The Guildmaster

I made a few edits today from the board software developers. You might have to clear your browser cache (Ctrl-F5) - curious to see if it's working better now?

Thank you syn! We're glad to have you aboard

Yeah, I'd really like to add this feature in. Maybe once I'm done with the backer portal for Eternity I can take a look at that. (Coming soon, seriously! )

Got a new update installed from the forum software developers... hope it improves quoting some.

Project Eternity the Documentary Update Article by Adam Brennecke, Executive Producer and Lead Programmer In Update #23 Feargus announced that Obsidian would fund a documentary of the making of Project Eternity without using a dime from the Kickstarter funding. Here's a behind-the-scenes of the behind-the-scenes and some other tidbits about the documentary. We've been working with the documentary team, Tony Jacobsen and Michael Mitchell from Creative Lane Media, for some time. Tony and Mike are very professional guys with years of experience making films, and have experience working with the games industry. They will be with following us with their fancy cameras for the entire production of Project Eternity. Our documentary will be a full movie and released in its entirety when the game is complete. We are targeting a 45 minute film that covers the entire process of the making of Project Eternity from the early days of the Kickstarter, into preproduction, all the way through production to finishing it up and going gold. There will be footage from our team meetings, informal discussions, scrums, and major milestone events. The room pictured above is an office at that we transformed into a small film studio. It will be used to shoot one-on-one sit down style interviews. Documentary FAQ When can I get the Documentary? The documentary will be released when Project Eternity is finished. We will have more details when we get closer to the Project Eternity beta. How do I get it? If you already backed at the $20/$25 tier level (and Slacker Backers via PayPal thus far) and above you will be able to stream it. At the $35 tier level and above you will be able to download it, and at the $140 tier level (and physical tiers above) we will include a DVD / Blu-ray. You can still get access to the documentary stream if you donate to the project today via the Slacker Backer pledge at the Eternity website. Tony and Mike from Creative Lanes Media Season 0: Season of the Wolf (Ghosts), Parts 4, 5, 6 Article by Darren Monahan, HTML monkey The truth behind Season 0's naming reveals itself in... ghosts. Note that this recording was done at the same time as last season, so any fixes or interface errors will not be fixed again until, uh, the real Season 1. (Ed: Yes, that means Chris is probably not using the world map enough quite yet. ) We'll be recording a new batch soon and I'm passing along feedback from YouTube comments and our forums. PART 4 PART 5 PART 6 Next week's update we will have a movie showcasing some of the progress we've made on prototype 1! Stay tuned!

I hope that with regards to moving the party through confined spaces, it didn't capture the IE feeling too closely... Nope, we've got a solution for that. Bobby or Josh will go into that in a future update.

