Another week has reached it’s end and work continues on all fronts. Tasos has been occupied with business meetings and based on discussions we have had all week as well as his notes we gathered all the information and compiled the following update, with the help of the development team.

It’s worth mentioning that since Monday a dedicated Project manager has been added to the team and we are expecting a couple more new arrivals next week. This is very important for us as it will allow team members to focus on specific tasks rather than spread themselves too thin trying to fill any gaps in the group.

On our on going tasks, the persistence feature has moved on to the testing phase. Implementation of the new markets continues and we now have some initial concept sketches of how they will look. We will share them as soon as our artists are done with them, but rest assured that we are aiming for something that will be aesthetically pleasing as well as provide good functionality.

Our engine programming team is also working hard on the aesthetics of the game and we have had some new shaders created for the new training area. Of course they may be used in other locations in the game as they look amazing. Also, SMAA  has been added to the game engine. For those of you that have not heard of it, it’s an antialiasing system that is quite new and extremely fast while providing very good results.

Weapon Ranks concept

Speaking about the training area, our world builders have complete the main layout but there is still some work to be done to bring it to life. The result is very impressive and we feel the area will be a great introduction to the game visually as well as game-play wise.

First four ranks of Militant Great Axe

Also our art team is working, among other things, on modeling the new weapons. You may remember the concept of weapon ranks. Now you can see the actual models for the first four ranks of the Militant style of Great axes. Keep in mind that this is just one of the styles of weapons that Darkfall 2.0 will offer. There are six styles with nine ranks each so you can understand there is quite a lot of visual diversity in the game.

Since we are on the topic of crafting, we have a few more details about the philosophy behind the new system and some examples of how it works.

As we mentioned in a previous update, rare ore plays a major role in crafting. Apart from being used for crafting weapons and armor, rare ore is also used to infuse other materials like wood and leather. Higher ranks of items require one of the infused variants of the specific material. The infusing task falls onto the relevant conversion profession. You are already familiar with the conversion professions of smelting and woodcutting. Smelting is used to convert raw ore to ingots of the specific metal. Woodcutting, apart from converting timber to wood, is now also used to infuse wood with rare ore to produce materials like selentine wood.

We are also adding two new conversion professions, tanning and weaving. Skinning does no longer produce leather ready for use in crafting, but raw hides. These need to be cured to become usable leather. As an example, combining raw hides with selentine ore produces selentine leather. Finally, cloth, which can now be crafted, will be made with the weaving profession. The herb gathering nodes have changed and they now produce cotton which can be processed into cloth, or infused with rare ore to produce materials like selentine cloth.

The reasoning behind all this is having a system that rare materials are proportionally distributed across all professions, players have more options and ways to combine them as well as create more crafting and market opportunities. The image below gives some examples of the process.

Examples of material conversion