Fireheart wrote:

Clever visuals appear invisible. (11/16)
Yeah, it seems one should never take an individual Rook, or a group of them, completely for granted. They may have a surprise in their pocket.
Be Well!
Fireheart

*kicks it*
Try now.

While I'm genuinely clueless what 'rubberman aesthetic' is even supposed to mean here, I do know that we still have not cooked up the shader settings that will make our game render into a specific feel and style that will be unique to us. So I suppose it is preliminary in some ways. We're at last able to focus on quality of appearance, but not on the ultimate visual style of the game.

desviper wrote:

Dunno if I'm digging the rubberman aesthetic the visuals are tending towards. Are these preliminary?

That's all in the shader and subsurface setup, which are going to be one of the last things we set down. (as that is polish)

Good question. I assumed still kind of preliminary, but it's good to hear it from devs.

I am still very stoked to get into this game whenever we get it. Thanks guys

Looks great! The animations seem pretty smooth too. Can't wait to see the character model with all the textures/shaders turned on!

I like the update. I don't know what the shader/subsurface effects will do, when they're there, but I would ask you to take a look at the faces that Guild Wars 2 has. They did those pretty well. The eyes look good, at least on the humans I made, for example. But that's a finished product, I get that this is preliminary.

Edit: the animation also makes the guy look like he's out of breath, because he's apparently breathing very hard, and is he wearing a checkered curchief, or is is scalp painted like that? And is the mohawk his real hair, or part of the `chiff?

I really like the concept of the Rooks. It makes sense that at some point people would start trying to achieve superpowers of their own to some degree, and I imagine many of them even succeed.

Cinnder wrote:

I kinda like the wee animated dude. I'm assuming this is just a prototype, but I like the fact that he feels kinda familiar, as if he escaped our old city and made his way to a more hi-res neighbourhood.

I don't know why, but this comment made me laugh. Thank you for brightening my day a little. :)

Brainbot wrote:

I really hope that is not the case because final art style can have a HUGE impact on a lot of other aspects in the development. Particle effects, lighting, textures, costumes, animations, locations, ect all are affected by the final art style. Even the tone of the game itself is largely influenced by the art style.
I can understand perfectly not releasing information on the final art style until the game nears completion (though I would really hate it if they did) but if they didn't have at least a pretty good idea at this point what it would be then I would be surprised and disappointed.

I'm not the best person to explain this, and Doctor Tyche may need to correct me on this. We know what sort of style we're aiming towards, for certain, but it's an on paper thing. Now yes, animations and FX designs will follow that direction we figured out. We know how we want the game to feel.

What is the last layer, is basically a bunch of rendering settings. The right rendering settings can make the same set of assets and characters look very different - we can literally make the difference between gritty Gotham and shiny Metropolis this way, and that example is quite deliberate: Gotham of DCUO, without its render settings, looks like Sim City. Bright flat colors. That's how powerful these are. It can't change the shape but it can and will affect the texture and appearance of clothes. Once everything is there, so we can see the whole results, we start working on a set of render settings that get the result we want.

The easiest comparison to think of might be Photoshop filters. Ever tried applying a few of those to an image? Startling how powerful those can be and what kinds of changes they can create. They can literally turn a picture into a painting. And our render settings can do this in 3D.

*scratches head* I'm not sure how important it being liked will actually be, but if you have an imgur account and liked the gif, it would probably be helpful to hit the upvote button. I'm not sure why it's getting *downvotes* since I made it public. Maybe people downvote more casually there than on youtube.

Very nice! Excellent to see some fleshed out looking characters even if they are just common mooks. Speaking of which I love how your using old titles/ranks for enemy mobs, makes it feel more nostalgic and CoH like. IE Skull Slammer and whatnot.

In CoX, the spawns were identifiable at a glance. For example, in the group The Lost, all the scrounger brawlers had red spiky hair, all the Scrounger Gunners had a trashcan lid on their chest, and all the Mutate Slammers had TVs on their heads. Will you be mixing things up a bit between different NPC models and sexes, or do you intend to follow through with the same 1:1 ratio of model to powerset?

There's a lot to be said for knowing what you're getting into

That's absolutely true. I would love to see a bit of variation within the models though if possible. Even if it's just to denote Danger, Will Robinson. A TV-head-guy with a bat and a TV-head-guy with a chain that drips fire are two different antagonists, and probably something I wouldn't want to mess up - but getting to look for that difference and remember getting my ass beat by jumping in on a flaming chain situation without proper forethought is always a nice touch.

You guys have a LOT of antagonists to fill out, though. It's understandable if everyone can't be a unique snowflake.

