This patch introduce Vertex Animated Textures on Horses, new super performant accurate melee collision and tons of bug fixes along new items and characters.

Also upgraded to UE 5.3 and hopefully next patch will bring 5.4.

VAT

Vertex Animated Textures was added as a new feature in Unreal Engine 5 to support bigger crowds. It's the most used technique to handle big crowds of characters that normally use expensive Skeleton Meshes for animations.

Horses have completely been converted using VAT, which was a heavy performance cost late game with many mounted soldiers. They have a complex expensive Skeleton bone structure so this is a huge performance save late game and for bigger heavy armies.

Soldiers generally are not planned right now to be converted due to unable to have free movement mixed with torso making attacks.

However Undeads will most probably be converted using VAT because there it would be fine for more static attacks that are in place. But would make it possible to have larger zergs of undeads.
So this is something being looked at for coming patches.

This will also make it easier to make animated characters on World Map and still be very performant.

Since dedicated servers do not use GPU, Horses will run using their Skeleton Collision Asset when needed instead on server side. But this is very performant and still makes Horses extremely cheap, not only for Clients.

Melee Collision

Finally we have a multi-threaded and super performant solution for all combat collision. Which scales way beyond the future needs. It is also very accurate even with high velocity like horse riding.

This system is now regarded as feature complete and production ready. A big important feature moving forward. The backbone of combat.

Dedicated Server / Multiplayer

There has been a heavy focus on honing multiplayer and lots of bugs have been fixed. And the next step now will be to try test with much more players on server than 3-4 which has been the max so far.

Reconnection for Players in Combat should now work properly.

Performance in Combat with several players have been heavily refined and tuned with congestion control of resources (bandwith) when replicating larger battles and several players.

Other

Some minor things to be mentioned:

• Character Dialogues has a new UI

• Settlement Extensions has a new UI design with new filter buttons

• Selling prisoners in Arena now correctly update UI widget prisoner counter

• Settlement Markets now show a Sell Junk (all) button for Players

• Tropical battle levels have had several fixes to the grass and water

• Spawns of all kinds on World Map have increased slightly for Players

• Added animation effect on new contracts in World HUD

• Fixed a naked neck issue on characters

• Player Horse when dismounted now stays around rather than start running

• Unreal Engine updated to v5.3

Plus too many changes/additions to be listed in Data (items/characters/missions/titles etc)