Mod_West

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...

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)

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’

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

I’ve already stepped on them all

You can go inside the buildings! I reworked the assets to allow for interiors :D

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

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…

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 👀

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 ...

Cheers, my dude! Love ya

Transport is something we’re thinking a lot about with this project :D

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

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...

Hmm, 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 ...

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 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!