Salvete, Anno community!

My name is Björn Frechenhäuser and I am a Senior Level Artist working on Anno 117: Pax Romana. I have been at Ubisoft Mainz for 12 years and after Anno 2205 and Anno 1800, this is the third Anno game I have the pleasure of working on. If you’d like to see some of my work on previous installments, you can check out my Artstation profile.

Level Art can mean a lot of different things, very dependent on which company, which studio and which project you work for. It can be more centric around the creation of 3D assets and textures or the visual development and dressing of levels or storytelling in the world and its locations. So, what does it mean for Anno? In short: all of the above (and more). But either way, at the heart of Level Art is always – you guessed it – the level. For Anno the level consists of the game world and its islands, which serve as canvas for players to build their cities on.

In today’s DevBlog I want to give you an insight into how islands are being created, what our processes are and how we tried to achieve the next step after an extremely successful Anno 1800.

From Anno 1800 to Anno 117 – what has changed in island creation?

At the beginning of every new Anno game, we ask ourselves: What do we want to achieve? What do we want to improve? What do we want to drop? For us in Level Art, the mission was clear right from the start: We wanted to create the best looking, most natural, most diverse, most immersive game world in the series. Sounds easy enough, right?

Of course, going forward meant more of an evolution than a revolution because the levels are still bound by the game’s rules, the balancing of its features and the performance of our target platforms – as they have always been. During the postlaunch of Anno 1800 we started researching in different directions and in this blog, you will see some of the breakthroughs we achieved.

Procedural Texturing

In the past we had already established a procedural content creation pipeline for some aspects of our island creation process, namely the generation of the island’s terrain – you can read up on it in this older DevBlog for Anno 1800. However, the texturing process of the islands (which involves adding materials such as grass, rock, sand, etc. to your terrain) was mostly a manual, elaborate but somewhat repetitive procedure back then. Furthermore, the resolution at which our textures could be added to our islands, the so-called “texture splatting resolution”, was too low. So, with the help of our Graphics Programming department we quadrupled our texture splatting resolution for the ability to splat textures with much more control and way more detail.

Now we use the so-called “splat maps” generated together with our terrain that use algorithms that simulate aspects of nature such as erosion, thermal weathering, deposition, terrain wear and many more.

Texture Displacement

The procedural texturing already added a layer of diversity and natural look that we couldn’t achieve before, but we wanted to go further to improve how the textures themselves shape our visuals. We implemented a technique called “displacement mapping” that allows textures to not only sit on top of the terrain but change the shape of the terrain and increase its visual quality without the use of actual 3D assets.

Terrain Steepness

Another lever we wanted to pull to make our islands look more natural and realistic was playing around with the steepness of the terrain and consequently the slope on which our buildings could be built. Anno 1800 had a maximum terrain angle of 12%, which presented us a significant limit for island design.

For Anno 117: Pax Romana, we aimed to increase this angle. Researching this topic was a significant collaborative effort involving multiple departments, including not only Level art, but also Art Direction, Game Direction, Graphics Programming, Game Design, 3D Art, and Gameplay Programming. This extensive teamwork was necessary because the topic is closely related to nearly every aspect of our building system. After a lot of back and forth and countless hours of testing we decided to go for it and doubled our maximum buildable terrain slope to 24%.

With these new improvements on our toolbelt – among many others – it was time to start our journey of designing and creating the world of Anno 117: Pax Romana. Below I will show you a simplified breakdown of how an island is being created from the first to the last step. 

Island creation in Anno 117 – from simple ideas to in-game islands

Setting a course

Before creating even just a single pixel of an island, we ask ourselves some questions: What should our world look like? What expectations do we want to fulfil? What stories do we want to tell? During this phase, we gather hundreds of reference pictures and explore many different ideas together with Concept Art to nail down what look and feel we want to achieve. This is when, together with Art Direction, Game Direction and Game Design we developed our two provinces Latium and Albion. We designed their look, established their uniqueness and set the ground to develop a visual direction that would serve as a guide for our creation process.