Update by Darren Monahan, dinosaur fan Yep, you've seen this before - but not animating! In this week’s update, we’re back with me for one more! We’ll cover what the team’s up to currently. To start, every one of Obsidian’s games goes through a series of phases. Those phases, chronologically, are: Prototype, Vertical Slice, Production, and Finalization. At the end of each phase, the team and owners do an analysis of the progress; we verify that we’ve hit key goals, and (hopefully) officially move the project into the next phase. Prototype! So where are we at on Project Eternity? We’re coming to the end of the Prototype phase. While you might think of a prototype as something you would consider before making a game, in our case, we use the term to mean a demonstration of the game that, when successful, demonstrates the game’s vision (AKA “pillars”) and concept. For Eternity, one of our biggest pillars is to recreate the Infinity Engine experience. To that end, we need to have a number of key things in place to make sure our prototype is a success. Things like: Character movement and combat. We want to make sure we have a party of up to six characters, each of whom can be moved independently and/or as a group, which does then imply rudimentary support for formations as well as NPC and basic creature AI. Basic AI meaning to ‘see’ the characters, face them, and then move to them and start attacking. This also means we need character models that have enough animations to demonstrate this convincingly, as well as at least one monster. For our prototype demo, we have one known only as “Chompy” for now. More on him (or her?!) in future updates! Basic RPG mechanics. We need to prove that we’re making an RPG here obviously! We need basics like loot management; for instance, inventory and opening containers like chests. We need basic conversations and quest giving, including receiving a quest, tracking its progress, and then providing a reward for it being completed. Environments. We want to have a working outdoor area as well as a tileset-based interior that the player can move between and throughout. This makes us prove out area transitions too (I can hear it now, “YOU MUST GATHER YOUR PARTY BEFORE VENTURING FORTH...”) For our outdoor area (see screenshot above), we’re bringing life to it by not only building out the rest of the level, but getting our technological solutions in place. We have a working waterfall now, with moving water, replete with foam around the rocks(!) and more. Eeeert (sound of a record scratching…)! Wait, tilesets, Darren? What? Believe it or not, a lot of the areas in IE games were actually assembled through tile pieces (granted, outside the game in 3D art packages), and then were beautified by hand to give them a more organic look and feel. This tradition carries on with Eternity. Work in Progress Concept of an Interior Our next phase of the project is called the Vertical Slice. At Obsidian, this is the phase right before Production. In Vertical Slice, we try to do two things: Get Ready for Production. During Vertical Slice and definitely up into Production is when the team size grows. Early on, we’re getting all of our tools and processes designed, programmed, and with luck, polished up for our designers and artists to hit the ground running. Unity has been a dream for our developers so far, and it’s been easy for us to bring over our latest tools from other games for things like text and conversation management. Produce a Final “Slice” of Gameplay. We also try to develop a ‘final slice’ of gameplay. It’s generally a short, maybe 5-15 minute demo that demonstrates all of the core pillars of the game, as well as taken to what we’re aiming for at a final quality level in terms of visuals, audio, and presentation. During our Prototype we try to make stuff look great, but it’s secondary to form and feel. So, how are we doing? Well, we are absolutely trucking along. We’ve recently added several new concept artists to the team, two longtime Obsidian designers have also come on board (more on them later!), and we are hiring for other positions too. The team all has their heads down pushing forward for our prototype review. Fear... of the Dark Periodically throughout the rest of the project, we’ll have a number of weeks where we’ll ‘be dark’ (or rather more succinctly, "won't have an update" ) due to a variety of reasons, and next week is one of those instances. Don’t worry though, we will most certainly be working on the game, but we want to always make sure we’ve got cool stuff lined up for you, and our Prototype final is something we all want to keep focused on. When we’re back the following week (3/26), we’ll start a series of fresh new updates from Josh, Rob and the Art team, Adam, me, and more Let’s Play Arcanum with Chris Avellone. You might meet a few new team members, and maybe even hear from George again soon too. Happy St. Paddy’s Day! -Darren and the PE Team In case you're not sure who those folks are above: - Josh Sawyer: Project director and lead designer - Rob Nesler: Art director - Adam Brennecke: Exec producer and lead programmer - Me (Darren Monahan): Operations dude and co-founder - Chris Avellone: Obsidian's creative director - George Zeits: Narrative writer/designer

