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Weekly report #30

The 30th weekly-monthly report is on!

Dear Friends!

We've been silent for a long time. And it has even confused some of you. This is why it’s so nice to reach out to you again and tell you what’s happening in great details since we’ve gathered a lot of materials.

Rebase origin or the war with the windmills

At first, we want to explain why we were silent. The 30th report might have marked the victory over the most complicated problem: it is the coordinates uncertainty when one moves more than 3 km away from the origin (0,0,0). It so happened that the first two counties were shifted by 10 km in the X- and the Y-axes which resulted in the catastrophe regarding the uncertainties. We’ve already discussed in details at our forum what sort of problems such uncertainties brought and told you about the methods for solving them. Also, due to this reason, we had to transition to UE4.22 and went against the road-map.

This is why we just mention here briefly:

  1. The transition to the new engine has been completed successfully;
  2. The unified methodology for shifting the coordinates has already been implemented for all parts of the combat system, except Raycast which is the foundation for the magic of the electric beam, for instance;
  3. As of now while writing this report, we are compiling the build. Tomorrow we will update the status of the pre-Alpha in details. We will walk you through the errors on the way to the stable build and what’s already been fixed.

Now about the content.

[h2]I Jumps[/h2]
If anyone among those who are reading this post thought that we did not realize negative consequences of the current arcade jumps (from the standpoint of animation and flying speed) and the bunny hopping they entail, then we would like to assure you it is not so.

It is just that everything has its time.

It would have been rather fascinating to cut this section of the report right here with the latter statement … No, we are going to discuss what is work-in-progress and what are the plans regarding the jumps:

From the game design standpoint:
  1. There will be two types of jumps: the first one is fast and short, and the second one is with the preparation stage and with the height sufficient to climb obstacles;
  2. One can use the high jump only while ducking, i.e. from the “squatting forward” position;
  3. The squatting will be bound to LCTRL by default. Holding SPACE while pressing LCTRL+W will result in the appearance of the jump bar titled “jump height”. The further the scale is filled, the higher is the jump. If this scale is full by less than 25%, the jump is canceled. This is the protection from misclicking;
  4. Obviously, the filling up of the scale expends the stamina;
  5. The energy consumption for the short jumps will stack, i.e. each consequent jump within N seconds consumes more energy than the previous one. Thus, it will be very easy to immobilize the character if one is not careful enough.

Now here is a GIF of the new fast jump which is currently work-in-progress (draft). Just to illustrate the point:


Changes with physics and animation:
  1. the height of the fast jump is reduced twice compared to the current one;
  2. the vertical acceleration is decreased by 30%;
  3. the in-flight speed, which is equal to the speed of the character at the take-off, is gradually decreasing;

We want to force the players to use fixed jumps and to eliminate the mechanics of the bunny jumping during combat completely by using this complex approach.

[h2]II Dodges and 8th semi-passive slot for buffs[/h2]
They have got some changes as well and they have become more realistic.

1. From the standpoint of physics and animation:


Dodge


Dodge left


Dodge right

Key points:
  1. dodges from all stances have been transferred to mocap data for the bottom part of the body;
  2. the delay after the completion of the dodge has been deleted;
  3. the initial speed of the dodge has been increased;
  4. the distance for dodges to the sides has been decreased to improve realism.

More details are provided in table:


2. From the game design standpoint:
  1. dodges get a short-term buff which grants them certain advantages depending on their direction;
  2. the current buff will occupy and the semi-passive 8th slot which will be introduced to unify several mechanics: leaps, char of the 2nd level, and combined magic.

The 8th slot will be semi-passive since the buffs will appear there only after certain actions which are not related to actual magic casting. For instance:
  1. the 2nd level of the weapon char will allow one to target self with a positive effect (attack increase, a decrease of CD, etc);
  2. the dodges will grant a short-term (< 3 s) increase of the Physical or Magical Defense, and the dispel defense depending on the direction;
  3. the combined magic affects the player even if all his 7 slots for buffs are in use;
  4. certain buffs will grant a chance to receive a certain advantage in the 8th slot similarly to point 1).


[h2]III Lightning[/h2]
We've had enough text already, time for some images.

We are still working with the TrueSky, since, even with some lack of polishing, the technology has a wider functionality from the game design standpoint.

