Mod_West

We have limitations due to a 17 year old graphics engine that community artists are unaware of and don’t have to abide by. Official art is also subject to far more scrutiny by the players. “So much better” is quite vague and subjective too, personally I’m quite proud of the player outfits I’ve made in my time on the OSRS team. I’d love to make some range gear as it’s probably the one thing I haven’t done yet but we have a bit of an issue with range gear currently...

Anyway, I suppose there’s room for improvement. Sorry for disappointing you :/

Much in the same way we can't expect an artist like me to write engine code, expecting our editorial team to make game content is a little silly. We are a large team of various disciplines and we're all working on many things for a wide and diverse community all at once. Try to understand that you're not our only customer.

Might be a clipping nightmare when it comes to wearing amulets but it's certainly something we can look into :D

Yeah, I’ve gone in and added some variety to their examines :) my intention with the future reworks is to make the crystals less of a common feature and more of a hero piece to the environment. That with a considerably toned down terrain colour should help make Arceuus great again ;P

Thanks for the compliments, always a pleasure to work on this game that we’ve all enjoyed for so long!

Haha, thanks! I did start writing up a response to your recent post about OSRS art but I’ve been so knee deep in Shayzien rework I’ve not had a chance to get back to it. Hoping to get something a little less of a direct response but a review of where we’re going with the art style written up for the next Gazette, although I’m unsure myself when that would be... hopefully the Shayzien rework is a step in the right direction as it certainly feels (to me anyway) a new bar in quality for OSRS environment design :D

Oh man, I don’t remember fluffing that up. I’m really looking forward to reworking Arceuus but there’s nothing stopping me from fixing the examines on the crystals for the Shayzien rework. There was a lot of feedback with Camdozaal about scenery lacking examines so we’re going to make sure that isn’t repeated again.

It's real. I've attempted to make 3 runes capes at this point and they've all not worked :D

Potentially, that might be the case for some. That doesn't mean the criticism is baseless, so I reckon it's still worth engaging with. It opens up the conversation and gives me an opportunity to further understand where the problem might be.

Thanks for your feedback :D Glad you like it!

There certainly is more to the puzzle :D After all, the Zarosian symbol is very recognizable to us as players, but to those in the world it is just an old ancient symbol from a time long ago.

Let's not forget about our friendly Chaos Dwarves, who I'd assume are more into Zamorak? Humans are free to follow whatever religion they like, I imagine the same applies to Dwarves even if they do tend to lean more towards Guthix.

I agree :D When the specific hue of an update is the issue you know you've done something right!

Thanks for the response :)

The primary reward, the new mace is your typical "didn't want to upset the meta so it's a good crush weapon for its tier" that has that weird high fantasy "cool" design that really just looks like a fancy gem on a stick.

Maces look like maces. Not entirely sure what else we could've done in this regard.

Questionable on why it's introduced since FTP is kind of the more puritan form of OSRS with hardly any change to the core identity on that more muted fantasy setting, well known gear, and very simple PVP.

While we don't usually make content for the free version of the game it's not that wild of a concept. The free game has some very out dated content which doesn't lend well to converting free players into paying players. As a business we need to think about that a lot as we're strictly against adding MTX, which I think is for the best.

The setting is ...

I'd love for you to convince me OSRS is low fantasy :P There are certainly parts of the game that are much more grounded than typical fantasy games but ultimately this game has a lot of magic and the world should really reflect that.

Every time we make something purple, players complain. At this point I've just stopped caring because purple is part of the colour spectrum and we're going to use it. We have enough restrictions working in OSRS as is, I don't think limiting our available colours is really helpful feedback. We do try to keep it to a minimum, but there's only so far we can go.

The key is using specific colours for content that makes sense. It might not be apparent now but the purple colour palette is tied to the lore of the area. It'll be a while until we use it this heavily again in the future, so there's that :D

yes.

Tile based blocking

I believe when we boost ambient light on the item it only impacts the icon/drop model as worn equipment follows a hard-coded front facing light that ignores config settings. I'll have a play around and see what I can do ;)

I suppose you might have a point there, still quite impressive though :D

It is wild. Another strange one is how animations are stored. Rather than being a single file that can be played on a single skeleton the frames are all stored individually and can be Frankensteined together and played on literally any skeleton. Not advisable as it would look distorted and nonsensical, but if used correctly a programmer could make a new animation without needing to bother an artist. We are starting to move away from this though as managing the files as individual frames is a bit awkward.

Ah, you're missing the genius of the Gowers. You see, this game used to run through a browser in the year 2004. A fully 3D experience in internet explorer of all applications. This wasn't a quirky way to make icons for the sake of it, it was memory saving - why store 1000s of sprites when the engine can just render a small image of the drop model? Every strange thing this game does is purely so it could run efficiently in a browser :D

It also saves us Artists a lot of time too, so it has development benefits as well. Of course, wanting to improve the quality of the icons is a little more of a hassle, especially with specific requests like this one - but it can be done :)

I'd love to say you're correct but honestly it seems more like a coincidence more than anything else :( The asset in question is just named "painting1" so it doesn't say much. Very old asset, easily from the early 2000s but unless we can get hold of the original artist we will never know for sure :/

If you want... just pretend it is :D

I think I used TAPP once or twice to play around with some shaders but I mainly used it to generate updates for oldschool. Ideation has evolved over the years and it's essentially what I was doing before but much more refined so I definitely prefer it over the former. We've got plenty of great updates from this process and we're all currently working on something quite exciting - I think it might be the most participants we've ever had in a single update proposal before.