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- Jan 28, 2011
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Tags: Adam Brennecke; Obsidian Entertainment; Pillars of Eternity
This week's Project Eternity Kickstarter update describes two of January's development accomplishments. The first one was the creation of the dwarf - and by extension, a unified system for creating all of the other races as well.
An interesting technique. So interesting, in fact, that they felt the need to repeat that first paragraph three times throughout the update. I do wonder if an armor texture designed for a human model wouldn't end up being noticeably distorted when transferred to another race, though.
January's second accomplishment was the creation of the humble doorway.
There's also a little screenshot of that:
It's IE-tastic!
This week's Project Eternity Kickstarter update describes two of January's development accomplishments. The first one was the creation of the dwarf - and by extension, a unified system for creating all of the other races as well.
One of the goals in preproduction was to figure out how we could make character modeling pipeline be as efficient as possible. The problem is fairly complex: All of the six playable races, human, elf, dwarf, aumaua, orlan, and the god-like can wear armor, boots, gloves, helmets (...well, some have trouble wearing helmets, but we will talk about that some other day...) and have other options that the player can customize like facial hair, hair style and skin color. We also have tons of armor variations and types of armor, like plate, brigandine, leather, and mail. (Josh loves his armor). Ideally, our artist would only need to model one armor piece - let's say plate body armor - and have it fit all six of our playable races even if the races are all of different proportions and body structure. At the end of the day the same model for plate armor could fit a slender four-foot-tall orlan and a burly seven-foot-tall aumaua. The goal for January was to build a system to allow us to do this very thing.
During January, we've developed a new system to allow our human bipedal skeleton to be shaped and morphed into the other playable races and have armor be shaped and morphed along with the skeleton. The character modelers have fine control over the proportions of the races, and only need to model armor pieces once and not six times over. In preproduction we look at developing systems like this. It may cost us time up front, but will save us hundreds of hours down the road in production. The dwarf ended up being our first test case, and now we have dwarves as playable races working in game.
An interesting technique. So interesting, in fact, that they felt the need to repeat that first paragraph three times throughout the update. I do wonder if an armor texture designed for a human model wouldn't end up being noticeably distorted when transferred to another race, though.
January's second accomplishment was the creation of the humble doorway.
On the other end of the pre-production spectrum, the programming team has been writing the building blocks for the area design toolbox. One of the essential things that all areas need are doors. From past experience we know that doors always present difficult problems with pathfinding and are a big pain in the arse. Getting a potentially risky, yet required, feature out of the way now seemed like a pragmatic goal, so Steve Weatherly (game programmer) and Sean Dunny (environment artist) set off on a quest to get doors working in the game.
[...] One issue that came up was door placement. We found that it was not easy to place a door in the exact space to fit a dungeon doorframe. Steve and Michael Edwards (senior technology programmer) coded a system for doorframe "snap points" that makes the door pop to the exact place that we want it to go. Designers can now place doors efficiently. Hooray!
There's also a little screenshot of that:
It's IE-tastic!
