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ALPHA
BAR servers can be unstable at times. A problem with our server-host is identified and we're waiting for it get fixed.
It’s hard to put into words just how excited we are to finally bring you this update. As some of you noticed two weeks ago, we surprise-launched the Lights Update. That may have come as a shock—especially since we’ve been building up hype for this patch for months now.
This update represents the largest and most ambitious graphical overhaul we’ve ever undertaken in BAR.
It was originally planned as a single package, featuring both a revamped lighting system and a full day-night cycle support. But as development progressed, and with new tools becoming available, we kept discovering new possibilities and adding even more visual improvements. The scope kept growing, and with the main game branch drifting further from our development build, merging everything at once became increasingly complex.
After much internal discussion, we made the call to split this massive update into two parts. That way, we could get the improvements into your hands sooner while continuing to work on the rest.
We’re proud to introduce the first phase of the graphical overhaul: The Lightbringer. Even on its own, this update includes so many changes that a single news post can’t do it justice. We’ll highlight the most impactful improvements below—and to help you better see what’s new, we’ve also prepared a video presentation for you to enjoy.
The introduction of the OpenGL4 pipeline and Physically Based Rendering (PBR) in BAR unlocked a wealth of opportunities to enhance the game's visual fidelity. With these technologies, all materials in the game—units, features, and terrain—became significantly more responsive to lighting conditions.
However, until recently, there has been not much light (other than ambient and few weapons) to make these materials shine. That changes now.
As materials began to behave more naturally under light, it became clear that the next logical step was to increase the number and variety of light sources in the game. And that’s exactly where the journey of The Lightbringer began. Lights themselves are now more flexible than ever—they can move, pulse, and change color, opening the door for all sorts of dramatic effects.
After many months of work, we’re thrilled to bring you this massive leap forward in BAR’s visual experience. Along the way, we also introduced a host of new shaders and the insanely good looking screen space shadow-casting system designed to make the game’s visuals even more dynamic and immersive. This is also setting the stage for the release of Night Mode and Day-Night Cycles with the Part II of the Visual Overhaul.
You might wonder if these visual upgrades make sense from a performance standpoint — and that’s a fair question. Performance has always been one of Beyond All Reason’s biggest strengths. A game with thousands of fully simulated units must be highly optimized, and we take that seriously. While much of the industry has drifted away from performance-first design, we continue to prioritize it.
These visual enhancements were built with care to ensure they don’t significantly impact framerate — even on lower-end hardware.
The key point is this: BAR’s main performance bottleneck is the CPU, due to the heavy simulation workload. Meanwhile, the GPU often has unused headroom. That’s why these graphical improvements make sense — they use the hardware that's often asleep while your processor does the heavy lifting.
Despite the scale of this update, we’ve kept the performance cost low. For more detail, check the performance notes at the end of this post.
Let’s break down some of the coolest additions and improvements in this update!
One of the first things we tackled while preparing this patch was enabling real light sources to be attached to units. Before the Lightbringer Update, lighting on units relied on a primitive workaround: parts of the unit texture atlas were flagged to appear brighter, simulating a kind of "fake" light source. This technique used pulsating emissive values, but it had major limitations—it always looked the same, couldn’t vary in style or behavior.
The Lightbringer Update comes with a brand-new system for attaching true dynamic light sources directly to units. And the possibilities? They’re huge.
We’ve already added over 3,000 individual lights across nearly 400 units—a massive undertaking, but absolutely worth it.
Point lights, cone lights, beam lights—they’re all on the menu. These lights can be animated, synced with unit behavior, or even move dynamically across a model to create rich, immersive effects.
From glowing thrusters to searchlights that track targets, from red-hot barrels to flickering reactor cores, this new system brings units to life like never before.
This update isn’t just about eye candy—we’re big believers in visuals that enhance gameplay. In addition to ambient lights, we’ve introduced a wide range of action-based lighting effects that respond to what’s happening on the battlefield.
Builders and factories now feature rotating construction lights while working. Nuclear silos light up during launch sequences, adding tension and clarity. And units that stockpile munitions—like anti-nukes and tactical nukes—now have visual indicators showing their stockpile status. Before you ask - yes, these stockpile indicators are only visible to you and your allies, so its doesn't inform your opponent about things you might not like them to know :)
These aren’t just pretty effects—they’re functional cues designed to make gameplay feel more immersive and alive.