Island Conceptualisation

The first step to creating an island is always thinking about shapes, volumes and topology. Additionally, we need to establish a set of rules with Game Design: rough island size, available construction space, required beach areas, mining lode amount, etc. Once this is done and we have all the ingredients, we can start creating the first island concepts.

Unlike Anno 1800, we start our island concepts directly in 3D, using a tool called “World Machine” which has already been in use since Anno 2205. By doing this we can already get a much better feeling for an island, and this lays the groundwork for later iterations. Thanks to the procedural pipeline we set up, we can create dozens of island concepts relatively quickly. Once a batch of concepts is produced, we sit together with Game Design and Art Direction to decide which islands are fitting to be approved for further production.

Blockout

Once an island concept is approved, we create a first playable blockout version of it to further iterate its topology and the balancing of construction areas, beach locations, mining lode amounts etc. Moreover, we do a first texturing pass to check the look and feel. Besides World Machine, during this phase we work quite a bit with our proprietary tool called “Anno Editor”, to implement the gameplay features mentioned above. Still, we stay as open and flexible as possible because we might need to make a lot of changes to the island along the way.

Visual Design

After numerous iterations of the blockout version we eventually reach a state where all gameplay and balancing aspects of the island are set and approved. Now we start working on the visual aspects of the island. A lot of the visual detail already came from our procedural workflow as described and additionally we scatter vegetation assets using a tool called “Houdini”.

Once all the procedural steps are done, our base island is ready: it’s now time to start working manually on the details and flesh out the visuals of the island by adjusting textures, placing rocks and vegetation assets, adding decals, giving more character to the topology, implementing particle effects, adding waterbodies, and so on. 

Polishing

The final step of our island creation process is a polishing pass. On the one hand, it encompasses visual polishing according to feedback we receive, adding more unique details such as environmental storytelling or adding points of interest, and on the other hand it encompasses gameplay polishing to make sure all the features work as expected (e.g. buildable beaches, mining lode, forest locations, etc.), implementing audio with our Audio team and making sure that there are no bugs occurring.

We cannot wait to see your awesome cities built on our islands, read about what your favourite (or least favourite) islands are and which of the details we so carefully crafted you discover along the way!

Not long ago we gave you a first look at how we’re handling roads in Anno 117: Pax Romana and how we improved the grid with additional functionality by allowing for diagonal building of roads and buildings. If you missed it, catch up by following this link.

In today’s blog, we’ll be looking at the challenges the team faced when making the game work with these new options and how they resolved them.

We’ll also cover a few further implications of these changes, since roads aren’t the only thing you’ll build in Anno 117: Pax Romana, of course.

A quick recap

For Anno 117: Pax Romana, we upgraded the building grid with additional functionality to allow for diagonal roads and buildings. For this, we sub-divided each grid tile into 4-subtiles, which allows us to still calculate and place objects precisely into the grid even at a 45° angle.

Building diagonally does help making both streets and anything connected to them look significantly more organic and changes the look and feel of your cities, production areas and the islands overall.

Despite these new options, our focus was to still make building roads as straightforward and simple as before, where a few clicks connect two points on the island no matter how they are orientated on the grid and where buildings snap to the roads automatically when placed nearby.

The challenges

Now, let’s dive a bit deeper into what we did to get there.

There are a few different ways to bring more flexibility into a builder game like ours, and before the project went into production, we made a prototype and tested all possibilities (all angles allowed, only 45° angles allowed, different rasterizations, different connectivity logics). The most drastic would’ve been to completely remove the grid. A clear disadvantage, however, would have been that it would have become almost impossible to play “Anno-Tetris”. Like playing Tetris without a grid, it would have felt rather strange and unsatisfying and not really like an Anno game anymore.

Once we had found a solution that seemed like it would benefit the game, we went with it.

Let’s cover a few more topics that we had to work on due to the upgrade of the traditional Anno grid:

If you build a road from point A to point B, the game has to suggest a path for the road to take – but diagonal roads mean far more potential paths for the roads. In Anno 1800 a street in an open field has only two options: It can either go first vertical and then horizontal or first horizontal and then vertical. In Anno 117, there is also the option to go first in diagonal or to end in diagonal. More options are cool, but it can be tricky to know what to use when we build streets.

