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Because nobody requested an asset for it so it was slapped with some reused graphic. Reuse can be fine though if the asset is generic enough. This is not one of those cases.
Because nobody requested an asset for it so it was slapped with some reused graphic. Reuse can be fine though if the asset is generic enough. This is not one of those cases.
top tier design
So true
I remember making a video years ago that showed how the big empty tent in Shayzien was bigger than some towns and villages on the mainland, so glad they changed it
That tent is what made me remake Shayzien. I ran to the end to pray at the altar and there wasn’t even an altar there so I just deleted the whole thing.
Anyone got any videos of release Zeah?
Pretty sure you can use osrs.world and change the cache to see how it looked on release. Have fun!
There’s still so much to fix 😞
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 exposin...
Read moreDamn that's impressive for a game this size. I stand corrected.
For sure! Around that time OSRS was kinda just doing its own thing in the corner with a small dev team, mostly ignored by the rest of the company which I think helped it grow :D OSRS team is easily 50+ people nowadays if not more (depending on how you count external support teams)
Conveniently ignoring that Jagex had over 500 employees in 2012, the year OSRS launched. Literally the next line from the Wikipedia page you're quoting from.
You deadass think 29/500 worked on OSRS? Especially 4 years later when zeah was released.Me wrong.
There were 12 people working on OSRS during the release of Zeah.
The woodcutting guild was mostly created by a single dev without any art support though, they reused all the assets. I updated the redwood trees a year later.
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’
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.
This is awesome! I recently added Varlamore to the league pixel art map I made a few years back and considered doing something like this at some point. This is stunning! Great work :D
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
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