A Window into Telon

[Cobalt Katze]

The media keeps flowin', and the good times keep rollin'. Or so the philosophy at Sigil seems to be!

As a late-evening/night post on the Fires of Heaven boards where a much-requested raw ingame footage video has been requested... Is now, ultimately delivered!

Vanguard Gameplay Mini-Video

Brad prefaced the video with the following description:

"I posted recently that it took time to make videos, that we needed to go to our publisher and shoot them, have them edited, etc.

Some people took issue with that and said that's great for major videos for big releases, releases to major sites or game pubs, etc., but seriously, how hard is it to release a few little movies... heck, you post a few screenshots here and there that are works in progress, have flaws, etc. to get people excited, even though they are picked apart, etc. Why not little videos?

I really thought about that. And so did an avid in-house Vanguard player and programmer, Jerrith (he also played a LOT on Veeshan, although wasn't an FoH member).

He has his system set up at home that he plays, like I said, avidly on. He also has it set up to take movies.

So as a test, he put a quick movie together. It's very basic. It's one of his Beta 3 characters that he's earned in the same Temple area I showed recently in a batch of screenshots. It's a quick video -- he simply pulls a mob with a bow and then kills it with melee. There's nothing special or too exciting. It wasn't set up with forethought. It is live on beta 3, but just him soloing a mob.

Here's what he wrote to me:

"Saw the most recent post on FoH about Temple of Dailuk, along with the comments about movies. So I recorded one this morning that, to my eye at least, is good enough to release. It’s 30 fps, 1280x800, 38 seconds long, 14.9 mb in size, and uses medium settings. I’m standing in the outpost (with tents, and guards beating on practice dummies) just outside the Temple of Dailuk, looking up at the main entrance. I have a Dustwalker (giant centipede) targeted and I draw my bow, activate my damage bard song, and then shoot, pulling it. I then activate abilities, fighting it (including a complete combat chain) and kill it. My clothing is mostly generic / Thestran, both my swords are from Qalia and different. The video ends shortly after it falls to the ground. My UI is on for the entire fight, names are off (except on my offensive target, of course) and there are no other players in the video. There are no major graphical glitches that I’m aware of. The arrow arced correctly to my target, and I switched my wield preference from ranged back to melee before my first melee attack so that the correct animation would play. Also, Shadows are on and working during the movie as well. Any chance you might put this up for the public to see? I think one nice decent simple fight like this would go quite a distance in answering the people asking for combat videos. It also fits with the screenshots you’ve been releasing, as it’s in the Temple of Dailuk area. My machine is an AMD dual core Processor which was top of the line over a year ago, but aging a bit now. My video card is an Nvidia 7800 GTX and I have 2 gigs of RAM."

So I thought about it and decided to give it a shot and see what you guys think. I know there will still be skepticism and criticism. And I know there are cooler things we could show. But what the heck, let's try this out and see what the comments are. If people like at all what they see, maybe we'll do another one, but, of course, no promises."

Additionally, over at Silky Venom, there are two short new videos showcasing a day and a night at extreme time-lapse speed!

You can check them out HERE!

[Greymain]

Its good. Nothing to criticise. Coming from AC2, Horizons and EQ2 it feels familiar. Nice sounds especially the bow. Damage display is too big but I am sure that it will be optional. Animations are still a bit abrupt could could do with a few more key frames. UI is very WoW, One point, if fighting is this fast in a 6 man group its going to be very intense doing all the chains, reactions an so on.