Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord - Developer Post

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord has a new developer update talking about the art department, and how the game handles hair.

One of the current focuses of the artists is on character hair. Hair is a great challenge for all games; simulating realistic movement and texture when you have so many individual strands moving separately is incredibly resource intensive, when done in real time. Some games use certain techniques to improve the simulation, while saving resources but in a game like Mount&Blade, where you may have 100s of characters on screen, the balancing act becomes significantly more difficult. Our current working method is: a textured base (something like a hair coloured swimming cap) with groups of hair strands (rendered onto polygons with alpha channels) moving in various directions to give a natural look. This adds more depth than the method used in warband, which relied on the texture to give depth to the hair. You can see the difference below (Left: Warband, Right: Mount&Blade II: Bannerlord):

It goes without saying but what you're seeing is the game in its current state and the hair will likely see further changes and improvements. That means, if there's something you don't like about it, feel free to let us know via an ALL CAPS tweet with several exclamation marks but there's a good chance we're not completely happy with it either... just yet. The most important thing is that it's something which can be used en masse without heavily impacting on performance, a possiblilty achieved by the strength of our new game engine.