We continue on with our efforts to bring our NPCs to life, beginning with bits and pieces of text from the IF version of Vespers and ending with a modeled, animated, and voice-acted 3D character. Last time I discussed the development of Matteo, the oldest monk at the monastery; the second character we tackled was Constantin, who had some interesting and unique challenges of his own.
We started out with a very general picture of Constantin; he’s middle-aged, a handyman around the monastery (he was a former blacksmith), and a notably large man with a short temper. Again, we didn’t have a lot of text to go on initially aside from a short description (which was actually removed from the game prior to the final release):
An enormous, hulking man, Constantin is taking the lack of food worse than the rest of the brothers. The former blacksmith has taken to
[More...]
Not Your Mother’s Integrated Graphics
One of the things I noticed when I posted the request for beta testers is that a number of interested people didn’t quite have the system specs I believed were needed to run the game smoothly – namely, a dedicated graphics card with a decent amount of video RAM. Systems with integrated graphics chips, at least in my mind, have not traditionally handled fairly intensive 3D games very well, hence the decision to exclude those systems, at least at the start.
That, and I didn’t have access to a decent system with an integrated graphics chip to test the game. That has now changed.
I’ve been wanting to upgrade my little server box for a while now, and with Apple’s recent tax-free sales event, I decided to make the leap and bought myself a tax-free Mac Mini. It’s a bottom-of-the-line model, although the specs have reached the point where they [More...]