In Brief: Halas Shaders, Freeblood Look, and Loitering NPCs

Here are some news items we missed in the flurry of Server Merge and Freeblood news. They include Shaders 3 and Halas buildings, the look of the Freeblood, and Loitering NPCs in Freeport and Qeynos.

Haohmaru has checked in some fixes to Shaders specifically in New Halas.

With todays push, Halas should be looking better.

Since we’re still unable to produce the issue internally, can y’all let me know if the issue is still visible, and if so, where? Screenshots would greatly help.

What we were able to ‘fix’ would be the buildings/objects in Halas.

Haohmaru confirmed issues with Heritage Gnome Armor and other armor sets and stated that fixes are incoming for those as well.

Meanwhile, Dave “covic” has commented extensively on the appearance of the Freeblood race including commenting on a screen shot posted by a player.

The male I posted is the evil illusion form, that is where the nails come from. Both male and female come with the nails when you go evil bad a… I was thinking that they need a way to take down 30 foot giants when laying the smack down. So the nails are big but only in the evil form.

He has nipples just cant see them in that pose because he is hunching over so much in the animation. Its one of the combat idles the freebloods do when getting ready to pounce their prey.

He does have a more tear dropped big jaw in your screen and that is about as wide as you can go in customisation. Those lips are at the extreme lemony look also. Once you get past the character select and to the customisation screen you will see that you can really bring that jaw in and push those lips out. What you are seeing at the race selection is a random creation that can be very extreme.

Tim our lead environment artist also mentioned how the character looks like a darkelf with that big jaw awhile back. So we could have limited the amount of customisation, to create characters to only our liking, but I know our players like more freedom to create who they want. So although we tried to keep the base line character the way we wanted, we set the customisation sliders just past our own personnal preference.

For the base skin tone it is very pale and I put in some slight green, blue, and purple in the tint wheel. With these colors you can get a more dead look, and with the purple the freeblood can get close to a darkelf skin color but not all the way.

For almost a year now, many of the NPCs in Freeport and Qeynos have been loitering or congregating all in one location. We might see some movement on this issue. From Gninja:

We are aware of the gaggle of NPCs in Qeynos and Freeport. Unfortunately its not something easily fixed but it is definately on our radar. We hope to get to it as soon as humanly possible.

There are certain conditions that cause them to get stuck and it happens more on more populated servers.