And the best part about it? These new lights are close to completely free when it comes to performance!
The variety of lighting effects we are adding further supports our unit design language, making sure units can be recognised and distinguished from one another even during the most complex of battles.
At BAR, we believe perfection is built from countless small details done right. This update embodies that philosophy.
One of the most exciting additions in the Lightbringer update is our implementation of screen-space raytraced shadows (SSRTX)—a technique that dramatically improves shadow realism without requiring cutting-edge hardware.
Unlike traditional ray tracing (RTX), which simulates light across the entire 3D world—including things you can't even see—SSRTX only works with what's currently on your screen.
It uses existing depth and shape data to figure out whether light should hit each pixel, creating realistic shadows without the heavy performance cost.
Because it stays within screen space, SSRTX delivers most of the visual impact of full ray tracing—but runs much faster. And since BAR is a top-down RTS, the visual difference compared to full RTX is minimal, making this an incredibly smart and efficient solution.
The Lightbringer update introduces a new suite of distortion-based shockwave effects that give every blast and impact a much greater sense of force. Explosions now generate air and ground shockwaves, with their size and strength scaling to the power of the weapon.
These effects aren't just generic either. They’ve been meticulously hand-crafted for many weapons and units for maximum quality.
From light bursts to massive nukes, each one feels distinct. High-power plasma weapons now trigger muzzle burst shockwaves, emphasizing their raw energy, while heavy units send out rippling shockwaves with every footstep or stomp, making their presence truly felt on the battlefield.
Introduction of distortion-type shaders enabled us to also create some crafty new effects to simulate space-time warp of Jammers, or special weapons like Juno electromagnetic discharge. And most importantly - even sexier looking fusion cores :)
Many of the game’s heat sources—like geothermal vents, aircraft thrusters, and flamethrowers—now feature heat distortion effects that add a layer of realism, making them look hotter, more dynamic, and more alive.
As real cherry-on-top we've made a major performance upgrade to BAR's main GUI elements, including the build menu, info panel (bottom left), order menu, top bar, chat, eco stats, player list (and its addons), unit groups, and idle builder display.
These parts of the interface now run at least twice as fast on the CPU, with GPU rendering time improved by 40% at minimum and all GUI elements considered we are looking 3x performance increase.
This boost comes from a switch in how the GUI is rendered: instead of relying on older OpenGL display lists, the interface is now rendered to a texture. This modern approach not only speeds things up but also allows for sharper, more detailed unit build icons.
Unit icons in BAR are using a technique called mipmapping. It works by storing multiple versions of an image at different resolutions. The graphics card automatically selects the most appropriate version based on the size you want to show. By rendering the GUI at a larger size, the graphics card will now pick a higher-quality mipmap level, resulting in sharper and more detailed icons.
Note: Performance gains may be even greater on Intel and AMD graphics hardware.
This update adds 25,000+ lines of code focused on lighting and distortion systems, with visual upgrades applied to almost 400 Armada and Cortex base units (now including the Legion Commander too).
Despite the scale, the performance hit is modest — only ~5–10% FPS on default settings — thanks to BAR’s CPU-bound nature and underutilized GPU headroom. This performance cost however, can be easily balanced by the major optimisations done to the UI elements along the way.
A major step forward in BAR’s visual fidelity, built without sacrificing performance.
As mentioned earlier, this update is just the first stage of what we have in store. We're continuing to expand and refine the features introduced here, with plenty of room left to push these new tools even further. You can expect BAR to keep getting better-looking with each update, as we build toward the next major milestone in our visual overhaul: the upcoming Nightfall Update.
Up next is the second major phase of our visual overhaul: the Nightfall Update. This update will introduce enhanced official NightMode support, including dynamic day-night cycles that affect gameplay—for example, Solar Collectors will generate less energy at night. This long-awaited feature will add a new layer of atmosphere and tactical depth to BAR.
For now, day-night cycles are planned for maps specifically designed around them, where variable solar output makes sense.
These maps will be balanced with supportive wind speeds, encouraging Solar Collector use during the day. In this context, geothermal vents will become even more valuable as the only consistent energy source, and energy storage will take on a more strategic role in maintaining your base. In the future, we may allow setting day-night cycles for all maps, within sensible limits, reflecting our philosophy of maximum replayability and customizability.
