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Someone will be the first ever to stand on certain tiles, yall better start claiming your tiles.
I’ve already stepped on them all
Someone will be the first ever to stand on certain tiles, yall better start claiming your tiles.
I’ve already stepped on them all
You can go inside the buildings! I reworked the assets to allow for interiors :D
no feedback process to make sure there was alignment.
I thought there was plenty of feedback about random and arbitrary design changes for thinks like the elves. They should be changed back, all of them, because it was wrong to change them in the first place.
That’s not what I was talking about, I was saying we had no internal reviews in the early years. We as a team decided to change the elves and I’m sorry that it didn’t go down as well as we’d have hoped.
As I said, we’re open to revisiting the elves but it would need to be paired with a project in that region for it to be viable. Sorry you didn’t like the changes, I know - change bad! Grr
With extended draw distance even powerful computers struggle when the camera is zoomed out. I don't know if it's just crazy high polycounts or something else, but those areas are consistently laggy for me when none of the pre-OSRS areas are (nor are modern games with high graphics settings lol).
That’s because the engine has no LOD system which is also why the render distance was so small to begin with! The 3rd party launchers extended it which for the most part wasn’t an issue as they also enable the GPU to process graphics rather than just a single CPU core the Java client utilises. However, in some of the new places this really adds a tonne of geometry to the viewport which tanks FPS. There’s definitely improvements we can make here but I’d prefer we solve it with better tech rather than limiting the ability to make a nice environment. I might be a bit bias though…
FWIW, I've always felt that the "new" approach is markedly less jarring for structures than for living creatures, especially humanoid ones.
I don't mind what the buildings in varrock and fally looked like after their updates, but a lot of things like varrock guards, new trees, and most of the prif stuff feels totally out-of-place.
Is there any intent to go back and fix some of the early graphical update missteps? I imagine the tech is better-developed internally by now, and (say) fixing prif would almost certainly pass polling.
Yeah, it would be nice to go back and fix things that missed the mark but it’s difficult getting them into the schedule as it isn’t new content which is hard to market. That’s why the reworks for Hosidius and Shayzien were packaged with other content (Kebos and AKD)
Returning to the Elf models would be a massive undertaking but if we are ever to venture into that part of the world again, I’m sure we could address it - if time allows 😅
We did change up the Varrock guards recently! We should probably apply the same fixes to the knights of Camelot too but we’ve not had much feedback about them! I suppose they’re out of sight and out of mind for the most part 👀
Read moreI just want to preface this by saying that most of what I'm about to say is my opinion:
The 06 style used textures sporadically, which have a sort of dated charm to them (Like some of the paintings). The new style (and current style) avoids textures almost completely and uses models instead.
It's a bit strange when some places skew towards the old style and some the new style. It's very odd seeing the solid-colored play-doh trees in Prif and Soul Wars when the rest of the game has the standard leaf texture trees.
It's tough as well because I think some of the OSRS artists want to somewhat modernize the ...
That’s a great breakdown and hits the nail on the head 😅 Id say the first few years of OSRS lacked a lot of cohesion down to a mix of poor planning and no feedback process to make sure there was alignment. Over recent years the art team is sitting at 11 people and I think you can tell that the new areas and reworks have greatly benefited from this expansion!
When it comes to the use of textures, it’s a tough one to crack. As mentioned the tooling is quite broken which means adding textures is time consuming and tedious so we tend to avoid it where we can. I think the aforementioned “play-doh” trees was an experiment that perhaps took the style too far from the classic textures we know and love. With Shayzien I wanted to see if we could blend the poly-colour trees in with textured trees which I think was quite successful but still disappointed players who prefer the original 2004 map design - although this could be down to the way I set dressed the Shayzien area as I really ...
Read moreAll the Ruinous Powers icons suck. Ancient curses icons look way better.
Cheers, my dude! Love ya
I think it wouldn't be as big of an issue if run energy weren't a resource that needed to be managed. That's the biggest issue I've seen people state about larger areas is the distance between locations you need to run to also increases significantly.
Transport is something we’re thinking a lot about with this project :D
Will we ever update older cities to be more consistent with newer cities? Or is that something you guys will never touch to keep the old-school feel?
I think we have a bit more control over how the new areas look. There’s no desire to be changing parts of the original areas :) occasionally we may add a thing here or there but only if we really need to or if there’s a high demand
Hey Mod West, speaking of correcting the mistakes from the first release, are you still working on redesigning the remaining original cities in Kourend? I saw Arceuus recently got turned green, so I figure that's a start to what you have going on?