Update by Darren Monahan, Operations Guy Fulfillment In this week’s update, we go over a lot of different little things going on here at Obsidian. Here’s a quick teaser: I’ll be covering a brief update on fulfillment; we have another three videos of Mr. Avellone’s Let’s Play series in Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, we’ve got some really great news for fans of Planescape: Torment (along with some sexy fan artwork to share!) and lastly, a project we backed recently that we think is pretty cool that you might too. OK, so on to fulfillment! Let’s do this FAQ style. Q: So, what’s happening with the backer portal? A: I’m personally busy putting together a whole new Project Eternity website, which includes our backer portal, RSS feeds (popular request!), as well as including information and artwork about the universe of Eternity. What we know about classes, races, the gods, and more, and this site will continue to evolve as more and more is designed and released. It is a big job though for just little ol’ me, so it’s still going to be a few weeks as I work everything out, but we’ll keep you in the know. Oh, and backer badges come with this system as well. The backer portal will also be a great resource for those of you in the upper tiers who are submitting item, character, or location designs. Speaking of which...! Q: When will I be able to start submitting my item, character, or location designs? A: The guys have been talking quite a bit about this recently and have already started designing out the forms. Our current plan is to have those of you with those tiers be able to input them directly in our backer portal, and you can revise them at any time up to a certain point down the road (which we’ll let you all know – this point is when we would send out your text for translation, and it becomes expensive from this point to make edits.) But until then, start thinking about the concept for the thing you’d like to add! Adam will have an update on that in the coming weeks with more detail. We’d like to make sure there’s enough backstory and content available for you to draw connections from, and our new website will be the place for that. Let's Play Arcanum: Season 0 , Chris’s playthrough of Arcanum continues, taking your comments to heart with higher resolution, less chair creaking, profanity, Virgil sass, and wolves, wolves, wolves! Part I Part II Part III InXile Announces Torment: Tides of Numenera! If you missed Monday’s announcement by the good folks at InXile, Brian Fargo and crew announced their new Kickstarter project opening tomorrow called Torment: Tides of Numenera. That name may sound oddly familiar, yes! They are making a spiritual successor to the beloved Planescape: Torment. We seriously couldn’t control ourselves here guys, and had to make sure all of you knew about it too as fans of the genre! We encourage you to check out their website and check in tomorrow to see their new video. ...and that’s not all in Torment news. Incredible artist John Crowcroft sent us some beautiful fanart canvases that we had to share with all of you. Egads! OK, so I’m not entirely sure how "egads" fits into this update exactly other than to fill the "E" slot in this update title’s FATE acronym, but I digress. One last quick item we wanted to tell you about was a project we "Kicked it Forward" on that we think looks fun and interesting for those of you who like table top dice games. It’s called Dungeon Roll – A Dicey Dungeon Delve. Check it out! Until next week, -Darren, seeker of Kerfluffleupogus.

Oh sorry, it's a bonus to the update - it's not just the update! I edited that to clear that up.

Update by Josh Sawyer, Project Director and Lead Designer Last week, our art director, Rob, showed you our godlike concepts and dazzled you with an in-depth technical breakdown of how we're doing animation rigging on the project. This week, we'll be talking about a different technical subject, but one that's more connected to gameplay: engagement -- specifically, melee engagement. Melee engagement is a solution to two common problems in the Infinity Engine games: melee characters' inability to control an area and ranged characters' ability to "kite" melee characters. In the Infinity Engine games, melee characters could be quite powerful in toe-to-toe combat, but many opponents found ways to foil those characters with little difficulty. Fast characters could easily rush around a slower melee character with impunity and ranged characters could backpedal perpetually out of reach. If you're familiar with D&D 3E/3.5/4E/Pathfinder's attack of opportunity mechanics, Project Eternity's melee engagement fills a similar role by making melee combatants "sticky". Coming near a melee combatant means being drawn into Engagement with him or her, a state that can be risky to get out of. Here's how it works: when two opposed combatants come near each other and one of them a) has a melee weapon equipped b) is not moving and c) is not currently at his or her maximum limit of engagement targets (the standard is 1), the other character will be Engaged. When an opponent is Engaged by an attacker, moving any significant distance away from the attacker will provoke a Disengagement Attack. A Disengagement Attack has an inherent Accuracy bonus, does significantly more damage than a standard attack, and will call a hit reaction animation while momentarily stopping the character's movement. When it's initiated, a Disengagement Attack automatically breaks Engagement on the target, but if the target is also the attacker's current melee target, the attacker will typically be able to re-establish Engagement before the target can move farther away. In this manner, melee combatants, especially ones that have high Accuracy and damage per hit, have a solid mechanic for keeping enemies close to them -- or making the cost of escape extremely expensive. Of course, there are other ways to end Engagement. If the attacker switches to a non-melee weapon or performs a non-melee-based action, Engagement immediately ends. If the attacker moves away from their Engagement targets, is paralyzed, knocked down, or otherwise prevented from maintaining a threat, Engagement will also immediately end. If the attacker has a limited number of Engagement targets (as most do) and switches his or her attack focus to a different character, Engagement immediately ends. We believe that Engagement can give AI a clear "decision point" where they can evaluate the threat of their new status and choose the appropriate course of action. For player-controlled characters, it makes melee enemies more potent threats and presents players with tactical challenges to solve. We want Engagement to be a mechanic that players and enemies can mess with using a variety of class Abilities and general Talents, so we will be experimenting with a variety of elements to that end: Fighters' Defender mode allows them to engage two additional targets and increases the range at which they engage targets. This gives fighters much greater capability to control the area around them. The limited-use Escape ability lets rogues break Engagement without provoking a Disengagement Attack. It is generally best used when the rogue's enemy is preoccupied with another target. Barbarians can use Wild Rush to temporarily ignore the movement stop and hit reactions from Engagement and Disengagement Attacks, respectively -- though they can still suffer massive damage while powering through. The wizards' Grimoire Slam allows them to attack an enemy in melee with their magically-charged grimoires, unleashing a concussive wave of energy on contact. If it hits, the attack knocks the target back, usually far enough to break Engagement in the process. Additionally, creatures may have their own special abilities related to Engagement and Disengagement Attacks. We hope that the system itself is easy to understand but allows for increasingly complex tactical considerations over the course of the game. That's all for this week! Let us know what you think of the mechanic on our forums. Your feedback, as always, is appreciated. In our next update, in addition to our usual weekly content, we'll also be continuing our thrilling coverage of Chris Avellone's playthrough of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.

