<b>It's tuesday already, so we're starting to run a bit behind schedule.. here's Sneak Peek #5!</b>
This past week has been a week of a variety of things, and yet of nothing in particular. It was a week of bushes, boats, bridges, brainstorms about biofuels, and branches. There were other things, such as rocks, reeds and raw materials, but their names did not fit well into the last sentence. Other than arranging the words according to their first letter, we are afraid that there is not much of a theme to discover in this week’s sneak peek. In absence of such a common denominator, we will resort to simply showing you whatever is close enough to completion to be shared.
<b>The reed farm</b>
My honourable colleague <a contenteditable="false" data-ipshover="" data-ipshover-target="<___base_url___>/index.php?/profile/12323-despo20/&do=hovercard" data-mentionid="12323" href="<___base_url___>/index.php?/profile/12323-despo20/">@despo20</a> has spent most of this week working on the next part of the reeds and grasses chain; the as of yet unnamed reed farm. Due to limitations in the game code regarding the spawning of resources on the river banks, we spent a long time testing various possibilities for this building. In the end, we decided that the most realistic and historically accurate approach was to go for a boat on the small river, with a bridge connecting the two shores. The building functions similarly to a forester, planting and harvesting reeds in an influence area along the river banks. The associated profession will be a reaper, similarly to the reaper’s shed that gathers grasses. The gathered reeds can be processed by the thatcher or be used for the construction of fish traps. They will also be compatible with the reeds introduced in <abbr title="Colonial Charter">CC</abbr>.
[img]<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_2017_05/ReedFarm1.jpg.88fc38d17be7011b79963a05f7da17d8.jpg[/img]
[img]<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_2017_05/ReedFarm2.jpg.dfad6935af0d268b37dd2242737d1dc9.jpg[/img]
<b>Alternative Rocks</b>
A few weeks ago I have shown some images of rocks in the rivers. This week, we have worked to create suitable meshes and textures for these water rocks. In the process, we have decided to kill two birds with one stone (or two flies in one slap as we say in Dutch), and start an overhaul of the rocks on land as well.
The state of diversity in the original rocks is rather appaling; there are only three meshes and they all have a bland, low-quality grey texture. To improve this, we have done several things; I have created (and am still creating) many different meshes, currently a total of 8, to allow for more diversity. Meanwhile, Despo has created several new rock textures with increasing amounts of moss/algal growth on them, for some colour variation. Lastly, a trick in the coding allows us to spawn each mesh at several different sizes, multiplying the number of variants we can create.
The result of this is that with just these 8 meshes, we have managed to create 12 unique variants for the water rocks (flat meshes with heavy algal growth textures only), and 36 unique variants for the land rocks (all meshes, with low and medium moss growth textures), a selection of which is shown in the second screenshot.
<a class="ipsAttachLink ipsAttachLink_image" data-fileid="2350" href="<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_2017_05/Rocks2.png.218a03f352e066351093946246763660.png">[img]<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_2017_05/Rocks2.thumb.png.7d59a5b2f827b50fc3fb8ac164ca60b8.png[/img]</a>
<a class="ipsAttachLink ipsAttachLink_image" data-fileid="2351" href="<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_2017_05/Rocks.png.b4f7938c7cad0b04e89b0f5dcaa379dc.png">[img]<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_2017_05/Rocks.thumb.png.f36e7d2b4e0bf0b386162f61eebce9b2.png[/img]</a>
<b>That concludes this week’s preview!</b> We’ve been working on many other things in the past weeks, including the things we mentioned at the start of this post but didn’t show. We are not quite ready to share those, but they will be shown in subsequent sneak peeks!
