Time for some news - Epsylon

Again quite some time since the last update. Like always this is mostly due to the fact that we push the work on the game engine before giving some hands on the game itself since we have the goal to get this puppy out of the door somewhere this year. The large part of this news post is therefore included in a separate news post for the game engine and won't be restated here.

Shadows of the forests

Nevertheless some work has been done the game itself. This work consisted mainly on working on the main characters in this case the dragons. A set of high resolution textures has been worked on. The aim on this skin is to make a lifelike and realistic dragon skin one you could imagine crossing your path while taking a stroll in the woods. We tested various methods and settled for a nice solution providing not only a good looking skin but also a reusable one ( the system, not the skin ). Dragons in the game have a similar or nearly equal base skin color ( for the same kinds that is ). Each individual though has a unique skin pattern. You will be able to tell them apart from a distance by looking merely at their skin pattern... that is if you manage to spot these guys. They blend perfectly into forestine environments. Use this as an advantage for those pesky little humans roaming around ;) . The skin is not fully finished yet but the general look is done requiring some touch ups on the feet as well as weeding out seem problems ( done in the end when the skin is ready ). So here the obligate images:

You can find more images in the Epsylon Showcase.

This skin contains now a diffuse, normal, specular and transparency map. The normal map consist currently only of the detail normal map. The geometry normal map is going to be made using a sculpted version of the model. It's the first time I used the sculpt tool of Blender3D and it works nice so far :D

HDRR Update

The HDRR received an update to tackle the problem with the tone mapper. More about this in the news post for the engine itself. Here an image showing the results. Shadowing is ticked off so it's better visible.

Surprise Bag

Now that the engine is getting closer to the final shape more time can be spend for the game play related tasks. We are not going to say more currently about the new system the player is going to receive to help him unravel the mysteries. So much we can though say ( and give you something to speculate until the next update ) that the system is named PeCopA. The next time we are going to show you what it up with this new system :D ( happy guessing ).

M.I.A.

This is a little unfortunate but as it looks our newest member got missing in action. Since a long time communication dropped to zero ( not a problem from our side ). What happened and why he vanished is completely unknown. The work spot is therefore open again for all interested people. Nevertheless we will push this forward. The war is not over yet so count with us in the future :D