Implemented an occlusion technology. Implemented it into the terrains and an invisible object I can place into walls. So have been reworking my very first zone and taking advantage of this new technology. Will redo many of the early zones since I was just learning back then and really wasn't focused on the art aspects.

This is the Old City section of this zone. Going for a feel of a forest and the land is taking back the city and the buildings are all a secondary aspects.

Updated the last five pics and adding two more.  I've been on a journey the last week trying to find the look of a game I would like to play.   I always pictured FoHO with realism like Vanguard or DAoC but their screenshots just seem washed out to me. The art side of me really wanted some color.  I brightened the pines, added some more color to the terrain, and ugh, I like it. It crosses more into the cartoony feel than I really expected out of myself to like, but the buildings pull back some realism but the environment gives the color I want.  Any games with a realistic but bright feel to them?  Would like to check out other game screenshots witha  similar feel.

When is the timeline for your game? After the fall of man? The End times?

EDIT: Sorry i am an idiot i did not see the post was three pages long--read the opening--sorry

It appears as though you've really gone some distance with this piece of work. I haven't read things from the start of the thread... but wow!

Dragons, humans, and... that other race that are sort of like lizard-orc-people. Cool!

I'll have to check in on this thread again in the future, good luck with everything! And good job on everything so far!

Starting to play with shaders. I know, just now?  It just hasn't been on my priority list.  Low end client framerates, technological implementation, and gameplay have been the focus.  But now that redoing zones and working on the art side of things getting ready for Beta, I decided to get the shaders implemented for Beta as well.  I am still using an old client so not next Gen or anything but still takes the game to a new level for the higher end video cards.  The cool thing is last week I ran FoHO on my old Dell D600 with 32mb vid card and 500mb ram.  Graphics and visibility were all set to low, and definitely no shaders, but it still ran around 15 FPS.

The shaders are implemented on that same client and are just checked to turn the functionality on.  This gives one client with and without shaders all connecting to the same world.  The client and shaders can also be ported to MacOS when I get to that point.  Only running shaders for water and DRL but still looks nice. Need to implement a slide bar of DRL settings and someday will implement shaders for buildings, NPCs, and players. Hopefully be able to patch this out in a week or two for clients to start testing.

These are some of the different looks of the playable dragons in the Bayou zone.

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It was a test of how low the client would go. The fact that it got 15FPS on a 32 mb vid card is pretty good to me. I was impressed the game even loaded let alone was somewhat playable.

I always design on a Geforce 7100 and make sure FPS is above 20 and usually all other cards are pretty safe. 

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Probably using a lot of VM, but really the specs are just a bit low for even non-gamer avg.

Originally posted by Daywolf

Probably using a lot of VM, but really the specs are just a bit low for even non-gamer avg.

 It is almost. I actually have people playing with laptops one step higher than this and even Geforce 5500 cards that won't even take dx 9c.  But really just making the point that the game client is capable of running on some low stuff and now with shaders able to give the higher end cards a little bit more to chew on.

Originally posted by Leathel

Originally posted by Daywolf

Probably using a lot of VM, but really the specs are just a bit low for even non-gamer avg.

 It is almost. I actually have people playing with laptops one step higher than this and even Geforce 5500 cards that won't even take dx 9c.  But really just making the point that the game client is capable of running on some low stuff and now with shaders able to give the higher end cards a little bit more to chew on.

Well yeah, mostly on the OS requirement and not so much the client needs regarding that. The engine should run pretty well on low-spec. So you get lower requirements and quicker turn-out in comparison to the previous engine. This is shaping up really well :)

Been in Closed Beta and ran into some bugs, so while slowly test fixes, decided to play with the new Torque T3D and see what FoHO looked like in it. Not totally sure if I am switching but if client/server is pretty stable with no crashing I probably will be. If performance is too much on lower end clients, I would have a FoHO Lite world using the current version I am using now. Both would use the same master and character server, so you could play your character in either world. But hopefully performance will be good enough I only need one world.