realmsoffantasyadmin Uncategorized

Flaming Braziers, Trees and More

So loads of updates and it’s really starting to come together as a small village.

As you can see the tree are back from the first tests and as you can see from my YouTube Channel there is now fluffy grass to go in the patchy grass around around the village. I think the effect works really well and it a combination of soft particles and billboarding for those that enjoy the technical side of all this. I’ll be adding bushes, rocks, patches of pebbles and scree (I think thats a word) which will make use of the Instanced renderer shortly.

What was great fun to add was some flaming braziers. That’s the right word for those isn’t it? Looks too much like Bra to me? Same spelling? Anyway.. those flaming pots as lights to welcome you to the village. I have quite got the light sphere to match up perfectly with the particle effect; it’s a little too intense and white but it’s nice to finally get to use the deferred lighting I built all those months ago.

I started to add in the peasants but that’s not really ready for public consumption yet.

I think the village need a vendor of some kinda. Some guy/gal selling stuff from under a canopy or from a tent.

Until next time.

realmsoffantasyadmin Uncategorized

The Forest Grows

I took a sidetrack from the game user interface a little to add some more bushy tress to mix in with my pine. I have a lot of tree and bush models to work with but I had to fiddle around with both my tree shader and the texturing to get enough detail on the bark and leaves. This might cause a few frame rate and/or memory issues down the line but i’ll worry about that later. I can always use a low level of detail (LoD this is commonly abbreviated to) for when the trees are further away anyway.

Here’s an image of a close up Oak with the camera almost next to is pointing straight up. Now i’m not 100% happy with it but I was more intrested in it not looking blurry like some early 2000s game close up and it looks pretty nice. The texture has got a little fudged at the roots but hey: Fix it later.

bark

Moving on…

Back to the user interface. I didn’t like the character screen at all. Not even enough to work on for now so I remade that as below:

charscreen

Which looks a lot better I think. It renders the player surrounded by icon slots for any equipment he’s wearing. Weapons, armor, accessories etc.

Also you’ll notice there’s a hotbar now with space for 6 icons. I want to keep it to 6 for now to avoid going down the route Everquest 2 does where you end up with 8 hotbars with 12 icons full of stuff, most of which does variations of the exact same thing. Also that won’t really work if playing with a controller which I want it to a possible to do.

I’m currently playing the remake of Final Fantasy 12 on the PS4 which is a pretty damn good (and underrated) RPG which obviously uses a controller just fine.

Other than that I made some other changes to make my life easier, refactoring etc but I won’t bore you with the details of that.

Next up: Health/Power bars, 3 Abilities (Close Attack, Ranged Attack, Self Heal for now), Making my peasants animated into a sensible resting pose and, knowing me, I’ll spend some more time fiddling with getting another nice bush or tree in the game.

Bye for now.