Inventories and sounds

We’ve been busy for the last week designing inventories, coding the octree v2 and making inquiries to different sound effect companies to find the one that would suit Rituals of the old the best with the licensing terms, prices and everything.

Sounds are probably going to be the single biggest expense in the near future. But we can probably add sounds, not all at once, but a few at a time which should take off some of the economical pressure this creates.

Above you can see the first mockup of the inventory system. Basically what happens there is that when you open the inventory the camera will switch to third person view and the background will blur.

On the right side of the screen you have the 3D representation of your character. When you hover the mouse you will highlight the slots you can use and a description of the item or the empty slot will show up on the left side of the screen.

Probably next to the character you will see the subinventories, ie. pockets in your jacket, backpack, belt, etc. which will show up when you, for example, select your backpack.

We will probably have a dynamic hotbar where new slots will appear as they become available. For example if you put on a shirt with a pocket a new small pocket slot might become available to you.

Things like backpacks cannot be accessed through the hotbar. Instead you will have to open the full inventory and put down your backpack to be able to go through the things stored in there.

This is just the v1 design and I would very much love to hear your ideas and feedback at the forums:

https://www.ritualsoftheold.com/community/index.php?p=/

Music

TaikaKim has been busy mapping out sounds and compiling lists of instruments that will eventually be used in the sound track. He might have a few words later on on this subject.

We are also looking into the possibility of having instruments in the game which can be played. It will most likely be based on free play + playing from composed pre-made notes.

Voice acting

The ambitious community driven voice acting project has been dropped from the feature list because of consistent lack of progress over a long period of time from the volunteers who were responsible for the project. It might be reconsidered at a later time. But no promises.

Changes in personnel

We have dropped a few people off the project who were not able to put in the required work hours so that they could have been relied upon.

The changes will not have a negative effect on the game’s development.

We are in need of one graphics designer who also has decent 3D skills. If you know someone please let us know.

Octree

The improved new version of the octree which stores all the voxel data is ready but we are currently in the process of researching efficient ways to reduce the map data size while also maintaining good performance.

It is really important to get this right in order to have an efficient and flexible game engine. Everything else has been put on hold and this is now priority one. It will take as long as it takes.

We are also considering releasing the octree part of our code as open source in order to help other voxel game developers. But it is still being discussed and we are not sure at this point how easy or difficult it would be to properly decouple the relevant parts of the code.

Helping the development

Remember: the best way to help us is to join our forums and share your feedback and ideas.

This article was updated on 21/10/18 @ 02:07