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Bard's Tale The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep - Director's Cut

Darth Roxor

Royal Dongsmith
Staff Member
Joined
May 29, 2008
Messages
1,878,406
Location
Djibouti
I've been waiting for ages for someone to replicate the Betrayal at Krondor combat system, I guess this is as close as it gets nowadays.

dude

duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude
 

cvv

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 30, 2013
Messages
18,075
Location
Kingdom of Bohemia
Codex+ Now Streaming!
Unity runs like dogshit as usual but for me this is fairly minor

Unity is not the culprit this time. It is a very poorly optimized Unreal Engine 4.

This is UE4? And I thought "holy shit Unity looks worse with every passing year, I don't remember MMX looking that bad at places". I hope Fargo didn't pay more than 10 bucks for the engine.

And yeah, the game runs like optimization is still in their "to do" part of the project whiteboard.
 
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Jinn

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
4,930
This is UA4? And I thought "holy shit Unity looks worse with every passing year, I don't remember MMX looking that bad at places". I hope Fargo didn't pay more than 10 bucks for the engine.

Judging from some other Unreal Engine 4 projects, I don't think the engine is really at fault here. I think in this case, it's those working with the engine who fucked up.
 

PrettyDeadman

Guest
Unity runs like dogshit as usual but for me this is fairly minor

Unity is not the culprit this time. It is a very poorly optimized Unreal Engine 4.
Unity runs WAY better than Unreal Engine 4.
Have you played Insurgency Sandstorm? Same shiet. Game runs like shit, and it seems to run worse on lowest settings then on High.
 

cvv

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 30, 2013
Messages
18,075
Location
Kingdom of Bohemia
Codex+ Now Streaming!
So I googled UE4 games - Hellblade, Vampyr, Fortnite, PUBG, Injustice 2 and shitloads of others. Yeah, it does seem the engine isn't the problem here.

I'm guessing California might be. The game looks like something a 5 strong indie team would hammer out in 3 years but I'm reading it cost over 10 mils. If inXile moved to some eastern Yuro potatoland they could employ 5 times more resources and squeeze 10 times more value out of them.

But again if graphics and not having 100 fps is the real problem for ppl they'll be much better off replaying D:OS (heard the console version looks even better) and not waste their precious time with old school blobbers.
 

Revenant

Guest
At least the game works in Proton until the promised Linux version is out, albeit performance is terrible. Then again, my GTX 660 Ti is below minimum specs so I don't really have a right to complain. Will be interesting to compare performance of the native version once it's out, though I'll probably have to restart the game due to save file incompatibility.
 

Zewp

Arcane
Joined
Sep 30, 2012
Messages
3,566
Codex 2013
So another inXile game turns out to be shit. Big surprise.

I can't wait to see which beloved franchise they fuck up next.
 

Kruno

Arcane
Patron
Village Idiot Zionist Agent Shitposter
Joined
Jan 2, 2012
Messages
11,478
Game looks like Oblivion but plays like Morrowind. I am also moving it to my SSD.
 

RatTower

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Apr 24, 2017
Messages
468
I thought you can activate grid movement.
Wasn't there a video specifically mentioning how the world was buit on a grid and you can activate that?

Personally not a big fan of it. Don't mind it, but I always thought free movement made for more interesting world designs.
 

Curratum

Guest
I literally preordered the game because a dev dude from Inxile told me there would be grid movement on the Steam forums. He obviously never told me it would come X months post-launch. :|
 

Theldaran

Liturgist
Joined
Oct 10, 2015
Messages
1,772
I literally preordered the game because a dev dude from Inxile told me there would be grid movement on the Steam forums. He obviously never told me it would come X months post-launch. :|

No Man's Tale - we're working on it.
 

santino27

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 1, 2008
Messages
2,679
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
I thought you can activate grid movement.
Wasn't there a video specifically mentioning how the world was buit on a grid and you can activate that?

Personally not a big fan of it. Don't mind it, but I always thought free movement made for more interesting world designs.

There's an option, yes, but it's greyed out currently.
 
Self-Ejected

aweigh

Self-Ejected
Joined
Aug 23, 2005
Messages
17,978
Location
Florida
I'll do the people who actually really want to play this a solid...

- Paste the following on the game's Engine.ini file if you want to:

1. Ensure textures are always at 'High' quality.
2. Ensure shadows are always drawn correctly.
3. Eliminate all texture pop-in (i.e. fix the LoDs).
4. Get a bit better performance, though this isn't a "performance tweak" by any means, just universally good settings for the UE4.

