06/02/2009    |    Devlog    |    Xenobia    |    Discuss

It has been a while since anyone has heard a peep out of me. I do some of my best work entertaining fans at PAX and GenCon as Captain Sassypants, but since those only happen once a year I suppose I actually have to do some real work in the off season.

Today I bring to you: Role Play Rooms! We’ve been listening a lot to our role-player community recently, and they have been asking for some spaces that they can use purely for RP events. As a result, in 1.16, you will have your very own locales to hang out in and talk the talk, or dance the dance. Look for one in your nation’s capital!

We decided to look for existing spaces that we could re-use for this purpose, as creating new rooms takes a lot of time, but we didn’t want the new RP spaces to look identical to existing rooms in the game. The challenge was working out how to make them look different without changing any of the room geometry or re-doing the lighting. Either of those tasks would increase the size of the patch significantly, which is something we try to avoid. Luckily for us, there is a neat feature in our game editor that allows us to swap out one texture for another while leaving the underlying room intact.

Time for a little demonstration you say? Well, okay! Let’s say that I want to take a room, like say the Freetrader room (see below), and I want to make the beams a different color. The first step is to figure out which texture goes with what. Each room has a long list of textures associated with it, and sometimes the name of the texture does not match the item that it colorizes. When an artist is making a room they usually group objects together that are using the same texture. This makes my job a lot easier when I go to swap colors. So, once I know the order, then I flip through the available textures and see what looks good!

Before	After

In theory that is all there is to it, but I take extra time thinking about colors and the way they can make a room feel more open. As I am sure you are aware, there are a lot of dark rooms in Pirates of the Burning Sea. Re-coloring rooms allows me to have some control over that and lets me show off some of the amazing details our artists have put into these environments.

Before: French Ballroom	After: Salle De Danse

I also take into consideration what would pass as appropriate for the time period. I highly doubt they had bright pink flower wallpaper in the 1720s…

Before: Tavern 4	After: Lugar De Encuentro

While this technique is relatively quick to do, it does come with its fair share of hitches. Because of the way that some objects in the room are unwrapped by the artists it can sometimes limit me in terms of which textures I can switch them to. When it does not work, the texture will stretch horribly or it will tile on the object in an unattractive way.

Before: Pirate Dance Hall	After: Kidd’s Retreat

You may have noticed that the shops in many towns have had color facelifts. BSharp and I went through and made several color variations for the shops using the process I just described. We have plans to implement this treatment to many other interior rooms, but we first have to make sure that there are no conflicts with our mission content. For example, if the Magistrate’s Office in a town is sometimes instanced specifically for a mission in that town, we either can’t recolor the Magistrate’s Office in that town or we have to do it in the town and in the mission.

Before: Freetrader	After: The Captain’s Club

It is my hope that using this technique more can free up time for the Environment Team to make more new rooms, and that perhaps I can go into some of the older missions and make some color variations to interiors that are used a lot. There’s nothing like polishing up an old coin and making it look shiny and new again!

06/02/2009    |    Devlog    |    Xenobia    |    Discuss