We experimented a bit on this topic, trying different solutions. At first, we tried to guess the intent of the player. Depending on the mouse movements we tried to guess if the player wanted to go first diagonal, or have a 90° angle, or finish in diagonal. In practice it was not reliable enough and the player had to manually change the orientation of the street.

After a lot of tweaking and experimenting, we’ve decided to try a much simpler solution: to always first use a diagonal street and then end with a vertical or horizontal one for the second segment. Sometimes the simpler solutions are the best.

And of course, if there are buildings in between, the street will automatically avoid them.

Farm fields were also adjusted to work in this new context, now able to fill gaps that aren’t the size of a full tile. This is done via a polygon tool that can take full advantage of the sub-tiles we described in the first blog. You probably already spotted this on previous screenshots, but let’s take another look:

The wider impact

We’ve only talked about roads so far but of course any changes to the grid system also impact everything else you build – from houses over ornaments to the mentioned farm fields.

It’s also important to go back to a point from earlier and state that while these changes will turn your cities into significantly more beautiful creations, the efficiency-focused builders among you will probably appreciate to know: Yes, you are losing more space by building diagonally, for a few different reasons.

Firstly – and that’s a lesson from the Anno 1800 days: building beautiful always means “wasting” precious grids that could be used for more residences or more production buildings. Making full use of the new flexibility with diagonal roads and buildings is very much a feature aimed at players who prefer a more organic look for their cities.

Also, we are actually changing the “logical scale” of objects upon rotation. Why and how? Well, let us explain:

Since the single tiles of the old 90 degrees grid are now divided into 4 sub-tiles each, we have to make buildings fit this more detailed grid-structure when turning them by 45 degrees. This can mean slightly increasing or decreasing their size – whatever value in the grid is closer. That, however, doesn’t mean that the building itself, the house (the “mesh”) changes in size, but that the space it occupies/blocks gets larger. Its groundplane (i.e. the ground the building/ornament is placed on) automatically adjusts to make sure there aren’t any weird gaps or overlaps.

Let’s make it a bit easier by visualizing what happens on rotation in our grid:

As you can see, the objects, after being rotated, do not align with the sub-tiles and have to be adjusted first to fit the grid. Of the two options, the one closest in terms of blocked area is chosen. The side length of the 1×1 object changing so much here was one of the reasons we opted for a separate solution for the farm fields, as mentioned previously.

Even if the blocked area increases, the building itself stays the same size. Below you can see what the potential impact of the rotation and scaling can look like. These are just examples for visualization, there are no 1×1 houses 😉

As you can see here, the mesh always remains the same size, even if we have to block more space to make the object in question fit into the grid. 

Non-square buildings are handled in the same way, of course, and depending on the building the blocked area might be bigger or smaller compared to it being built in the traditional grid layout. 

Additionally, we also opted to slightly increase the width of streets (visually) so that they’re a bit wider than a single grid. With both these solutions we avoid what we had internally started calling the “green gap”. 

On average, taking advantage of the diagonal option means that you will use slightly more space.

And when we’re already talking buildings: Let’s not forget a key aspect of Anno’s city building – connecting all your buildings with roads! Production buildings don’t function, and residences don’t get their needs fulfilled if they aren’t connected to a road.

In Anno 1800, at least one road tile had to connect to the building with one of its edges. Simply being in proximity and passing by the building would not count.

In Anno 117: Pax Romana, however, with the option of diagonal roads, we are suddenly faced with more ways in which roads and buildings could interact. For example, a road can just pass by one corner of the building – do we still count it as connected?

The answer is: yes, we do. The game will also help visualize this connection by adding a little cosmetic connection between road and building (marked in blue below). This way something like the below is possible, if you so desire:

As you can see, only 45° angles count for the road connection. 90° connection as in the example on the left side, still are not possible.

Well, that concludes our two-part series on the grid in Anno 117: Pax Romana! 