The most important thing is that we’ve made the lighting richer and nights brighter.

We’ve moved the setting to the golden latitude to increase the average duration of the daytime.

10th of March, 13:00

10th of March, 18:00

11th of March, 02:00

11th of March, 02:00

[h2]IV Mobes[/h2]
Today only animations and no description:

1. The skeleton (oh yeah, the belt will be skinned for low/mid settings and it will be processed with apex cloth for max / epic settings)
So far we’ve remade the movement animations (earlier they've been shown in report #26) and added gnashing of teeth:

Idle


Step forward


Run forward

The animations of the attack will be redone from scratch later.

2. Forest


Idle


Sprint


Death


Slow cast


Middle cast with left hand


Middle cast with right hand


Fast cast

[h2]V The Necromancer[/h2]
We talked long enough about the necromancer in the 27th and the 28th reports, we showed work stages. Now we will show his completed set, except the gloves.

We will show how we’re aging the armor with the help of the material using the robe as an example:

Step 1: the geometry with the base material




Step 2: the geometry and the material with the use of a texture with a “worn” alpha-channel (Diffuse map)


Step 3: dirt and dried blood


The rest of the items of his set will be shown for Step 1.

We concluded to have 3 headgears for the Necromancer (I, IV, and VI tiers) after your feedback.

On the 1st tier is only a hood:


In the 4th tier, a death mask split in two pieces and reattached with metallic clamps is added to the headgear:


The 6th tier will feature a crown from metal and bones. However, the 6th and partly the 5th visual tiers of armor will be made later after we finish the 1-3 tiers of other items completely.

Other parts of the set:


Which part of the set do you like the most?

P.S. It should be noted that now we make all the screenshots at brightest lighting of the TrueSky right within the game world. This is why the scene is so full of light, unlike the separate scene we used before.

[h2]VI The Crusader[/h2]
We are remaking the Crusader’s armor for the 5th level, because the armor is not universal for both the old characters and the new ones:


Unlike the Master of Steel, the Crusader on the 5th level has only chainmail, which is the 4th tier out of 6 based on general rules for the visual heaviness of armor.

However, the Crusader’s chainmail will have an increased resistance against magic. In this case, we proceeded with making several colors for future customization.

Regular chainmail with a tabard won’t have symbols of the Crusaders’ school, because it has nothing to do with it. However, it will get rather sympathetic colors:


[h2]VII UI[/h2]
New effects which additionally notify about damage received:


Interface for the guild window:


[h2]VIII Conclusion[/h2]
The best news is for last: during the publication of the current report, we've received a build, where most of the raised issues described in the first part have been tackled.

A dozen of brave men of the ROG Club, who got access to the most classified :) dev-PTR, will receive an invitation to update the game tomorrow. The ROG Club as a whole will join a bit later.

We've removed some content from the report because there is just too much information. However, at last, YO-YO version by ROG:


We will try to make the next report in the video format.

It's Tuesday evening. ROGgoms up, friends, cause now there is a reason indeed!

Yours sincerely,
The team of Reign of Guilds

Weekly report #24

The 24th report wishes you a happy first day of the spring!

And let’s go straight to the report.

[h2]I Level design - dead city[/h2]
We have already told about deserted castles and cities in the previous report. Some of them will be empty and it will give an opportunity to find something interesting and share it with the other treasure hunters - it’s an open world PvP, after all.

But the larger part will be inhabited again. It will be inhabited by the different monsters and lepers.

Lepers are the people who among the first left the villages and towns of Dworran in the period of the Great Poverty. But oddly enough, they created their own camps and settlements, hiding from the tax collectors of the King and the killing squads. We will give more information in one of the next reports.

The screenshots below show the city in the daytime when it’s empty. In the night it will be full of undeads. The road from the Harbour will take about 15 minutes.

It will be the first open instance with the raid boss on the Alpha. The loot will be more qualitative than the vendor’s items.

The walkthrough is under development. On the one hand we don’t want to make it too linear and we want to leave the space for the tactical research. On the other hand, the particular rules of the walkthrough should be kept. But taking into account that the wipe will send the players back to the city and the difficulties with the other treasure hunters we will make it simpler for the Alpha.



