Today we had our sprint presentation meeting where most of our activities of the past weeks were presented and discussed. Here are some of the highlights:

The worldbuilder team has been hard at work with the remake of the dungeons and fixes related to this. They’ve been testing the new lighting system out and have also been testing the new spawns placed around the world. They have concluded the remaking of clan cities and hamlets and are going to start testing these as well.

The art team has finished with full sets of new assets including new trees for the arctic regions, some of which are as tall as 300 meters (~1000feet), new flags and banners to be placed around the world, and new ruins. New monsters have been created like the Imp, a monster that likes to support the Devils. The artists are also working on the female variations of the new armors and they’re finishing the clan wonders. We got to see several very cool new monster animations including a work-in-progress of the animation for Agon’s largest monster, the one we mentioned before that takes up an entire area by itself. New hairstyles for player characters are also being created. The art team has evaluated all updated clan cities and our Art Director Henning Ludvigsen reported that they look and work great. Finally, all tree textures have received updates.

The big news of the day was about the new siege system. This has been completely rewritten and is ready for testing. It is completely configurable on our end, every parameter can be adjusted. It puts an end to self-sieging and allows for multi-sieging. The system being completely configurable, has us turning to the community for feedback on many of these parameters, so it’s an area where we expect to be work with our players to get it just right. We’ll start the discussion on this very soon.

Some more work has been done on the new Darkfall information system/ interactive map: NPC cities, Chaos cities and bindstones have been added to the map. Relationships between clan holding owners will be shown as well as clan relationships; this way you can compare and match common allies or enemies. Finally you can focus in on a detailed top-down view of villages and NPC cities, which displays all points of interest such as vendors, workstations, banks etc.

More news from the programmers has to do with improved blood splatter behavior. We watched a demonstration of blood splatter following the direction of each hit and spraying onto surfaces and on the ground in a very realistic manner.

The designers report that phase one for all Racial and Capital quests has been completed. Phase one had to do with the order of the quests, the planning out of goals, spawns and items included in the quests, vendors involved etc. New NPC vendors have been prepared and they are all based on the new character models. All spawns and points of interest for racial and central areas have also been completed, with the subcontinents following next. We saw a very cool layout for the new central demon dungeon and a rough first version of it that has been built for testing. The dungeon takes up an entire area measuring about one square kilometer. The next step as far as the dungeon goes has to do with concept art for the different areas inside the dungeon. We also saw concept art for the new Celestial Mountains.

More work on the new lighting system was presented. We now have HDRL (High Dynamic Range Lighting). This effect enables us to display a wider range of light and dark than before. You can see evidence of some of the new lighting system in the screenshots included below this activity report.

Finally there was a presentation of the newest updates in Darkfall’s new audio system: Monsters will play back sounds according to what state they’re in (searching, surprised, winning, losing etc.). There is continuous randomization of the environmental sounds, smooth changes through different terrains, and weather changes will affect environmental sounds. The music system is ready now, music won’t play always but on occasion to enhance the ambiance of an area and new music for this is being made on a daily basis. Reverberation has been added, now each area will have different echo properties implemented on all sounds. Filtered effects have been added, like the underwater effect. There is a new emitter system that’s more stable and consistent with better sound distribution. The combat sounds are also being tweaked according to the type of weapon. Finally, our audio quality checking is using specialized tools that implement the European Broadcast Union instructions. The result of all these changes will be a much improved immersion effect and audio experience for Darkfall players.

Due to unforeseen circumstances the patch scheduled for this week has been postponed until next week.

Thank you for reading.

Here are Screenshots of the new Mahirim model wearing the new Barbarian Armor in scenery using Darkfall’s new lighting system (work still in progress).