Your signature made me 'lol' in my office.

Rob Nesler, Project Eternity's Art Director Hello everybody it's me again, Rob Nesler, Art Director on Project Eternity. I had intended on presenting our Art Style document to the world by this update, but it still needs work. So, you have to wait a bit longer for it. So that’s sad. However, with the last art update, I glossed over our Technical Animator Antonio's work 'cause it was 3 o'clock in the morning and I couldn't think about how to describe intelligently what Antonio does for us. Some of you professed extensive knowledge of rigging and skinning, as well as profound disappointment in my patronizing tone, and demanded to be better informed of this horribly complex facet of game development. So...okay! Before that we have some eye candy. A Godlike concept by Polina (click to see full size image): And noooooo...you can’t have a larger version. Google "estoc" if you want a sense of the weapon she's holding. The godlike are the children of humanoids (most often humans) who have been "blessed" (or cursed, depending on personal or social view) with the physical manifestation of a divine spark granted by the gods. Godlike manifest their divine heritage in a variety of ways: wings, horns, strange birthmarks, talons, odd eyes - but they always manifest it somehow. BTW, in case you missed it, this is a playable "race". Below are some further examples of the possible deviations/conditions they inherit: Okay back to technical animating. If you recall, in the last update, I wrote this little nugget: Some of you wanted more... so... here’s more. His primary responsibility is rigging and weighting characters for skinned forward kinematic and inverse kinematic animation. Daily, he also uses his expert technical knowledge of animation techniques and the underlying idiosyncrasies of 3D animation software to assist our animation team as a problem solver, a mentor, and a scripter to improve animator workflow and overcome deficiencies in the applications we use. So that sounded intelligent; vague and awkward, but intelligent. So, specifically ROB, what does Antonio do that will make Project Trenton/Eternity awesome? Generally, technical animators program scripts using languages like MEL or Python to extend or enhance the functionality of existing off-the-shelf apps like Maya, Max, or Softimage. These scripts are often programs running within the larger app, but sometimes they are utilities that exist outside the application to assist in conversion or batching operations. These often can be purchased, but sometimes they themselves don’t have all the features our animators want so... NO! Specifically ROB! What the hell does he do??? Okay, okay, for Project Trenton/Eternity Antonio has written, a few, and re-written a couple times the following, and it's all called DNA (Design New Actor). Firstly, there is the Export Rig, and this is not so unique to 3D character animation. This is a highly optimized skeleton that represents only the bones that the actual actor mesh is weighted to. For a humanoid character these bones would be named: Pelvis, Femur_Rt and Femur_Lt., etc. Vertices of the visible textured geometry, that the player sees, are all attached to these bones with various amounts of strength, so the character will appear to bend and flex more naturally. Sometimes these bones will have physics applied to them, like pony tails. This is less a rig and more of: simply the skeleton that the other rigs interact with, but these are the only bones that go into the game, and we call it the "export rig". Antonio builds this skeletal hierarchy to fit the expected proportions of the character, and character modelers build character meshes to match visible body parts to the locations of bones, so that -- for example -- the bendy part between the upper_arm_rt and lower_arm_rt ends up being where a humanoid creature, as designed, would expect an elbow to be. Then there is this nifty rig that was discussed a little bit, a couple updates ago — fricken’ Adam (PE's Executive Producer) always stealing my thunder! I think we call it the “stretch rig”. As he mentioned, it allows Dimitri, our dutiful Character Lead, to scale, even non-proportionally (with volume adjustments) meshes with the export rig already weighted. This way we can make a human character mesh, rig him to a human-proportioned skeleton, animate him, then take that same character and deform him to a new size and proportion, export him and use the same animations that were created for the human on this newly scaled/deformed mesh. This is a very useful asset multiplier, which allows us to leverage costly armor set and animation development across the spectrum of our races. ...And last, but most certainly not least, we rely on Antonio for creating rigs that provide controllers that allow the animators the maximum amount of flexibility when creating animations. These 'control rigs' are specialized for each character/creature type, after they've been stretched. They provide controls for jumping, crouching, twisting, grabbing, etc. They provide inverse kinematic and forward kinematic transformations, physics blending, following, squeezing, etc.-- whatever is required, actually. These controllers and extra bones are for animator manipulation only; they do not get exported. That's why when I said, "he rigs the rigs" I wasn't actually joking. These are rigs of rigs. These are the animator’s most essential bread and butter. Using these tools is how they actually create character animation. And that's it. The update is over. I know, not so fun, but this is serious stuff. We’ll show some animated examples sometime in the not-too-distant future. Rob Out!

