Friday with(out) Means - April 16th, 2010: ohai

burmese

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=573362



Friday with(out) Means - April 16th, 2010: ohai

Hey. It's me again.



I'm gonna be honest with you here. I got nothin' (1).



See, this is the thing about game design and development - When you're working on a content update there's a period toward the start of the process where everything's new and shiny; you've got tons of great ideas, basic frameworks are getting cranked out, ect. ect. ect. You've got stuff that's cool and awesome and uber to talk about because it's all brand new, both to yourself and to everyone else (because hey, no one's heard about it yet).



That's the startup phase.



Then you get into the middle phase, where real work begins. This is where stuff starts taking shape, where you can talk about details instead of just vague concepts. You can start sharing some of the mechanics behind your work, talk about the subtleties of the design, share information on how the overall content is shaping up, and even start passing along screenshots. This is a great period because you start getting feedback on what you're doing - People start getting the chance to really critique and discuss the design work going on, which works wonderfully well for a designer because everyone loves feedback (except when you guys just post "omg u sux" (2)).



And now? Now we're in the end phase. What we like to call "the 90/10 split". See, there comes a point where all your features are done, all the framework's been set up, all the shinies are in place... and you resign yourself to a month or two of straight-up bug stompin'. Oh, sure, you manage to creep in a few features here and there; maybe make a couple of new textures, toss in a nifty effect or two, change a proc on a monster or something. But for the most part it's all about making sure the requirement checks on items are correct. It's figuring out why that NPC won't get a blue name (3). It's checking grammar on item descriptions, making sure the invisible leets spawn, attempting to figure out just why the hell that damn collision sphere won't actually activate like it should.



Not to put too fine a point on it, it's friggin' tedious. ><



And that's where we're at right now - The first 90% of the content has been taken care of for a while. That part's easy. We're currently on the 10% that involves bug stomping, exploit hunting, general polish, tweaking, and minor feature creeping. This is important stuff, and it's absolutely needed before we can ship anything out to the live servers... it's just not really very fun or exciting to talk about. What I can say is that we're plowing through that 10% with great rates of speed at this point, and it's genuinely our hope to be able to send this update to the live servers before the end of the month. With the way things are progressing at the moment, it looks like we'll be able to get the finalized version of this update out before May hits, which will be great for all parties involved (4).



So all of that aside, even though I don't have much in the way of content to talk about ('cause it's already been discussed to death here and elsewhere on the boards), I do have shinies to show. Flaptoot's nearing the end of his sojurn to China and they've been cranking out new heads like madmen. Seriously, I cannot believe how quickly these guys are managing to turn out these resources, particularly at such an amazing quality - Honestly, the work they've done is above and beyond anything I could have hoped for. It's a shame that I don't have the skills to crank out some simple video renders of these because they look so much better in motion - Seeing the highlighting and shading from the normalmaps really brings these models to life, and I think everyone's going to be happy with the finished products once they get ahold of 'em in the new engine. In the meantime, though, some work-in-progress screengrabs (5) from the Max viewport will have to suffice - Hopefully you guys will be as happy with them as I am (6).



Additionally, we've got a nice little teaser image from MstrBstrd, showing off one of his new social armour concepts. Now, I know, I know - It's been nearly a year since we first talked about some of these going in-game. Reasons for the delay are two-fold: First, these armour sets are things that MB's been doing on his spare time, either when he's got a little downtime here at the office or (mostly) at home when he's bored. These are things he's cranking out because he wants to, not because we've told him to, so there's no real expectation of time or anything like that. Secondly, since I first started talking about them we've gotten better access to the new engine, enabling us to start working with high-poly models, creating normal/bumpmaps, and a whole host of new tools which helps us create said graphical resources. Since then MB's been going back over some of the preliminary work he's done and has started in on remaking the armour sets in high-def, including all the great new shiny stuff that the switch over to Cheetah will afford. The first armour set will be hitting Live with the Collector instance being patched out along-side the Daily Missions (7), and I'm really looking forward to seeing peeps wearing it out on the streets of Borealis. For now, though, we've got a teaser image of the next set he's working on finishing up, this one inspired by the Engineer class - Again, a screengrab from the Max 10 viewport. Hope you guys enjoy.



And as for me? Well... back to bug stomping (8). Hope everyone has a great weekend - Catch you guys later. (9)



PS: I'm posting this a little earlier than usual today because Waldgeist unfortunately won't have a chance to translate this for our German community (10) - He's currently in the process of getting ready to head to Cologne to show off the Rise of the Godslayer expansion for Age of Conan. I'm trying to get ahold of some of our German ARK volunteer staff to see about getting it translated over, but no luck so far; that said, as soon as I have something, I'll make sure it gets posted for our German players. (11)





1: And yet at least 1200 words of nothin'. Mad skillz.

2: I'm expecting at least three replies in that vein in this thread or else I'm going to be very disappointed in you all.

3: I recently beat my head against this issue for over half a day. Everyone *else* got a damn blue name, just this one NPC refused. Turned out to be something monumentally idiotic with his base NPC script. Go figure.

4: For you guys because you want something new to do. For us because we want something new to do. ><

5: Lemme re-emphasize: WORK IN PROGRESS. Not done yet. There will be much further tweaking to come. But still, damn good starts, far as I'm concerned.

6: *insert "omg u sux" reply here*

7: With normalmaps and the like disabled - They can't display in the current engine, but the work's actually done so when we flip the switch over to Cheetah the armour sets will have the enhanced shinyness.

8: Drinking heavily.

9: I really use that smilie a lot, don't I?

10: Also because I wanna see how badly I can confuse everyone by posting it before 6pm Norwegian time. ;P

11: There it is again. Dammit.

Attached Images

File Type: jpg     heads_04-16_wip_1.jpg

File Type: jpg     heads_04-16_wip_2.jpg

File Type: jpg     heads_04-16_wip_3.jpg

File Type: jpg     armour_04-16_engie.jpg

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Brad L. McAtee/Kintaii

AO Designer/Jack of All Trades