You know us by now, we wouldnt be the Beyond All Reason team without packing a ton of other goodies with it. Alongside this, we’re also:
As the history shows, one may expect we will end up adding much more than we list here, so buckle up for an another amazing update!
Every time we share one of these updates, we love taking a moment to shine a light on the incredible growth of the Beyond All Reason community. And honestly? We’re still trying to wrap our heads around just how massive the response has been lately.
Back in our Season II announcement, we mentioned a 30% growth in daily active players. Well… scratch that. As of May, our daily active user count has doubled since the start of 2025, now surpassing 15,000 every single day!
🚀 We also shattered our previous record with a peak of 3,025 concurrent players online in multiplayer alone—and we estimate just as many are playing in singleplayer!
🚀 Our Discord community is approaching 50,000 members, up over 10,000 since February! (Yes, we're already plotting a wild celebration for that milestone…)
With this explosive growth, we’ve also seen an amazing wave of new volunteers joining the project, bringing fresh energy and talent to the team. Since Season 2 launched on March 18th, nine new contributors have joined our ranks—and we couldn’t be more proud to introduce them:
🛠 Whocanitbnow – for bringing tons of new features and fixes to the BAR lobby client.
🛠 neb_ – for stellar community moderation, management, and organizing events like Fight Nights.
🛠 Setokaiva – for delivering high-quality writing across the website and unit wiki.
🛠 Encyclopedia – for work on widgets, scavenger content, and the Dev Environment Setup tool.
🛠 Superkitowiec – for mentorship and creating powerful camera tools that made the Lightbringer video possible—and will make the 2025 trailer 3000% cooler.
🛠 Endorphins – for great work supporting the community and stepping up as a moderator.
🛠 Calm Phill – for absolutely stunning concept art now featured in-game, and shaping the visual direction of the Legion faction.
🛠 smellymoo – for squashing bugs and making key widget optimizations.
🛠 robert82 – for latest contributions to improving UI performance.
To all our new team members—and every single player and supporter in this growing community: thank you. You're making BAR bigger, better, and more exciting with each passing day. We’re just getting started. 💙
It’s hard to put into words just how excited we are to finally bring you this update. As some of you noticed two weeks ago, we surprise-launched the Lights Update. That may have come as a shock—especially since we’ve been building up hype for this patch for months now.
This update represents the largest and most ambitious graphical overhaul we’ve ever undertaken in BAR.
It was originally planned as a single package, featuring both a revamped lighting system and a full day-night cycle support. But as development progressed, and with new tools becoming available, we kept discovering new possibilities and adding even more visual improvements. The scope kept growing, and with the main game branch drifting further from our development build, merging everything at once became increasingly complex.
After much internal discussion, we made the call to split this massive update into two parts. That way, we could get the improvements into your hands sooner while continuing to work on the rest.
We’re proud to introduce the first phase of the graphical overhaul: The Lightbringer. Even on its own, this update includes so many changes that a single news post can’t do it justice. We’ll highlight the most impactful improvements below—and to help you better see what’s new, we’ve also prepared a video presentation for you to enjoy.
The introduction of the OpenGL4 pipeline and Physically Based Rendering (PBR) in BAR unlocked a wealth of opportunities to enhance the game's visual fidelity. With these technologies, all materials in the game—units, features, and terrain—became significantly more responsive to lighting conditions.
However, until recently, there has been not much light (other than ambient and few weapons) to make these materials shine. That changes now.
As materials began to behave more naturally under light, it became clear that the next logical step was to increase the number and variety of light sources in the game. And that’s exactly where the journey of The Lightbringer began. Lights themselves are now more flexible than ever—they can move, pulse, and change color, opening the door for all sorts of dramatic effects.
After many months of work, we’re thrilled to bring you this massive leap forward in BAR’s visual experience. Along the way, we also introduced a host of new shaders and the insanely good looking screen space shadow-casting system designed to make the game’s visuals even more dynamic and immersive. This is also setting the stage for the release of Night Mode and Day-Night Cycles with the Part II of the Visual Overhaul.
