The 24th report wishes you a happy first day of the spring!
And let’s go straight to the report.
I Level design - dead city
We have already told about deserted castles and cities in the previous report. Some of them will be empty and it will give an opportunity to find something interesting and share it with the other treasure hunters - it’s an open world PvP, after all.
But the larger part will be inhabited again. It will be inhabited by the different monsters and lepers.
Lepers are the people who among the first left the villages and towns of Dworran in the period of the Great Poverty. But oddly enough, they created their own camps and settlements, hiding from the tax collectors of the King and the killing squads. We will give more information in one of the next reports.
The screenshots below show the city in the daytime when it’s empty. In the night it will be full of undeads. The road from the Harbour will take about 15 minutes.
It will be the first open instance with the raid boss on the Alpha. The loot will be more qualitative than the vendor’s items.
The walkthrough is under development. On the one hand we don’t want to make it too linear and we want to leave the space for the tactical research. On the other hand, the particular rules of the walkthrough should be kept. But taking into account that the wipe will send the players back to the city and the difficulties with the other treasure hunters we will make it simpler for the Alpha.
II Mobs animations - red scorpion
Meet the first animations of the mobs showed earlier - red scorpion.
Attack
Attack with claws
Appearance
Death
III Fur work
We have already told about our attempts to create the beautiful fur with the minimal FPS losses. There are not so many variants in the industry:
- Without fur, using 2.5D material (parallax, for example) that resembles the fur structure;
- Polygonal fur;
- Nvidia Hairworks.
We’ve tried the last one and it shows an amazing picture. With the first one everything is pretty clear too, but the second one should be tested.
We should painstakingly smoothing the fur polygons by hand. That’s what we get:
After that we got started on the updating of the fur material.
We put both variants to the simplest scene under the in-game TrueSky light. We work on it at the same time)
That’s how it looks like:
We, hand on heart, consider this work on the bear and fur (second way) successfully done.
23 thousands of polygons. We hope that you will like it too.
We do the same work with the wolf fur now.
All optimization measurements, comparisons and conclusions will be included in one of the next report. But there is one predictable spoiler (with the 20 bears on the screen the FPS losses twice smaller than using Nvidia Hairworks). We don’t know if we can reduce the FPS losses with the NHW.
IV Conclusion
In conclusion we talk about around-development:
- ROG Club is under NDA (confidentiality agreement) but it doesn’t mean that we develop it secretly or we will prohibit to show the videos (vice versa), but it’s traditional step;
- We continue to send the emails with the news. The main aim of it is to move the old Alpha members to the new site and to return those who forgot about our forum;
- Follow the news in the topic about pre-Alpha status, the next update is on the Monday or Tuesday.
That’s all!
We congratulate with the coming of spring and the great news from the Reign of Guilds Team ;)
It’s Friday evening - ROGgoms up, friends!