[h2]II Mobs animations - red scorpion[/h2]

Meet the first animations of the mobs showed earlier - red scorpion.

Attack


Attack with claws


Appearance


Death


[h2]III Fur work[/h2]

We have already told about our attempts to create the beautiful fur with the minimal FPS losses. There are not so many variants in the industry:
  1. Without fur, using 2.5D material (parallax, for example) that resembles the fur structure;
  2. Polygonal fur;
  3. Nvidia Hairworks.

We’ve tried the last one and it shows an amazing picture. With the first one everything is pretty clear too, but the second one should be tested.

We should painstakingly smoothing the fur polygons by hand. That’s what we get:


After that we got started on the updating of the fur material.

We put both variants to the simplest scene under the in-game TrueSky light. We work on it at the same time)

That’s how it looks like:


We, hand on heart, consider this work on the bear and fur (second way) successfully done.

23 thousands of polygons. We hope that you will like it too.

We do the same work with the wolf fur now.

All optimization measurements, comparisons and conclusions will be included in one of the next report. But there is one predictable spoiler (with the 20 bears on the screen the FPS losses twice smaller than using Nvidia Hairworks). We don’t know if we can reduce the FPS losses with the NHW.

[h2]IV Conclusion[/h2]

In conclusion we talk about around-development:
  1. ROG Club is under NDA (confidentiality agreement) but it doesn’t mean that we develop it secretly or we will prohibit to show the videos (vice versa), but it’s traditional step;
  2. We continue to send the emails with the news. The main aim of it is to move the old Alpha members to the new site and to return those who forgot about our forum;
  3. Follow the news in the topic about pre-Alpha status, the next update is on the Monday or Tuesday.

That’s all!

We congratulate with the coming of spring and the great news from the Reign of Guilds Team ;)

It’s Friday evening - ROGgoms up, friends!

Weekly report #23

The report №23 salutes the followers of ROG development!

We look through the visual and talk about deserted castle, technical moments and take the day off!

Let’s start with the funny things!

[h2]I Stickman animations[/h2]
We continue to make our favourite mob of the ROG more alive, funny and original. We conceive the stickman as a bit otherworldly. That’s how his aggro will look like:



[h2]II Mobs[/h2]
We’re not going to discuss it for a long time because we will show it later together with their animations.

a) Dryad

It’s a forest dweller.



b) Red scorpion

Well, this character is familiar to many of us and it’s going to look like this in the game:



с) Skeletons

Of course they are! Moreover, the undeads will be represented approximately by 10 different kinds of mobs.



[h2]III 3D models - barbarian's armour[/h2]
We're finishing barbarian armor sets as it comes up to release as next profession.

Gambeson and one more original helmet!



[h2]IV Level design - deserted castle[/h2]

Well, a bit of history from the start.

[By the way, ]

Many of you remember that no one knows the story of the Dworran kingdom. But there are the stories of its inhabitant. One of this stories “About the Sovereign” will form the basis for the trailers and all the kingdom will have the echoes of it.

This story tells about the people, their principles, decisions and consequences. An attentive reader has already got that this is the plot depicted on the concept-arts.

Deserted castles, villages and towns of Dworran are the echoes of this story.

Powerful stone constructions look absurdly huge in the underdeveloped and poor regions where only huts and fields around and there is only one mill for a few villages.

This castle was resurrected for one purpose - to suppress the discontent and excitements and retain the power which had become a tyranny.

[***]

Castle is a tumbledown construction comparable to the castles of tier 3 (level 120) in size. You can capture only part of it in the game but the value will differ from the built-in one in the common mechanics “King and counts”. More likely this castles will become instances in the open world.

However, one of this castles, situated near the Harbour city, will serve as an arena for the testing of capture mechanics during the pre-Alpha, Alpha and even Beta-1.

Screenshots below provides the sight of what’s already done at different times of day and with the different atmosphere. The only thing left to do is visuals.




[h2]V Legendary sword[/h2]
And we will finish our report with the pictures:



This is the Legendary two-handed sword (more than 180 cm). This sword was owned by the Sovereign. The model was done for the intro with the name of the game. After this we plan to make 2 videos about the prehistory of this intro.