You might wonder if these visual upgrades make sense from a performance standpoint — and that’s a fair question. Performance has always been one of Beyond All Reason’s biggest strengths. A game with thousands of fully simulated units must be highly optimized, and we take that seriously. While much of the industry has drifted away from performance-first design, we continue to prioritize it.
These visual enhancements were built with care to ensure they don’t significantly impact framerate — even on lower-end hardware.
The key point is this: BAR’s main performance bottleneck is the CPU, due to the heavy simulation workload. Meanwhile, the GPU often has unused headroom. That’s why these graphical improvements make sense — they use the hardware that's often asleep while your processor does the heavy lifting.
Despite the scale of this update, we’ve kept the performance cost low. For more detail, check the performance notes at the end of this post.
Let’s break down some of the coolest additions and improvements in this update!
One of the first things we tackled while preparing this patch was enabling real light sources to be attached to units. Before the Lightbringer Update, lighting on units relied on a primitive workaround: parts of the unit texture atlas were flagged to appear brighter, simulating a kind of "fake" light source. This technique used pulsating emissive values, but it had major limitations—it always looked the same, couldn’t vary in style or behavior.
The Lightbringer Update comes with a brand-new system for attaching true dynamic light sources directly to units. And the possibilities? They’re huge.
We’ve already added over 3,000 individual lights across nearly 400 units—a massive undertaking, but absolutely worth it.
Point lights, cone lights, beam lights—they’re all on the menu. These lights can be animated, synced with unit behavior, or even move dynamically across a model to create rich, immersive effects.
From glowing thrusters to searchlights that track targets, from red-hot barrels to flickering reactor cores, this new system brings units to life like never before.
This update isn’t just about eye candy—we’re big believers in visuals that enhance gameplay. In addition to ambient lights, we’ve introduced a wide range of action-based lighting effects that respond to what’s happening on the battlefield.
Builders and factories now feature rotating construction lights while working. Nuclear silos light up during launch sequences, adding tension and clarity. And units that stockpile munitions—like anti-nukes and tactical nukes—now have visual indicators showing their stockpile status. Before you ask - yes, these stockpile indicators are only visible to you and your allies, so its doesn't inform your opponent about things you might not like them to know :)
These aren’t just pretty effects—they’re functional cues designed to make gameplay feel more immersive and alive.
And the best part about it? These new lights are close to completely free when it comes to performance!
The variety of lighting effects we are adding further supports our unit design language, making sure units can be recognised and distinguished from one another even during the most complex of battles.
At BAR, we believe perfection is built from countless small details done right. This update embodies that philosophy.
One of the most exciting additions in the Lightbringer update is our implementation of screen-space raytraced shadows (SSRTX)—a technique that dramatically improves shadow realism without requiring cutting-edge hardware.
Unlike traditional ray tracing (RTX), which simulates light across the entire 3D world—including things you can't even see—SSRTX only works with what's currently on your screen.
It uses existing depth and shape data to figure out whether light should hit each pixel, creating realistic shadows without the heavy performance cost.
Because it stays within screen space, SSRTX delivers most of the visual impact of full ray tracing—but runs much faster. And since BAR is a top-down RTS, the visual difference compared to full RTX is minimal, making this an incredibly smart and efficient solution.
The Lightbringer update introduces a new suite of distortion-based shockwave effects that give every blast and impact a much greater sense of force. Explosions now generate air and ground shockwaves, with their size and strength scaling to the power of the weapon.
These effects aren't just generic either. They’ve been meticulously hand-crafted for many weapons and units for maximum quality.
From light bursts to massive nukes, each one feels distinct. High-power plasma weapons now trigger muzzle burst shockwaves, emphasizing their raw energy, while heavy units send out rippling shockwaves with every footstep or stomp, making their presence truly felt on the battlefield.
Introduction of distortion-type shaders enabled us to also create some crafty new effects to simulate space-time warp of Jammers, or special weapons like Juno electromagnetic discharge. And most importantly - even sexier looking fusion cores :)
Many of the game’s heat sources—like geothermal vents, aircraft thrusters, and flamethrowers—now feature heat distortion effects that add a layer of realism, making them look hotter, more dynamic, and more alive.
As real cherry-on-top we've made a major performance upgrade to BAR's main GUI elements, including the build menu, info panel (bottom left), order menu, top bar, chat, eco stats, player list (and its addons), unit groups, and idle builder display.
