"Jefferson" Project Forum News
Posted Wednesday, February 26, 2003 - 21:57 CET by Veldrin

Here are today's "Jefferson" project forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer

Animations: We wound up re-using a lot of effect animations in IWD2 because there were so many spells and creating/rendering out effects took so much time (that's why the bull's head for Bull's Strength wound up on the barbarian rage). The Visual Effects Group editor for Jefferson is really, really excellent. We can create a pretty wide array of visual effects without much effort at all.

Quote: Having a mouse control party and a mouse control camera just sounds very awkward to me. Moving the party and then having to play catch-up with the camera. Or indeed having to move the camera ahead of the party then moving the party into that space...

Huh? That's the way IE and Fallout games did it. That's the way Jefferson's doing it. You can control camera rotation with the keyboard or with little buttons on the interface. Scrolling is "standard".

Quote: So that means there is a fog of war effect in place ?

There is right now, yes. I've never really been a fan of Fog of War, personally. I like the Fallout camera system, where you have a free-roaming camera area defined as a distance around a character or characters. However, I do like the idea of characters and other objects being invisible if they are out of the character's line of sight.