We hope this not only calms anyone who was worried that we’re getting rid of the grid, but also gave everyone who enjoys a little bit of a look behind the scenes some insights into our processes and the sometimes-unexpected challenges when doing changes to something so central like the grid. 

Please let us know if you liked these kind of development deep-dives and leave any open questions you might still have for us on our social channels, Discord or Reddit, so we can address them later.  

You can also expect to see the new diagonal building options in action later on in videos and livestreams. Until then: have a fantastic Friday!

Hello Anno Community,

As you might have guessed from the title, today’s DevBlog will focus on modular ships in Anno 117: Pax Romana. If you watched our segment at IGN FanFest, you have probably heard Manuel Reinher, Creative Director, talk about this new feature; therefore, let’s have a closer look at modular ships!

Anno & ships: a 27 yearlong cruise (and counting)

Since 1998, ships have always played a key role in Anno games: whether you were transporting tools after desperately buying the whole stock from the travelling merchants in Anno 1602 or efficiently coordinating trade routes in Anno 1800, you certainly have sailed the high seas in some shape or form while playing Anno.

It should not be a surprise to you all, then, to see ships play a key role in Anno 117: Pax Romana. However, unlike earlier Anno games, Anno 117: Pax Romana will change things up a bit with a new feature: ships will be modular, and you will be able to select different types of modules to customise and specialise them for economic or military roles.

We spoke to Markus, Game Designer on Anno 117: Pax Romana about this new feature: “The idea of introducing modular ships to the Anno was going around already for a while. With the Roman setting we had the perfect platform to do it, since it is very true to how the Romans themselves built their ships. In Anno 1800, we made good experiences with the ship items and wanted to build on the experience of customizing your ships to the specific tasks you had in mind for them and represent your choices also in the visuals of your ships this time.”

Thus, just like Romans, in Anno 117: Pax Romana you’ll build your ships modularly: this design is historically inspired by their building techniques. Romans typically constructed their ship hulls with a flat deck and then attached different modules to them.

Ships: how do they work?

“They float on water”, you might answer. That’s true, however, we are not here to discuss physics.

Just like previous Anno games, you will build ships in the Shipyard. When opening its menu, you’ll be offered a list of pre-designed ships. Upon selecting and clicking on a ship, you will initiate the construction phase and consume the resources needed; the ship production, of course, will also require time. During this phase, the Shipyard will cost workforce and money; if the workforce is insufficient, the construction speed is reduced, resulting in longer production times.

In the Shipyard construction menu, you’ll be able to choose between three different types, based on the size of their hull, that you unlock throughout the game:

• Penteconter – small ship
• Trireme – medium ship
• Quinquireme – large ship

The new modular system

If you feel that none of the predefined ships quite suit your needs, then it’s time to customise them based on your preferences and requirements.

When it comes to the customisation of your ships (aka modularity), the hull will influence the number of modification slots your ship gets. Slots determine the cargo capacity of a ship and can be used to install modules. However, larger ships also mean slower acceleration – something you’ll need to keep in mind when preparing your fleet!

• Penteconter: 2 modification slots
• Trireme: 3 modification slots
• Quinquireme: 4 modification slots

By adding modules, you will influence different aspects of your ship: its stats (e.g. health points, speed), its function (e.g. naval combat) and, of course, its appearance.

There are multiple types of modules that you can use, each one with a different feature:

• Mast: additional speed when sailing with the wind on long distances, reaching higher max speed and higher speed when sailing between regions
• Rows: additional speed, reaching higher minimum speed and acceleration, with smaller turn radius; it’s perfect for short ranges and combat
• Reinforced Hull: additional HP
• Archer Tower: shoots many small arrows in all directions on short range
• Scorpio: shoots high-precision spears and deals high damage mid-range, only on the sides
• Onager: Shoots rocks with high range and highest damage, but low accuracy and towards the front

With the construction menu, we wanted to show the player a preview of the ship configuration while setting it up. However, it was not feasible to only use regular 2D elements like Icons in the UI, as it would either look too simple, by just listing the elements, or too complex, by trying to show a preview in 2D which follows the exact same rules as the ship would follow in game. Therefore, we tried to show the full 3D model of the modular ship in the UI, the same as it would show up in game when built. That worked quite well, and we are going with that approach since then.

