The massive battles of Mount & Blade don’t all happen at high noon – the series has always been dynamic, and if you get jumped by bandits at night, you have to fight in the dark. TaleWorlds have been working on the global lighting system in their custom engine for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, and the results look rather nice.
The sun shines bright in Mount & Blade II’s southern deserts, home to the Aserai clans.
In their latest devblog, TaleWorlds get into the weeds on what they’ve done with version 1.4 of the Bannerlord engine, focusing on how they’re handling lighting. It’s a fairly technical post, detailing the methods they’re using to shade particles and reduce the load on GPUs. But even if you don’t find game engine design philosophy interesting, it’s hard to argue with the results shown in the accompanying video, which you can see above.
TaleWorlds also point out that reworks to the game’s engine aren’t holding back the development of the game itself, which as of yet does not have a set release date. Instead, they write, engine development is going on in parallel to work on the game, meaning that a new engine version isn’t going to undo progress made on Bannerlord’s campaign, characters, or environments.