I was hoping to have them done before moving on to Varlamore but that hasn’t gone as planned… it’s quite a difficult thing to rationalise as the reworks are pretty much as expensive as making it from scratch.
As you noticed, Arceuus did have a slight colour shift. I did this during DT2 as it was a very cheap change! I know some of the main criticisms of that area is that it’s too purple. Funnily enough purple terrain is really bad at blending with other colours and it doesn’t match the crystals in that area. Green is far more natural and makes more sense in context so figured that would be a quick win
My unofficial plans that have a small amount of white boxing done are Gentletractors rework of Lovakengj (moving most of it underground) and there are a few designs of Arceuus and Piscarilius floating around. I also have some I’ve done myself but they’re quite old now and due a revisit for sure :D
Kourend is certainly something that still needs that final touc...
Read moreHmm, I think it’s a reasonable size, but I might be bias :P
When we were working on the map plan with Gentletractor, I initially felt the buildings were a bit small but I decided that it’s probably better to start with them feeling too small as things generally grow when translating to 3D. I think Gentletractor has nailed the sizes of the city and towns.
While comparing to the oldest cities is a good litmus test I don’t think it’s the best way to judge scale. We have a larger render distance now and you can really see how small it makes the old world feel. The idea behind Varlamore being a vast Savannah was to really make the most use of the change in technology the game has seen over recent years.
Hopefully you can trust the team to not make the same mistakes that were made during the initial release of Zeah when it came to scale. I’ve spent much of my time here correcting those mistake! For a start, having a concept map like the one we’ve shown is a big ...
Read moreThis is all true.
The problem is that we have to travel around this map, and I know I hate going anywhere in Zeah that isnt near a teleport. Even if it is all to scale, nobody wants to run around a table the size of varrock.
Maybe you should give it a chance as that table was removed well over 2 years ago! The north is still a bit messy but the south has lots of places to explore :D
Awesome work! Excited to see the others :D
this is found on almost every model when you import them into blender- but rarely visible in game. i believe it’s something to do with rigging and animating, but i’m surprised it’s not auto-hidden
This is correct! The way old school models used to be rigged required us to add little polygons for pivot points. A lot of really old models just use an average of the points being manipulated which can lead to poor control over movement so it was helpful to add anchor points like this.
These would probably never be visible on the boss itself but due to scaling them down they sometimes poke through the mesh!
It's a cosmetic change being polled after Jagex's "we don't poll cosmetic changes" polling charter in October, so I'm guessing Jagex themselves aren't super optimistic either.
The task for this was made well over 3 years ago 😅 I was under the assumption we were just showing it for feedback not officially polling it
dirty dirty west
Haha, that was my predecessors work! I wouldn’t dare
I think about this everyday too! Still a long way from venturing south from Kebos but I’ve been chipping away at laying a ground work for Varlamore for a long time now. I use this map as a rough guide but there are plenty of changes that take into account other projects that this map wouldn’t know about - plus a few references to other player made maps :D I think when it comes to Civitas Illa Fortis I’d try and get the city layout very close to what’s here, the idea of a Carthage inspired city and dock would be perfect with the theme we want to achieve for Varlamore!
Unfortunately large land mass expansions take a long time to create and I wouldn’t want another repeat of the original Zeah release… I still feel that continent has a lot of unfinished reworks that need doing.
I think most of those changes still maintain the general old style/vibe of the area with the newly added scenery/buildings, so they fit in pretty neatly. I'm still a bit bummed about the time the Shades of Mort'ton wall kit was changed with a 50-50 preference question instead of 75% vote though.
Ah yeah, forgot about that one! Personally I don't agree with needing 75% vote on visuals - I know, outrageous! That poll was a test run to see if that way worked. Asking if we should make some new content seems reasonable to get a super majority, but when it comes to visuals it gets a bit more limiting as for the vast majority of visual decisions, we come to as a team which works well from an art direction perspective as it keeps it consistent. I've experimented with many avenues of player polling and feedbacking when it comes to visuals and have found trying to run art direction this way leads to a few issues.
Ultimately, the area was incredibly old and had very little engagement, keeping it with the old style was potentially causing less engagement as it felt incomplete and poorly made. Perhaps I'm bias, but you could see into the barrows dungeon from within the shades dungeon and the clashing styles was incredibly jarring. Solving that breakdown of style was integral an...
Read moreI've teased this one a few times as it's used for NPC's. The current issue with this is there are a lot of helmets which don't remove the jaw, so any protruding beards would poke through
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