Finally completed my
M.Sc., i can now focus to the
game.
I have worked mostly on NPC portraits & shaders to fix two (2) important issues of the game, realism & content/quests.
NPC Portraits will unlock the quest department & will spice up the world.
Those NPCs will play the role of skill trainers, as well as hired mercenaries, providing additional boosts and/or moves (probably) or whatever a NPC could offer.
I only had party portraits & decided it was not a good thing to use them as NPC portraits as well.
You can check all the following images for different combinations of
male, female & monster NPCs.
Transparency by distance
I also worked on my OpenGL shader, providing model transparency
by the distance.
The problem was mostly shown on outdoor areas, where the horizon merges with terrain.
The different ending colors of them caused a very sharp result, not really desirable as made horizon looking really 2D and not really attached to the world.
To understand the change, look those two (2) images; first one doesn't use transparency distance (old), the second one (new) use it:
Ignore the ugly ass low-res spiders
The horizon is simply a parallax 2D set of textures, but they're
blending nicely with 3D geometry where the terrain & horizon ends, along with lighting, fog, night etc.
You can see that effect in the following images as well.
Compass
Another change was the replacement of compass graphic. You can check my previous posts to compare, but i find it more elegant & more fit for those graphics.
NPC Portraits
Before creating content, i wanted to complete a good list of NPC portraits & i think i did. There are currently
30 NPC portraits, including male, female & monsters! You can different combinations of all of them, for test purposes. All of them could be your henchmen, trainers or just troubled NPCs asking for help. Some images showing some NPC portraits follows:
Day & Night cycle
Most of the parallax horizons i am using, have two (2) versions of day & night. Based on current time of the day, they're toggling automatically (for example from 20:00 to 06:00 is considered night). When you walk or rest, time is updated appropriately.
Rulebook
Finally, i updated the rulebook that will be used for the game. I added many references in all of its content, explaining to the best of my abilities the current mechanics of the game. This is an ongoing work; expect many changes as the game develops. You can download the current state of rulebook
here.
Well, that's all for now!