-Jannis, Gameplay Programmer

When building your ships, there will be some limitations in place. Each module can only be built a limited number of times per ship; for example, on a trireme you’ll be able to build only a maximum of 2 catapults or archer towers. If you like numbers, you might be interested in knowing that for a penteconter there will be up to 16 different combinations of modules, 60 for a trireme, and 114 for a quinquireme.

Once you finish adding modules to your ships, the cargo slots will be calculated from its original capacity minus the used modification slots. Each module always takes up exactly one cargo space slot. However, to ensure that ships always retain some cargo capacity, we have made sure that a certain number of cargo slots remain free and cannot be used for modules.

Be careful, though: you can choose and modify modules for each slot only during ship construction – once the ship is built, you won’t be able to modify its configuration anymore. And if you’re wondering: yes, you will be able to save your ship configurations! Each Shipyard has 2 slots per ship type, this means 6 slots in total. If you want to have a third custom ship, you will need to build a new Shipyard.

Modular ships and Items

We know what you’re about to ask – what about Items? Yes, just like in Anno 1800, you will be able to equip Ship Items. For example, each of your ship can have its own Captain equipped on board! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we’ll talk about this in more detail in the future.

Dev insights: some behind-the-scenes about the modular system

As you can imagine, implementing this feature came with its fair challenges – from different points of view. When it comes to Game Design, for example, Markus mentioned that it was crucial to design the system in a way that it as flexible as possible without breaking any logic or visuals, while keeping it simple and intuitive for players to use.

For the art team instead, one of the challenges was to understand how big a ship module should be in order to be compatible with the beloved Anno grid. It might not seem obvious at first, but just like roads and buildings, the grid applies to the ocean too – that means that ships move within the grid. “This required a lot of back and forth: first we prototyped by building simple grey blocks and figuring out if that measure worked in the grid, then we made it work visually.” – Rolf, Expert Artist

Jannis, Gameplay Programmer, told us about the challenges they faced to create a system that is flexible and at the same time easy to maintain. “The placement of modules on the ships is dynamical. As the number of possible combinations is quite high it is not possible to create static files for all combinations, but we have to create the ship dynamically on runtime in the game when a ship is created, as in we calculate on which positions which slot gets installed and place it visually and logically at that slot index.

How this happens is defined by a few rules that we had to iterate on a lot. Furthermore, we had to split the system into a logical part: ‘where and how should modules be linked to?’, and a visual part: ‘which 3D models are used in which situations?’. For example, a mast at the front of the ship has to look different than a mast in the center of it. This allows us to efficiently set up modular ships, validate each possible configuration and create different visual variations e.g. for special participants such as pirates.”

This means that, not only does each module have a different feature, but they also have a different priority in relation to other module types. This priority influences the slot the module will occupy when the ship is configured: each module has a preferred slot to be on; however, if the slot is already occupied by a module with higher or same priority, the module is placed on the next open slot that is further outside. If all slots further outside are occupied, it will move to the next open slot towards the middle of the ship. This is to make sure that placement of the modules will result in a nice, good-looking structure on the ship.

Workforce, construction and maintenance costs

Unlike previous Anno games, ships will now require workforce not only during the construction phase, but also to function. “We moved away from the more artificial and abstract influence limitation established in Anno 1800 to the more grounded and realistic workforce approach. This will lead to a much tighter tie between your economy and your Naval capacity.” – Markus, Game Designer. However, this is a bigger topic that will be addressed in a future blog – so, watch this space if you’re curious to know more!

The construction and maintenance costs of the ships change depending on the installed modules. For example, rows will be more labour intensive then sails – this means they will require more workforce. Same thing for the Archer Tower compared to the Onager, as there are more soldiers involved.

Well, we hope you enjoyed reading through this (quite long) blog on Modular Ships! As mentioned above, expect more to come on the ship topic, in which we’ll focus on naval combat and the ship system in general. In the meantime, if you have any questions, never hesitate to reach out!