Go to your AppData/BardsTale4/Config/WindowsNoEditor and open the Engine.ini file and replace its contents with the following:

[Core.System]
Paths=../../../Engine/Content
Paths=%GAMEDIR%Content
Paths=../../../BardsTale4/Plugins/MORT/Content
Paths=../../../BardsTale4/Plugins/RamaSaveSystem/Content
Paths=../../../Engine/Plugins/Tests/EditorTests/Content
Paths=../../../Engine/Plugins/Tests/RuntimeTests/Content
Paths=../../../BardsTale4/Plugins/VaTexAtlas/Content
Paths=../../../BardsTale4/Plugins/WalkabilityVisualiser/Content
Paths=../../../Engine/Plugins/2D/Paper2D/Content
Paths=../../../Engine/Plugins/Media/MediaCompositing/Content
Paths=../../../Engine/Plugins/Runtime/AppleARKit/Content
Paths=../../../Engine/Plugins/Wwise/Content

[SystemSettings]
r.Streaming.PoolSize=1750 ; game default = 1500
r.Streaming.MaxTempMemoryAllowed=40 ; game default = 40
r.Streaming.FullyLoadUsedTextures=0 ; game default = 0
r.Streaming.FramesForFullUpdate=5 ; game default = 5
r.Streaming.HLODStrategy=0 ; forces all LOD mips to be loaded rather than streamed. game default = 0
r.UseShaderCaching=0 ; game default = 0
r.UseShaderPredraw=0 ; game default = 0
r.OptimizeForUAVPerformance=0 ; optimize for performance instead of memory. game default = 0 (optimizes for memory instead)
a.URO.ForceInterpolation=0 ; game default = 0
a.URO.ForceAnimRate=0 ; 1 = 30fps, 2 = 60fps? game default = 0
r.ViewDistanceScale=1.0 ; increase render distance. game default = 1
r.SkeletalMeshLODBias=-1 ; increase character LODs. game default = 0
r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale=1.0 ; increase static mesh LOD distances, lower = larger distance. game default = 1
r.DetailMode=2 ; ensures materials and objects are rendered at full quality
foliage.DensityScale=0.80 ; game default = 1
grass.DensityScale=0.80 ; game default = 1
foliage.LODDistanceScale=0.80 ; increase grass LOD distance, not much perf impact. game default = 1
foliage.MinInstancesPerOcclusionQuery=1024 ; game default = 256, but UE4 recommended is 1024-65536
r.MaxAnisotropy=16 ; game default = 8
r.Tonemapper.Sharpen=0.75 ; game default = 0
r.LightFunctionQuality=1 ; game default = 1
r.Shadow.DistanceScale=0.80
r.Shadow.CSM.TransitionScale=0.80
r.ShadowQuality=5
r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=2 ; above 3 doesn't seem to make any difference, try lowering it if you like. game default = 10
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=1024 ; anything higher than 4096 is placebo, best performance with 2048. game default = 2048
r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold=0.040 ; lower value = further shadow distance. game default = 0.03
r.MinScreenRadiusForLights=0.030 ; game default = 0.03
r.MinScreenRadiusForSmallLights=0.010 ; game default = 0.01
r.MotionBlurQuality=4
r.MotionBlur.Amount=0.3
r.MotionBlur.Max=1
r.MotionBlur.Scale=1
r.MotionBlurSeparable=1
r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=2
r.AmbientOcclusionRadiusScale=1.5
r.DepthOfFieldQuality=2
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=1
r.LensFlareQuality=2
r.EyeAdaptationQuality=2
r.BloomQuality=5
r.FastBlurThreshold=7
r.Upscale.Quality=3
r.Tonemapper.GrainQuantization=1

Enjoy. This fixed all of the pop-in and the glitchy shadows for me, as well as ensures that the textures don't change shapes/qualtiy levels. also you can play around with the values for LODs and foliage and all that stuff for less/more performance/quality.

EDIT: Remeber to make the file READ-ONLY afterwards!
 

Jinn

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
4,930
Gotta say, in the first few hours there seems to be some real good evidence of clever map design and satisfying exploration. We'll see how that persists.

I can also see how, while really not what a blobber fan wants to see in the least, the combat could become more interesting with 6 party members. Hard to tell with only 2 at the moment.

The game is having a bit of a strange effect on me. I'm at times repulsed, and at times inexplicably drawn back in.
 

Fairfax

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2015
Messages
3,518
So I googled UE4 games - Hellblade, Vampyr, Fortnite, PUBG, Injustice 2 and shitloads of others. Yeah, it does seem the engine isn't the problem here.
Does the game have long loading times? Because that's a common issue with UE4 games (along with input lag). This kind of performance isn't, though.
 
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