OpenZone 8.4 in the works

[Windcatcher]

Bears, finally...



Hunting bears by moonlight?

[Windcatcher]

A new lair, somewhere...



I'm adding lots of spawns and pathing to the six zones that come with SimpleClient, and loot where applicable. I'm also improving some zones as necessary, as with The Namtarn, here. I had hoped for a release this weekend, but there is simply too much to do. At this point I'm planning on releasing everything around Christmas. There will be new versions of OpenZone, the Admin Tool, SimpleClient, and OpenZone textures. I want to make every zone viable for play, which means mobs and loot, and merchants, guildmasters, etc. in player zones. The Namtarn will allow play up to level 20, though you will probably need to group for the rooms in it. There are also lots of new spells since the last release, though no visible spell effects as yet, and of course lots of bugfixes and some new features in each app.

[Windcatcher]

Hey, I can get to the site again!

Here's what I'm currently experimenting with...GLSL shaders in OpenZone:



This is showing up to 6 dynamic lights using a vertex shader. You can't tell in the screenshot, but they are also flickering. I've added a Flicker parameter to light objects and updated the mesh library objects so torches, etc. will flicker. There is still a ton to do, there is no way to export any of this to XWA yet, but that's the plan: to have SimpleClient support shaders. At the moment I'm trying to get bump-mapping working in OpenZone with normal maps. When I'm satisfied with the results I'll start working on the export chain so this can work in SimpleClient. None of this will work in the live client as the .WLD format doesn't support it.

For shader purposes, I'm defining the light radius as the point where it reaches 50% intensity, not zero. This more closely approximates what the static lighting model was producing. Think of it as relating to a FWHM measurement.