Just applied a patch that should (hopefully) fix the shortcuts not working in the RTE editor!

Wow Zeckul, thank you! I'll pass that along to Adam and Chris for our next update!

The e-mail updates went out late for some reason last night, but hopefully you've gotten them now?

Chris Avellone Got to tear into Arcanum today in the first of our Let’s Play videos – for all the supporters that were willing to pitch in to see the gameplay footage, . I wanted thank everyone that were willing to up their donation to make it happen, and I also wanted to thank RPG Codex for sending me a copy of Arcanum in the first place from GOG.com. Currently I’m playing it without any fan patches, I want to play the release version. Part of me wants to contrast and compare if I do a second modded version (probably doing a tech-focused run). If that ends up being problematic, I’ll add the mods and then do a rush playthrough to get back to the point I was at so you guys don’t have to sit through the second playthrough. Well, unless you want. Feel free to post suggestions for how you’d like me to play it on our forums or in YouTube's comments for the video – for right now, I’m just playing it as I would normally, which makes it a lot more relaxed. Hopefully, my in-game reactions and critiques should be enough if you’re interested on my RPG takes on any elements in the title. If you have any questions about how I felt about certain elements (aside from Virgil’s sass), feel free to drop me a tweet at @ChrisAvellone and I’ll do what I can! Many thanks to Adam Brennecke, our Executive Producer, Carter Thomas, our production intern, and Justin Bell and Austin Shannon, our audio duo, for getting me all set up and good to you, and to all of you backers for making this happen in the first place. This is a rare opportunity for me, and one that I certainly appreciate – thanks.

