devtrackers.gg
We want color.
External link →We want color.
External link →This is one of my favorite weird tidbits:
Literally part of it is that somewhere in the spaghetti code in the last few years they lost the ability to add textures to polygons (think the leaves on old trees or the classic door model) and now they can only create new objects NPCs etc by using colored polygons like clay (think, anything in Priffdinas) that they model into whatever they want.
It actually totally explains the art style disconnect between new content and the oldest content.
It’s not that we really lost the ability. It’s just always been really bad and the technology to improve it has never been worked on. There’s no way for us to ‘unwrap’ an asset so if we want to use textures they need to be manually projected for each polygon.
That isn’t the main reason we don’t do it though, we do use it sparingly (trees mainly). It’s just that the majority of the game isn’t textured and so we use polycolour a lot more as things match a lot better that way.
It did lose a bit of charm when some of these towns were updated back in the day, they did get a lot more personality though, so I don’t think it’s all bad or as ugly as this post is making out.
I do find it funny how we can label a change that was made roughly 18 years ago and still tag it as ‘new’
On the topic of area design, do you happen to know why Prifddinas doesn't use the standard tree models? It's difficult to describe what exactly bothers me about the present look, but if I had to pin it down to one thing, it's that the environment looks very cartoony and smooth. It's even more jarring when you realise that the trees in the Elven Lands outside of the city gates use old textures.
I wish you guys would reuse more of the truly oldschool-feeling textures for building walls and dungeons, even in new areas.
(I realise this is a ridiculously tiny hill to die on)
Definitely something we talk more about these days and we want to make this a bit more consistent going forward. I think a good comparison with the Prif trees are the ones around Shayzien as they also don't use the classic texture and rely on poly-colour in the same way. I don't think I've seen many comments talking about them compared to the prif trees which have been described as 'playdough' which I think is a fair criticism. It's down to how the mesh is constructed, the shayzien trees are not a complete shell so the shading is less intense and flatter when compared to the prif tree mesh.
The issue we've had with the textures is that our tools haven't changed in a long while and we currently don't have traditional texture mapping like most game engines do, instead we have to manually project each plane which is cumbersome and a little buggy. I think the rough plan is to give us the ability to unwrap meshes so we can start using the textures on new trees while also exposing an option to toggle between purely texture and purely poly-colour so players can choose :D Nothing has been decided yet though, so don't quote me on that, haha.