The picture shows the low-polygonal version of the sword (14 thous.), that will be included in the game. And there will be only one legendary sword. Also the right of possession should be regularly proved, otherwise the sword will be handed to the other great warrior.

[h2]VI Conclusion[/h2]
A little bit about around-development:

  1. An important information about joining the Alpha and applications for ROG Club - at this topic;
  2. Also here we talk about work to do before the launch of pre-Alpha - so we recommend to pay attention;
  3. We fixed a few bugs on the site and increased the speed of working. Now we plan to implement an additional functional gradually:
  4. the users will be able to create the guilds right on the site;;
  5. also they will have an option to design its page (nothing fancy), and leave an application to join;
  6. on the site an account joins a guild, so a guild will have two number indexes: the number of players and the number of characters in the game;
  7. a guild can choose one or the other side (East and West);
  8. the whole guild statistics will be shown further on the site, and also it will be included in the overall statistics of Dworran guilds;
  9. It’s a short description of a functional. We will express our view later. And now we are interested in your opinion on the subject.
  10. Every week we will send the emails to those who joined the Alpha. We will mention that we have a new site and if you want to get the key, you will need to sign up the new site. If these emails annoys you, unsubscribe by the link in the email or into your account on the site.


It’s Friday evening - ROGgoms up, friends!

Yours sincerely,
Reign of Guilds Team

Weekly report #22

A weekly report “a pair of pairs” is out!

This week was hard and we had something to show and to talk about.

Honestly? We are satisfied with the results. So if we’re satisfied you will probably like it.

Let’s follow the beaten path: a little action from the start, then pictures with the text, and a short video in the end.

[h2]I Animations[/h2]
Minotaur

Continuing the report №15 we will show the minotaur’s movements. Before watching a video take into account that he has 3,5-4,5 meters of height.



Death. When such big fellow falls the camera of all players next to this place will be shaken.



Here’s the “ram” that will send a gaping loot hunter to respawn.



Furious cry and stamping. The players’ camera is shaking and the legs give way under him. (We consider the possibility of frightening that will affect the character’s energy within N meters).

[h2]II 3D models - weapon[/h2]
Exclude a weapon editor the game has a solid weapon. You can’t take it to pieces but you can change the stuff of almost all weapons.

With an increase of the average length of a blade - from the daggers to the two-metre zweis:



We’ve already shown the rob models in the report №19. It was included in the Pre-order Bundle. Now it’s time to show the shields, helmets and weapons (from the daggers to the huge two-handed swords).

We remain that it’s only “skins”, i.e. you need to have a game item of an appropriate type (often with level) to use it. After having it you can talk to special NPC to use the skin.




[h2]III Crosshairs[/h2]
Let’s forget about models for a while. Now we call on the comments and discussion. We decided to finish new crosshairs to the pre-Alpha. It will not only hint about the type of weapon in your arms but will also look more suitable for the melee and ranged combat system.



Let’s get this sorted out:
  1. 3 crosshairs are on top for the magic (we’re still choosing but we’re inclined to the left one). Turning it to yourself the upper part of a crosshair will be changed to the icon of character’s silhouette (men and women have different silhouettes).
  2. 6 crosshairs for the melee weapon:

3 on the right “before focusing the aim”;
3 on the left - the crosshair will look like this if you’re successfully focused the aim and it is in the kill zone;
The crosshairs will have different size because different weapons have various kill zone (we talk about the effective casualty radius that’s obtained in accordance with the formula and hidden from the players). The 3 sizes are shown as examples. There could be more sizes - it is under discussion. Or we will divide all weapon types into the 3 types.
There is a cooldown line under the third crosshair (reload or preload). We tried different variants but the line indicates more precisely.

[h2]IV The first step in the Dworran kingdom[/h2]
Well, we’re proud to tell that we finished the important stage - the merging of the main project with the game world. And the most important - we fixed 100% critical errors blocking the certain functional of one of the projects (or both!).

It means that we got close to the pre-Alpha.

Here’s a first short video.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]V Conclusion[/h2]

What do we want to tell in conclusion of the important report?

First of all, the report is late because we didn’t want to post it without the video content. We missed it.

Second, we commit to the pre-Alpha. The timetable is set with the check-points with the maximum of 2 days.

