Tagged News: tasos flambouras

In the first of what could be a few new takes on the developer journal series, Associate Producer Tasos Flambouras goes to a straight Q&A; of questions he selected from his community. This is obviously a week early of the regular bi-weekly timeslot, not that any fans will complain, I am sure.

Community: With the more advanced AI of enemy monsters, how relentless will they be when it comes to pursuit? Will they follow us a set duration of time or distance, would they be smart enough to stop if we ran to a city? Also, along a similar line, if an enemy monster is outnumbered and out matched will it flee to find nearby allies?

Tasos Flambouras: They'll follow you around but they won't follow you forever, they'll return to their area. They will call for help, and they'll also flee when the odds are stacked up against them or if they're damaged. The AI constantly assess the situation and will react accordingly but not in a consistently predictable manner. This is something I have personally never enjoyed in other MMOs that I've played, but it's fun fighting AI in Darkfall.

Read the Q&A; after the click.

In the latest Darkfall developer journal, we get a status update from Associate Producer Tasos Flambouras and he promises to chime in with a community driven Q&A; style developer journal next time.

Anyway, since the last journal some people had a few precious days off to go home and spend the holidays with their families. This year we had a very short break, less than we've ever taken, trying to get back to the loads of work waiting for us. We're regrouping now getting back to work on some really awesome new equipment. We've been doing a lot of work around the office setting everything up to run as it should. The new equipment has been helping to speed up the remaining tasks and making our lives a little easier with a lot of things. A sound studio is being set up on-site to help with the final sounds for the game. Also at the moment, we're building a new server cluster.

Read more after the click.

In the final developer journal of the year, Tasos Flambouras chimes in with answers to a bevy of community questions. Topics include arrow physics, solo-ability, trophies and much more.

We also get three exclusive screenshots of the game that show off an Ork female, Human male and Alfar female respectively all in monster armor. There is an image on each of the three pages of this extensive article.

Ork Female (Exclusive)

In another post the uniqueness of Darkfall's characters was put into question by one of the posters. We've talked about this many times in the past, and I think that in testing where most of our screenshots are taken from we don't pay so much attention to modifying or dressing up our characters so you end up seeing a lot of the same stuff all the time. We won't implement character creation morphing because we're shooting for performance during massive battles, rather than spending time drawing everyone's uniquely disfigured character. Still...we've done everything possible to give your character variation and uniqueness and your character will definitely stand out in a crowd if you want him/her to. Henning took some quick screenshots with some new facial / hairstyle / equipment variations of characters exclusively wearing armor they looted off of monsters. The female ork is wearing face paint and angra skeleton shoulder pads, beastman bracers, and a servants of Malaut girdle, and revenant greaves. The Alfar female is wearing face paint, zombie shoulder pads, hobgoblin bracers, and Ciel Fey boots. The human male is wearing face paint, black knight shoulder pads, gloves, girdle and boots, and a hobgoblin helmet. That's a tar lake behind the alfar by the way.

Read more after the jump.

Due to the perils of email file transfer, this article appears on Monday as opposed to its regularly scheduled Friday slot. Nonetheless, Tasos Flambouras gets us up to date on a slew of the latest questions the community has been asking in our regular bi-weekly developer journal.

All this work is making it hard to release more updates than what you get in this journal and even this is a stretch. We made an effort last week and got some screenshots from siege testing and released more later in the week on our website. We'll keep trying to make more frequent updates as time permits. We want to give you videos, and we will, as soon as we can get around to it.

The last journal raised some questions which I think need answers...

Read more after the click and our apologies for the delay.

In today's developer journal, Associate Producer Tasos Flambouras takes us through three big issues he's seen discussed in the community lately: the economy, prestige classes and much more.

Every other Friday, Flambouras presents a developer journal that updates the progress of Darkfall here on WarCry.

On remapable keys: You can absolutely remap everything.

On Invisible hiding: There is no invisibility or stealth skill built into the game. You can be stealthy using actual player skill and using the right equipment and movement, and hide as to not be detected moving in.

On the related issue of having radar: The only radar is one that shows you your own party. No other radar exists in Darkfall. You can add your own map markers and customize your map, and some quest information will add map markers for you.

Read more after the click.

We've got some more Darkfall for you today. Associate Producer Tasos Flambouras muses on potential publishing options and business models for Darkfall and then brings some brief descriptions of clan cities and what they're all about.

A major concern right now is publishing. We're still looking at both options of self publishing and accepting one of a few specific publisher options. We have strong arguments for either scenario. We hoped we'd be done by now with a final decision and we're not, so to compensate we've been moving forward and working on setting things up as to not waste any time. We've actually come a long way and we should be able to settle on what's best very soon.

Read more after the jump.

Darkfall Associate Producer Tasos Flambouras gets back to the journal writing this week after a brief hiatus and discusses the nitty-gritty details the team has gotten into recently. Game development is often seen as a dream profession, but in this update, he reminds people of all the things they need to do that are a little less cool.

Overall, we're on track as much as we can be. We've been plagued by various physical bugs, health issues, equipment failures, but nothing seems to be able to keep us from the mind-blowingly boring tasks of QA, and adding content that have become our daily routine for the past few months. On top of all that, we're having a hell of a time getting some positions filled. We have a very high standard, and while we're getting a lot of applications in, it's not easy finding the right people.

Right now, it's all about the millions of little things.

Read more after the jump.

This week, the Darkfall developer journal series continues with a brief, but enlightening entry on recent events at Aventurine SA. This last week saw a fan - Asp of the Lords of Death guild - visit the studio and Flambouras also reveals that they now have a specific Beta date chosen. Although, he isn't yet in a sharing mood on that front.

Asp from the Lords of Death guild visited us today. He was in a neighboring country on business and he made the trip down to meet us, see what we're up to, and to hang out. We were hoping to maybe give him a small beta preview but he couldn't delay his visit until Monday for our beta build to be up again. We talked about city building, conquest, tactics, the economy, griefing, clan cities, alignment, racial balance, and a lot more. He met several of the developers and saw some of the work. We let him play our demo to get a feel for the gameplay. Asp has played pretty much every MMOG out there since Ultima Online, and his reaction really elevated our spirits, made us remember what our goal is: to hopefully blow you away. We don't get that many visitors around here so it was great meeting with him. I believe he's going to write something on his impressions when he gets back home.

Read more after the jump.

The bi-weekly Darkfall developer journal series moves to a new day as we continue with our coverage of this game. Associate Producer Tasos Flambouras will continue his updates every other week in this space, but from here on out, it will be on Friday.

In this issue, he gives us a general development update.

There are a few AI issues having to do with the AI configuration which are being fixed. Some animation blending bugs have been fixed. Animation blending as in the character jumping for example involves three different animations.

We're continuing to make tools lessening the need for human interaction with the data which leads to less inconsistencies and more speed for the developers. We're making more worldbuilder tools to automate production, and server monitoring tools for statistical analysis of the data.

Read more after the click.

After a few weeks on hiatus, we're back with a brand new exclusive Darkfall developer journal. In this new issue, Tasos Flambouras brings us up to date on all that's gone on behind the scenes since he last had a chance to write.

We're working on hardware compatibility and hardware support issues. There are some minor problems with some older NVIDIA cards which are being addressed. Some Z fighting issues are also being dealt with at the moment. Z fighting is basically a graphical glitch where you get some flickering in areas where polygons meet or are placed too close together. It has to do with world building and the placement of objects.

We're building tools for ourselves to automate data integrity testing, and to report inconsistencies in the content.

Read more after the click.