These parts of the interface now run at least twice as fast on the CPU, with GPU rendering time improved by 40% at minimum and all GUI elements considered we are looking 3x performance increase.
This boost comes from a switch in how the GUI is rendered: instead of relying on older OpenGL display lists, the interface is now rendered to a texture. This modern approach not only speeds things up but also allows for sharper, more detailed unit build icons.
Unit icons in BAR are using a technique called mipmapping. It works by storing multiple versions of an image at different resolutions. The graphics card automatically selects the most appropriate version based on the size you want to show. By rendering the GUI at a larger size, the graphics card will now pick a higher-quality mipmap level, resulting in sharper and more detailed icons.
Note: Performance gains may be even greater on Intel and AMD graphics hardware.
This update adds 25,000+ lines of code focused on lighting and distortion systems, with visual upgrades applied to almost 400 Armada and Cortex base units (now including the Legion Commander too).
Despite the scale, the performance hit is modest — only ~5–10% FPS on default settings — thanks to BAR’s CPU-bound nature and underutilized GPU headroom. This performance cost however, can be easily balanced by the major optimisations done to the UI elements along the way.
A major step forward in BAR’s visual fidelity, built without sacrificing performance.
As mentioned earlier, this update is just the first stage of what we have in store. We're continuing to expand and refine the features introduced here, with plenty of room left to push these new tools even further. You can expect BAR to keep getting better-looking with each update, as we build toward the next major milestone in our visual overhaul: the upcoming Nightfall Update.
Up next is the second major phase of our visual overhaul: the Nightfall Update. This update will introduce enhanced official NightMode support, including dynamic day-night cycles that affect gameplay—for example, Solar Collectors will generate less energy at night. This long-awaited feature will add a new layer of atmosphere and tactical depth to BAR.
For now, day-night cycles are planned for maps specifically designed around them, where variable solar output makes sense.
These maps will be balanced with supportive wind speeds, encouraging Solar Collector use during the day. In this context, geothermal vents will become even more valuable as the only consistent energy source, and energy storage will take on a more strategic role in maintaining your base. In the future, we may allow setting day-night cycles for all maps, within sensible limits, reflecting our philosophy of maximum replayability and customizability.
You know us by now, we wouldnt be the Beyond All Reason team without packing a ton of other goodies with it. Alongside this, we’re also:
As the history shows, one may expect we will end up adding much more than we list here, so buckle up for an another amazing update!
Every time we share one of these updates, we love taking a moment to shine a light on the incredible growth of the Beyond All Reason community. And honestly? We’re still trying to wrap our heads around just how massive the response has been lately.
Back in our Season II announcement, we mentioned a 30% growth in daily active players. Well… scratch that. As of May, our daily active user count has doubled since the start of 2025, now surpassing 15,000 every single day!
🚀 We also shattered our previous record with a peak of 3,025 concurrent players online in multiplayer alone—and we estimate just as many are playing in singleplayer!
🚀 Our Discord community is approaching 50,000 members, up over 10,000 since February! (Yes, we're already plotting a wild celebration for that milestone…)
With this explosive growth, we’ve also seen an amazing wave of new volunteers joining the project, bringing fresh energy and talent to the team. Since Season 2 launched on March 18th, nine new contributors have joined our ranks—and we couldn’t be more proud to introduce them:
🛠 Whocanitbnow – for bringing tons of new features and fixes to the BAR lobby client.
🛠 neb_ – for stellar community moderation, management, and organizing events like Fight Nights.
🛠 Setokaiva – for delivering high-quality writing across the website and unit wiki.
🛠 Encyclopedia – for work on widgets, scavenger content, and the Dev Environment Setup tool.
🛠 Superkitowiec – for mentorship and creating powerful camera tools that made the Lightbringer video possible—and will make the 2025 trailer 3000% cooler.
🛠 Endorphins – for great work supporting the community and stepping up as a moderator.
🛠 Calm Phill – for absolutely stunning concept art now featured in-game, and shaping the visual direction of the Legion faction.
🛠 smellymoo – for squashing bugs and making key widget optimizations.
🛠 robert82 – for latest contributions to improving UI performance.
To all our new team members—and every single player and supporter in this growing community: thank you. You're making BAR bigger, better, and more exciting with each passing day. We’re just getting started. 💙
