Gameplay and engine work in progress news - Epsylon

Not much has been said or screenshots presented in the last time. This has not much to do with people not working in the project but simply the work beeing not that presentable as some aspects of game development can be. Here once again a short summary of what is going on behind the scenes.

On the engine side more work goes into expanding the abilities of the engine in terms of rendering as well as optimizing stuff to crank up framerates.

The most note worthy upcoming change is the implementation of a better world system. It will allow to roam an entire world of the size of the earth surface and far beyond it without loading times or slowdowns. The system used provides mod makers with a single scene object to encapsulate the entire world. To gain the needed speed a Scene Graph Module is introduced to handle the management of such a scene. Building a huge landscape with caves or sky rocketing buildings is possible without a lot of effort. This system is in progress at the time beeing.

Another upcoming change is the integration of Blender3D into map creation process. I decided to not implement full 3d modelling capabilities into the map editor in favor of using Blender3D for this job which is by far better suited. Mappers will be able to export terrains build in blender as Terrain-Meshes which can then be directly imported into the mapeditor. Some preparation work is conducted at the moment and the new feature should be in the engine soon.

On the side of gameplay I started to implement the player behaviour like using objects like the tranquilizer rifle. Also the Inventory-System and player animation helper systems are progressing. Besides those the Dragon-View Mode has been implemented. This allows the player to see the world with dragons eyes. Furthermore you can also turn your eyes separatly allowing you to see a very large area without moving a single bit. The looking-around mode will also be available for people prefering to play with the chase or movie camera. Dragon-View is not mandatory and can be switched off in the options allowing you to play with the common single-camera view you are used to from first-person-shooters.

On the concept side Grogdon is putting work into creating some previews of the city of Scy-Te, in which you will spend a lot of time. On the model side SiegfriedX fixes some models and tackles new ones to give some more props to throw into the first map.

I close this news-post with a couple of images of the Dragon-View system. This will also show you how far your 'sight' reaches if you turn your eyes. Awareness is the key to success.