D&D: Dwarves and Doors Adam Brennecke We are another month into preproduction and have been making awesome progress on all fronts. This update covers dwarves and doors, two of the many accomplishments in the month of January, and gets into the finer details of development on Project Eternity. The Creation of the Dwarf One of the goals in preproduction was to figure out how we could make character modeling pipeline be as efficient as possible. The problem is fairly complex: All of the six playable races, human, elf, dwarf, aumaua, orlan, and the god-like can wear armor, boots, gloves, helmets (...well, some have trouble wearing helmets, but we will talk about that some other day...) and have other options that the player can customize like facial hair, hair style and skin color. We also have tons of armor variations and types of armor, like plate, brigandine, leather, and mail. (Josh loves his armor). Ideally, our artist would only need to model one armor piece - let's say plate body armor - and have it fit all six of our playable races even if the races are all of different proportions and body structure. At the end of the day the same model for plate armor could fit a slender four-foot-tall orlan and a burly seven-foot-tall aumaua. The goal for January was to build a system to allow us to do this very thing. During January, we've developed a new system to allow our human bipedal skeleton to be shaped and morphed into the other playable races and have armor be shaped and morphed along with the skeleton. The character modelers have fine control over the proportions of the races, and only need to model armor pieces once and not six times over. In preproduction we look at developing systems like this. It may cost us time up front, but will save us hundreds of hours down the road in production. The dwarf ended up being our first test case, and now we have dwarves as playable races working in game. Pictured at the front of this update is a high-poly dwarf head that Dimitri Berman (lead character artist) modeled in ZBrush. The high-poly head is used for making normal maps which aid in lighting the character models. A simplified mesh is created from the high-poly head is used in game. Open, Close, Lock On the other end of the pre-production spectrum, the programming team has been writing the building blocks for the area design toolbox. One of the essential things that all areas need are doors. From past experience we know that doors always present difficult problems with pathfinding and are a big pain in the arse. Getting a potentially risky, yet required, feature out of the way now seemed like a pragmatic goal, so Steve Weatherly (game programmer) and Sean Dunny (environment artist) set off on a quest to get doors working in the game. We first tackled this problem creating a list of all the features that doors need to have. It's easy with doors since we all know how doors work: Doors have a few states, like open and close. Doors can be locked, and be unlocked with a key (or skill). Doors can be used, meaning the player can click on a door and the selected character will be commanded to go and "use" the door. Doors can animate to match the open/close state. Doors block character pathing when closed, and don't block pathing when opened. We even listed out minor details such as doors can change the mouse cursor to a different state when hovered over, and doors should always open away from the character using the door. Tasks were made from this list, and the work began. Steve was able to get a working prototype of a door ready to test quickly. At this stage we could see how the door looked and felt in game, and if there are any unexpected problems that came out of the prototype. One issue that came up was door placement. We found that it was not easy to place a door in the exact space to fit a dungeon doorframe. Steve and Michael Edwards (senior technology programmer) coded a system for doorframe "snap points" that makes the door pop to the exact place that we want it to go. Designers can now place doors efficiently. Hooray! We love being able to share our progress with you all, and we hope you enjoy reading these production updates. If you have any questions about development, please post them in our Project Eternity forum. Thank you!

