Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
We're currently working on quite a few things in parallel, but at this point it's about completing various bits and bobs rather than developing anything new. We're shifting gears to get the largest changes such as the new renderer and procedural item system in the hands of beta testers very soon.
So far Kieran has developed all the new weapon assets, working closely with Madoc to figure the whole system out. Now that the system is fully functional and we've also improved our tools, he's rapidly producing a huge quantity of great looking weapons. We really want to make a lot of weapons, and we'll continue to do so gradually. Now that everything is well established other team members will also be able to get involved and contribute their designs.
This week we've focused particularly on swords. Although swords are not made of as many distinct parts as some other weapons, they vary greatly in shape and design and there's a huge amount of material to draw from. We developed some new specialised deformations for balanced tapers and blade and guard curvature, and we've been really impressed with how much variety these add alone. We're also adding more specialised procedural materials, with blade metal being the most challenging we've dealt with so far.
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We don't need procedural weapons to be complete for our first beta test, but we will include some new weapons, and armour is getting some updates too, new materials, a separate build quality and condition modifier, a larger material palette to support new items and a new colouring system that is more versatile and supports new mechanics.
The only other thing we really need to start beta testing is basically making some aspects of the new GI game ready. The new GI updates really fast, but it does consume resources and for our large maps with hundreds of lights and thousands of objects, it needs to work with a more focused area and stream objects and lights in. We've solved these problems already, but we need to put some time into a game ready implementation.
We are also still making progress on roles. At this point we're mostly trying to figure out how to make some aspects of it more intuitive from an end user / content designer point of view, when designing roles and characters. This is largely about understanding and properly documenting usage cases and best practices. There's been an increasing focus on making our tools user friendly, to streamline our own development, to potentially take on new people for content design and in the long run to provide powerful content creation tools to the community.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
We're currently working on quite a few things in parallel, but at this point it's about completing various bits and bobs rather than developing anything new. We're shifting gears to get the largest changes such as the new renderer and procedural item system in the hands of beta testers very soon.
So far Kieran has developed all the new weapon assets, working closely with Madoc to figure the whole system out. Now that the system is fully functional and we've also improved our tools, he's rapidly producing a huge quantity of great looking weapons. We really want to make a lot of weapons, and we'll continue to do so gradually. Now that everything is well established other team members will also be able to get involved and contribute their designs.
This week we've focused particularly on swords. Although swords are not made of as many distinct parts as some other weapons, they vary greatly in shape and design and there's a huge amount of material to draw from. We developed some new specialised deformations for balanced tapers and blade and guard curvature, and we've been really impressed with how much variety these add alone. We're also adding more specialised procedural materials, with blade metal being the most challenging we've dealt with so far.
.
We don't need procedural weapons to be complete for our first beta test, but we will include some new weapons, and armour is getting some updates too, new materials, a separate build quality and condition modifier, a larger material palette to support new items and a new colouring system that is more versatile and supports new mechanics.
The only other thing we really need to start beta testing is basically making some aspects of the new GI game ready. The new GI updates really fast, but it does consume resources and for our large maps with hundreds of lights and thousands of objects, it needs to work with a more focused area and stream objects and lights in. We've solved these problems already, but we need to put some time into a game ready implementation.
We are also still making progress on roles. At this point we're mostly trying to figure out how to make some aspects of it more intuitive from an end user / content designer point of view, when designing roles and characters. This is largely about understanding and properly documenting usage cases and best practices. There's been an increasing focus on making our tools user friendly, to streamline our own development, to potentially take on new people for content design and in the long run to provide powerful content creation tools to the community.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
