Double Designer Diary Day!

Posted by:  at 23:13 PM 

IGN has released another designer diary featuring Tony Oakden, Producer of Tribes: Vengeance. Here's a bit of what's covered in the diary:

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The art team has finished second pass work on all the armours in the game. Not that the first pass armours where too shabby! Second pass involved general tidying textures, normal maps and specular masks and a bit of geometry work (some physique work too). The net result is a substantial visual improvement on assets which already looked great IMHO. Particularly impressive was the improvement in Blood Eagle armours. These where the first amours we produced so suffered a bit because we did not have all the rendering technology available for testing when they where being made. We've brightened the red a bit so they really show up in the levels now. I'm very pleased with the quality of our art. I think we have a very strong aesthetic coupled with a high technical standard.

We've now got unique first person hands and arms for all armours and tribes. We were not originally scheduled for this and I allowed a bit of feature creep to get into the schedule to get them done but I'm glad I did. We wanted a way for the player to know which tribe they where playing and more importantly the armour they had chosen without an extra icon on the HUD. The FPS arm is the most natural way to do this but obviously more costly from a development POV than a simple icon. However now that they are in and animated they look great. The heavy arms in particular look extremely cool with the weapons slung underneath and the hand grasping a joystick. The animations are nice too.

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• IGN Designer Diary