended)! This release will feature a Spanish style sugar plantation (as a town) but you can imagine how easily the main buildings can be swapped out for more English style housing.
I’m also planning to use this scene as the basis for Algonquin and Iroquois fortified “villages” (ie: towns):
Moving on to the new armours – this week I decided to focus on re-implementing an existing armour set that was really way below our desired quality level. If you’ve ever had a close look at the “Ranger Coat”…its really quite disgusting:
Yuck! 🤮This was was one of our very first custom models…but more importantly we didn’t really know our way around Blender very well. Fast forward 7 or 8 months and look at what we can achieve now:
There are improvements in literally every aspect here…the mesh topology, the textures, the cloth physics…each individual area is like a generational leap from where we were at the start of the year. We’re also getting much better at recycling assets, and using those to make new variations. This is crucial for someone doing something as crazy as weekly releases (err…🫠) as it allows us produce new variations much much faster:
We’re also using a new technique to add natural looking patterns to our textures. For example if you look closely at the Maroon coat here you will notice the suede/leather style pattern:
This is done by starting with a natural looking texture, which we then tile and blend into the base colour:
We’re increasingly doing this with all our textures, which make them look so more more realistic.
The last thing for this week is map updates. I’m on the fence as to which area to focus on, but it will either be the central US (Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma):
…or Brunswick and Nova Scotia (and maybe Newfoundland):
I figure the north east is easier as I don’t need to add any new cultures…whereas the central US will require the implementation of the Caddoan culture along with armour, troop trees, etc…so we’ll see how we much time we have left at the end of the week.
All in all shaping up to be another big week of updates. You’ve probably also seen the announcement of the Warsails competition from Taleworlds – yes we will be entering…and it will be exclusively an Americas entry! Wish us luck 🙂
Good hunting!
-Fatrod