The new mobs, a few funny animations and... a huge deserted castle of the forgotten empire awaits un in the next report.

That’s all! Watch the videos, subscribe to the channel (soon there will be new videos about game mechanics).

It's Friday evening - ROGgoms up!


Yours sincerely,
Reign of Guild Team

Weekly report #21

The report number "Blackjack" is on the air!

Today we get in touch later than usual and on a smaller scale.

The reason is an extremely busy week with the preparation for adding the world to the project. We made it and now the project takes about 130 gb on our hard disks.

In addition - last week we presented the project to one of the funds at this week, so the maximum of errors and bugs were fixed.

And the most important - until the last day we wanted to make a little video showing a gameplay in the new world but we hadn’t enough time.

Now let’s start at the beginning.

I Level design - mines

We continue to work on the structure and atmosphere of the underground space.

The results are shown below. The tree in the daylight is most likely the illusion or beautiful fiction because the mines will be an instance type. It has nothing to do with the open world technically.

The daylight is an unnecessary load with regard to the performance. However, the measurement can change our mind. It can happen that we will afford it without fear of losing FPS.





II 3D models

We returned to a barbarian’s armour. It will be the next vocation to be added in the project.

Screenshots show its gambeson and a helmet of the third tier. The way of barbarian prefers the medium armour.



III Optimization

Before implementation of our new world to the project we optimized the landscape and objects to increase the field of view and improve frame rate.

We remind that every continent is the separate map, built with the help of the world composition. Its size is about 20x20 km and divided into 64 squares 6.25 square kilometers (to compare - all prototype map is about 8 km2).

This map contains the continent, it takes about 250 km2(including the islands). The rest 150 km2 are hided under water.

Squares are uploaded as a player approach to it. Obviously, the use of LOD’s only (for the objects, situated at this squares) won’t give an opportunity to move the field of view at a huge distance. Every object still has its own Draw Call. Imagine that every settlement has about 10 thousands of objects (after the merging with the help of Merge & Spline which we described at the reports №12 and №13 (before the optimization the big cities had 40-50 thousands of objects).

In this case HLODs are coming to the rescue.

It replaces the massive groups of models by one LOD with the low number of polygons (lower than 97-98%) and one simplified data. It turns on only at a great distance.

The process of HLOD’s generation is long and resource-intensive. But it’s necessary to optimize the open world.

The sample of one of the LOD actor’s with the boosted setting. It doesn’t depend on the distance for visual comparison (i.e. we show it close enough but in the game the HLOD’s will be turned off at this distance).

HLOD off
181 949 triangles



HLOD on
4090 triangles, ~2.25% of the original polycount



HLOD off
GPU frame time ~19,3 ms



HLOD on
GPU frame time ~17,4 ms



As we can see, the difference isn’t evident and also a certain distance will be foggy.

You can notice that some buildings aren’t generated well but it’s a question of a day’s work with the settings.

The performance comparison in details:

HLOD off
~4.5k Drawcalls, ~6kk triangles



HLOD on
~2.6k Drawcalls, ~5.2kk triangles



The numbers speak for themselves. There’s nothing to comment.

IV Conclusion

We launched the new site on the 03.02.2019 - it sometimes looks roughly and unfinished but the site we can endlessly redecorate as well as the apartment renovation.

Together with the site we launched the pre-order. And we express our sincere gratitude to all who have already ordered the game.

We tried to make the pre-order page as informative as we could make. That’s why there are many (i), and we are going to complement as far as the screenshots will be available (instead of concept-art, like most studios do).

For the next report we will try to make the gameplay video in the new world. Otherwise, it will be the new weapons, armour or mobs.

We updated the development page and moved the global updates of the existing systems to the separate section in “Mechanics”. Besides, we added a road map. It provides a glimpse of the steps and the size of the content for the each step.

The newsletter now has a form of a decorated letter and it will be regular, 2-3 times a month. ROGBot_1.6 won’t bother you in the private messages on the forum, If the delivery becomes annoying - don’t send the letters out as a spam. Every letter has a link for the automatic refuse. It doesn’t include an important announces as the pre-Alpha start, Alpha and so on.

That’s all for now.

It’s Friday evening - ROGgoms up, friends!

Yours sincerely,
Reign of Guilds Team