Patreon Devlog #2: September 2021
Added 2021-09-12 15:27:22 +0000 UTCHello Patrons!
Thank you for yet another month of supporting us.
First of all, congrats to the winner of the first Custom Art Contest: Steak. We hope we can show you the result of… whatever he might want to request drawn by our art lead by next month once it’s finished.
Also, while there was only one question asked three times, we still felt compelled to give you an answer. Scroll to the bottom to get the answer for the question asked last time as well as some of the main milestones we have reached this month.
Visuals:
While this doesn’t impact player experience much, we replaced our grass shaders!
This allows us to do a few neat things that’ll save a lot of time with world mapping.
- The grass render distance is quite insane now with no performance drops and it’s really nice and thick even far off in the distance (as you can tell on the picture).
- It comes with automatic grass removal, meaning if we put something on top of the growing grass, it’s really easy to make it disappear. Rocks and buildings will just “squash” it.
- It bends a lot better now. It also raises by itself after a while once a bit of time has passed.
We also sent in one of our wolves and the human female model to a company specializing in stylized anime shaders. We plan to license one from them and requested a visual example of how it’ll look like. Sadly they didn’t make it in time since we put in the request, so we will have to keep it for next time. Once we get it we’ll post it right away!
Mobs:
We are nearly done with all wolves. In the showcase video you can take a look at our Greenwood and Redwood wolves in male and female versions, the corrupted variants, as well as our hungry wolves and Rashun (who needs a little rework this coming week, where we’ll make him more buff and bigger).
Questing:
We did some initial work on the dialogue and questing system. We managed to get branching dialogue working properly, meaning we got all the storytelling tools we needed set and ready to go. We also went ahead and implemented the main questline for the prologue and demo zone. Prepping it up comes next as soon as we have the boss wolf models finalized.
New Cliffs & Rocks:
We started work on turning our rocks a bit more stylized. The old rocks we used are now full-time cave employees, while new ones will be used to populate the outside world.
Here’s a video showing off some of the first few rocks. Still a few improvements and additional textures needed, but the groundwork is laid down.
We also made the first dungeon cave out of our former world cliff assets. Here’s the main corridor of the lower floor. Keep in mind, it’s going to be a lot darker in the actual game and we somewhat demand the use of torches here to find your way to the depths.
Character Customization:
We added even more improvements to the character customization.
If you remember last month, we had preset colors available for you to modify body and hair elements.
Now we went ahead and pulled in the entire available color spectrum we could. Still some things to iron out with the interface for it, but it fully works.
Water:
We improved the water surface visuals and shape. Waves are now much more pronounced with the added effect of tessellation and the ocean itself blends quite well with the horizon.
Apart from the above, we did the following (and definitely more, but we lost track):
- Modified dialogue UI.
- Replaced all NPCs with tictacs before we start working on custom NPC models.
- Added upper body bending/leaning.
- Optimized **all** textures in the project to free up VRAM for testers.
- Misc. animation behavior improvements.
- Removed our custom camera to work on questing. Should be back in by the time of demo.
- Set up a bunch of dialogue and slowly writing quest documentation in Arcweave.
Q&A!
While not many, there was a valuable question asked, three times.
“wen deom” - by Steak.
A general demo for testers is planned for October and we are trying to cram as much as possible into it, visually and content-wise. We have few hands and are slowly grinding through all tasks one by one to deliver a nice demo for everyone. This will also be our biggest test yet as we’d like to squeeze as many people as possible onto our server and see how it fares in a battle scenario.
We also updated our roadmap mid of last month with some progress, you can take a look here again: http://roadmap.age-of-aincrad.com/
Thanks again and till next time!