Orlan First Look Josh Sawyer Click for full size image As some of the keen-eyed among you noted from last week's update, there was an unfamiliar portrait in our work-in-progress tileset screenshot. We read the debates and viewed the Blade Runner-esque enhanced images that followed with interest. Good work, sleuths, the character pictured is, in fact, an orlan. This orlan is engaged in some important work in one of the Dyrwood's busiest cities. Here's the full-sized portrait for your continued speculation! Ziets on Pantheon Design George Ziets Hello all. This week, I will be writing the update, and we’ll be starting to talk a bit about world development. For a designer, this is the fun part, and it’s a surprisingly rare opportunity. On all my previous Obsidian projects, the team has worked with an established IP (intellectual property) like the Forgotten Realms or Fallout. We’ve always had a wealth of existing lore to draw upon – cities, towns, characters, history, gods, etc. Sometimes we’ve worked in an area of the world that hadn’t been seen in a CRPG before (as in NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer), which gave us the opportunity to extrapolate beyond what was already established... but otherwise, we were working with established material and trying to be true to existing lore. In contrast, Project Eternity is an entirely new setting that we’re creating from scratch. And at the start of development (around the end of the Kickstarter campaign), we didn’t have much more than what KS supporters have already seen: a map, a few high-level ideas about races, nations, and technology level, and the idea that souls play a major role in this world. So where do we go from there? Building a Pantheon One of our first steps was to think about gods. Deities can be a good starting point when developing a world. They reflect the views and beliefs of the world’s inhabitants, and they can inspire ideas for characters, organizations, and conflicts. You’ve already heard a few of our gods mentioned in passing: Magran, goddess of fire and war; Berath, god of cycles, doors, and death; Eothas, god of light and redemption. Josh invented these gods when he was first developing the world, and they play important roles in the region where the game will be set. But we’ll need a lot more gods to fill out the pantheon. Here are a few of the elements we consider for each new deity: What is the god's name, and what are his/her "aliases" (e.g., "The Twinned God" for Berath). What is the god's portfolio? That is, what aspects of life or the world do they represent (e.g., mortality, greed, summer, commerce)? What allies and foes do they have amongst the other gods? What are their symbols? How do they manifest in the mortal world? We list this information for each deity, as well as providing a detailed description. Players won’t necessarily get to see all this stuff, but it’s useful background for the art and design teams, so that the world feels like a consistent, coherent whole. One other thing to bear in mind: for the most part, our deities aren’t good or evil. They’re somewhere in between – closer to the multi-dimensional gods of the ancient world. Every deity has his or her own agenda, which isn’t bound by notions of alignment. Sometimes they can be helpful and benevolent. Other times – not so much. Woedica – "The Exiled Queen" All the preceding info is important, but I wouldn’t want to leave you without revealing an actual example... A lot of my design ideas start with a visual image. That applies to characters, locations, even narrative. I’m not sure where most of them come from, but examining them more closely will usually lead me to develop stories to explain who they are and where they came from. One of the first images that sprang to mind was an old woman – a dethroned queen – wandering along an empty road in tattered finery. Despite whatever horrors she had suffered, she maintained a certain stubborn dignity, and she carried a heavy book of law. I felt like this goddess could cover a range of portfolios, and I liked the idea that the deity who was the "rightful ruler" of the gods (in her mind, at least), had lost her throne. That may have some interesting implications for the way in which mortals view the world. So what was her story? According to her followers, she had once claimed rulership over all the other gods. But if that was true, she was cast down in the far distant past. Among the other gods, she has no real allies, believing that all the gods owe her fealty. She claims the portfolios of law, rightful rulership, memory, and vengeance. And she manifests in the world as the Strangler, a leathery-skinned old woman, always clad in tattered finery, who appears on an empty road or abandoned alleyway to murder those who break a solemn oath. Her Aedyran name is Woedica, which evokes the “Old English” feel of the Aedyran language. (Maintaining a distinct sense of national/ethnic language and culture is important to us – more about that in a later update.) There’s a lot more to tell about the Exiled Queen and the other gods (some of which aren’t even “human”). But that should give you a taste of our creative process. We’ll have plenty more to say about world-building in future updates.

