Monday, February 17, 2014

Who Knows Where The Time Goes? : EQN Landmark



Oh heck! Another day gone and what have I got to show for it?

Well, I learned how to make an archway - after a fashion. I also learned how to superimpose a texture on pre-existing terrain, and how to extract a texture from pre-existing terrain and superimpose it on something else. That kept me amused for hours.

I also taught myself how to distress and deform voxels to simulate weathering. Fine in theory although in practice it's a bit like a Minor Threat gig - too many straight edges. Still, pretty shabby if I do say so myself.

SOE did something to the day/night cycle recently. I'm sure I never saw those clouds before or not in those colors. It had a side effect of ramping up the intensity of torches and other lighting effects to the point where you need to wear sunglasses indoors. Which, naturally, I do all the time anyway. All we hyper-cool '50s and '60s cats wear shades after dark.

It was never my intention to build some kind of Thomas Crown Affair mountaintop hideaway, all right angles, cutaways and vertiginous drops from the terrace. It just happened.

Certainly if I'd planned it I'd have had the terraces descending in extending tiers, not overlapping each other and casting constant shade. It did, however, give me the chance to learn how to excise a massive chunk of masonry and cut and paste another chunk in its place.

At the moment a great deal of the interest, what I guess you might call the "gameplay", comes from learning to use the tools. They're pretty limited and I don't know how much that's down to Alpha and how much is voxels. I've seen a good few complaints on the forums suggesting that Voxelfarm, the licensed software that Landmark uses, can be a good deal more flexible than we're seeing so far so my bet's on "it's Alpha, dummy!"





Dead grass in my planter. I live in the desert and we don't have water yet so what can you do? Another thing I learned today was how to use Alt-Select to grab textures that aren't in the standard gimme set. Doesn't help much. I can see live, green grass from my claim that looks very much as though it's in the same biome but can I get it to grow on my patch? Can I heck as like!

So there we go. I'm quite scared, I'm not ashamed to admit it. I've been here before after all. Barely any of the good stuff is in yet and already days are vanishing like summer mist. If they give us Storybricks I may never be seen again.

9 comments:

  1. The Storybricks implementation is the thing I'm most interested in seeing in EQNext. It sounds really impressive.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Smed says it's the "special sauce". I guess we'll get a taste of it in beta.

      Delete
  2. Not ashamed to admit i giggled at the Minor Threat comment.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Fairport Convention and Minor Threat in the same blog post. I blame it on John Peel.

      Delete
  3. wow your textures look so much better than mine... so jelly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My PC is only just above minimum spec, too. Landmark is running decently in Very High/Ultra but anticipate issues when mobs and combat arrive. Already expecting to need to upgrade at least the video card.

      Delete
  4. So how long did that take to complete?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's actually a very hard question to answer. If you discount all the false starts, messing around, trying to get the tools to work, watching YouTube vids and reading the alpha forums and only count the time spent building, not the time spent gathering the mats both to make the structure itself and the tools, than I've probably spent somewhere between 12 to 15 hours on it.

      If you add in all the stuff I left out then probably three times that long. It took me nearly six hours just to find the Sapphires to make my Line Tool and Cobalt Pick back before they made Sapphires easier to find...

      Delete
  5. Great work. Can't wait to get back from my business trip to get back to "work"

    ReplyDelete

Wider Two Column Modification courtesy of The Blogger Guide