As has been mentioned, this was not the finished product, which will likely look better, hopefully have less huffing and puffing, and maybe have a better, more realistic face and haircut. I take that vid clip to be akin to the "live, guitar not really tuned, drummer still hung over, no bass at all, lyrics still subject to change, jam session" version of a song. When it's the ALBUM version, it'll get thumbs up, in it's present state, you can tell people "this is a preliminary look" and they'll still act like it's supposed to be the finished product, and thus down vote it. Personally, I don't even like live music as much as the polished album version of the song. This is why I don't by CDs of live shows, and I generally tune people out who try to tell you the live version is "way better" because that's a very subjective thing, and they're usually just trying to make you think they know more about music than you do. To the general public, the album version is always the best version, and that's what we expect when we see anything.

I really like the idea of the Rooks. I really hope that in a clip before a Rook boss fight, there is a top ranked Rook guy in the room playing chess :D

(Maybe a callout to the movie Fresh, have like 4 boards set up all him playing against himself)

Redlynne wrote:

Rook Slammer animation
Human proportions reference
Is it just me, or are the legs of that Rook guy too short for the size of the rest of him? I look at the animation and think he'd be swinging that bat at hip height versus a regular/normal human. Definitely has the "orc" look to him though (all torso, no legs).

They did comment that he was of "huge" stature, maybe he's meant to be one of those naturally ogre-looking builds (I'm looking at you, Brock Lesnar), OR, maybe he's one of the Rooks who "found his edge" in some type of physical augmentation and he's so big he has to swing low to hit a normal human?

Either way, I can't wait to take my brand new, shiny noob baby hero out to tangle with some Rooks!!!

Even in the "How to draw the marvel way" thing, Stan Lee mentions that they do deviate from that formula (7.5 heads tall) from time to time based on the character. The Kingpin is mentioned as only being 5 heads tall, for example. That said, when they do that, they do it for a reason. 7.5 heads is still the rule of thumb, and I would expect more generic run-of-the-mill minions to be very "rule of thumb" unless there's a specific reason they're not for specific ones.

*inserts "Aliens" guy*

Sliders...

No but really, is there a Huge frame or just a bunch of sliders to get you from average to huge? Seems like that would be the ideal. There certainly are a LOT of sliders.

blacke4dawn wrote:

Hopefully both, in a manner of speaking.

I hope we will have a few presets, like small medium large huge or some such while still having sliders that can take us from the smallest possible to the biggest possible as a whole without having to re-choose one of those presets. MWM has at least alluded to having a basic and advanced "mode" when customizing body shape so maybe that could be one of the biggest difference between those modes.

I'll likely just do what I did back in CoH; get a few "base" bodies and presets set up with the character creator, save them, and then use them as templates for future projects.

Hmm... am I right in assuming the reason "...the Black Rose and the Five Dragons, major forces in Titan City’s underworld, [are] mysteriously tolerating their rise" is because when a rook develops a good enough edge they're scouting by other groups? As in, the Rooks are really just a recruitment block for the rest of the city's more dangerous criminal organizations, but are made to appear as something more innocuous. I could be overthinking this, but that would definitely explain why the big boys are leaving them be.

Empyrean wrote:

I did not search-fu this, but I believe MWM said that they were currently planning on having the equivalent of a "huge" build.
Anyway, if there are plenty of sliders, then build options on top of that is gravy (mmmm... gravy).

I think the goal in CoT was to make the base male and female body models be "flexible" enough (via sliders) to effectively allow us to create the "huge" versions for ourselves without having to have any completely specialized body models (like CoH did for the "huge male" model). If they can achieve this then not only will they not have to waste time and effort supporting two unique male models (with all the extra time it took to make two sets of costume items that fit both models) but we'll also by default have the ability to make "huge females" which basically didn't exist in CoH. Two birds... one stone.

What I really want to know is whether the Rooks will be able to move only in straight lines. And will their lesser minions be able to move forward only, but attack diagonally? Until they reach the other side of the map, of course...

Kiyori Anoyui wrote:

Cinnder wrote:
What I really want to know is whether the Rooks will be able to move only in straight lines. And will their lesser minions be able to move forward only, but attack diagonally? Until they reach the other side of the map, of course...
The queen is a ranged that has free range of attack and the king is a PBAoE melee and can only attack those close to him xD

All joking aside it might be cool if the Devs could figure out a scenario where in order to succeed in a mission you'd need to have a team of players that used specific powers to act like pieces on a chessboard. I don't know if you'd have two players actually play chess with all the other "player pieces" or how all that would exactly work - I'm just spit-balling here. Wasn't there a point in one of the early Harry Potter books where the kids had to pretend to be chess pieces in order to solve some kind of puzzle or something?

I hope im not too late to this topic! I freaking love this update and all the information it brings this enemy group could of easily fit in CoH! And there "Edge" seems like the thing you will see more and more as you level like the Lost slowly mutating into Rikti! Or Freakshow more teched out! The model is an awesome concept too very theme fitting. My only thing is isnt the slammer a sledgehammer user? Hehehe :) more hero and villain group break down like this i could read and reread to hype myself. Awesome stuff :D!