/headdesk Can you give me a couple of the kb shortcuts you were using? I'll compare the code from their previous release and see if they nuked 'em.

...and the new patch is here with the quote headers!

Hail, elves. It's been a while since we've had a mechanics update, so I'd like to cover a variety of topics today: the basics of our "non-core" classes, our cooldown system (or lack thereof), an update on how attacks are resolved, and another update on the evolution of our armor system. I'd also like to show you a dungeon tileset test render and some sweet shakycam of some of the combat basics running in engine. Non-Core Classes We've previously discussed the design of our "core four" classes: fighter, priest, rogue, and wizard. The non-core classes are the other seven: barbarian, paladin, ranger, druid, monk, chanter, and cipher. Like the core four classes, the non-core classes all start the game with two active or modal abilities and one passive ability. When it comes to the balance of active/modal and passive options, the classes generally reflect their D&D counterparts, with spellcasters having more active use abilities and weapon-based classes being oriented toward more passive or modal abilities. Even so, it will be possible to push a spellcaster toward more passive talents and to optionally buy more active/modal abilities for traditionally low-maintenance characters. While all classes will have many more abilities as they advance, here are some basic elements for each of the seven classes. Barbarians can use Wild Sprint a limited number of times per day, allowing them to rapidly rush across the battlefield to a distant target while ignoring hazards along the way. Paladins have limited healing capabilities, but their Revive command allows them to instantly snap an unconscious ally awake with a large Stamina boost. Rangers' animal companions are so closely bonded to their masters that they share Stamina and Health pools, which can be both a blessing and a curse. Druids can Shapeshift into animal forms, gaining natural -- and some supernatural -- abilities associated with those creatures. Monks absorb a portion of incoming damage and convert it into a Wounds resource they can use to power their soul-based abilities (such as Stunning Blows) through any weapons they use, including unarmed strikes. Chanters begin the game with a number of phrases they can arrange to form songs with different effects. Aefyllath Ues Mith Fyr is a phrase that causes allies' weapons to emit magical flames. Cipher powers often gain intensity as they maintain focus. Their basic Mind Jab starts as a minor irritant but can build to inflict devastating damage. Cooldowns Early on, some folks asked about cooldowns and both Tim and I agreed that we weren't opposed to using them in some form if it made sense for our mechanics. To be more explicit about it, the only way in which we are currently using anything cooldown-like is for per-encounter and per-rest abilities. Per-encounter abilities can be used a number of times in an encounter and are then disabled until combat ends. Per-rest abilities can be used a number of times after resting before you must rest to recover them. We've previously discussed grimoire-switching for wizards possibly invoking a cooldown. It's more likely that grimoire-switching will be limited through the inventory system and not by a cooldown. We also have modal abilities that can be turned on and off at will, with some abilities being exclusive to others, meaning you can only have one active at a time. Attack Resolution I've talked about this a bunch on the forums, but not in an update. All attacks in Project Eternity compare the attacker's Accuracy value to one of four defenses: Deflection (direct melee and ranged attacks), Fortitude (body system attacks like poison and disease), Reflexes (area of effect damage attacks), and Willpower (mental attacks). A number between 1 and 100 is generated to determine the attack rules. If the Accuracy and target defense are the same value, these are how the results break down: 01-05 = Miss 06-50 = Graze 51-95 = Hit 96-100 = Critical Hit A Hit is the standard damage and duration effects, a Graze is 50% minimum damage or duration, a Critical Hit is 150% maximum damage or duration, and a Miss has no effect. In a balanced Attack and defense scenario, the majority of attacks wind up being Hits or Grazes. If the Accuracy and defense values are out of balance, the windows for each result shift accordingly, while always allowing for the possibility of a Graze or a Hit at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Damage Type vs. Armor Type We've previously talked about how different weapon damage types (Slash, Crush, and Pierce) fare against Damage Threshold (DT) in the game. We implemented that system and found that while it worked well on paper and scaled well, it was unintuitive when put into the game. It was not possible for players to make informed decisions about what weapons to use against a given armor type because doing so required making relative damage vs. DT calculations for all weapon types, i.e. having a spreadsheet open for comparison at all times. In light of this, we are going to try a more explicit damage type vs. armor type model where armor, regardless of its DT, has a familiar weight classification: Light, Medium, and Heavy. Damage types are either good or bad against a given weight classification. When a damage type is "bad" against an armor type, it does half damage before DT is applied, making it very inefficient. Within the "good" types of damage, there's still an efficiency curve against DT for meticulous players to figure out, but it has less impact than avoiding "bad" damage types in the first place. Energy-based attacks (like most spells) oppose a different characteristic of the armor, its substance type (Natural, Armor, or Spirit) and like damage types, have good and bad opposition characteristics. Weapon bonus damage that is energy-based is applied to the target separately, but at a fractional DT value matching the bonus damage. E.g. if a sword has a fire effect that does +15% the sword's damage, it is opposed by 15% of the target's Damage Threshold. Tileset Trials and Tribulations Environment artist Sean Dunny has been experimenting with building tilesets for our dungeons. "Tilesets?!" you may be saying (or thinking). It may be a surprise, but many Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment levels started from a tileset or modular unit base. We use these tilesets to generate basic renders for testing layout, navigation, and combat. Once we like the basic layout, we refine it by adding additional "meta" (special) tiles, modifying the tiles individually in the layout, adding lights, and of course having an artist do a 2D touchup pass. That's all for this week. Thanks for reading! Update by Josh Sawyer

Looks like that header citing isn't in this version... it's coming in the next forum revision. Errp!

So... since you're here. I just tried using it. I'm getting the quote box, but not the "quoted from" portion. I'm using Firefox 18.0.1. Cleared cache and did a hard reset. As in, I'll see the box where the quote is but I don't see who worte it. Edit: So I tried doing some nested quotes. Can't really see who wrote what until after it's published. For some reason the code is missing the 'cite' on top of each quote. Looking into why that is...

Thanks Spider - I added a version param to the editor's JS. Hopefully that'll fix everyone up!

If you're using Chrome (which seems to be showing the old one - I can't repro on IE, FF, or Opera) try this: Ctrl-Shift-F5. If that doesn't work, this will: Hit F12, then right-click on the Refresh button, and select 'Empty Cache and Hard Reload'.