Diablo II 1.13 PTR patch
by Jito | 12/12/2009 04:27:42 The patch notes and FAQ can be found here: http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=21730644778&pos And for convinience:
So, since it's soon holidays and you probably don't know what else to do...it might be worth considering to go slay some demons :P |
by Thundgot | 15/12/2009 23:14:09
The rest is cool too, but this is actually my favourite one. :-) Community Team - English "Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months." - Clifford Stoll |
by Wryxian | 22/08/2009 00:08:25 Monsters The panel then shifted gears and held up to its namesake by moving to the design and implementation of the enemies that inhabit Sanctuary. The section kicked off with the overall design philosophy for creating monsters in Diablo III. The points made were that monsters work best in Diablo when kept simple, that their complexity shows best when it comes from combining different monster types in groups, that being able to identify monsters easily is key, and that the game should keep introducing new monsters to the player. The panel then went into the monster creation process, starting with the first step -- pitching the idea. This could come from any area of the team, but generally starts from one of three places: a visual concept from the artists, an environmental concept from the world designers, or a behavioral concept from the game designers. The second step is putting it down on paper and fleshing the monster out. What is it going to do, what are all of its attacks, what is its visual style and theme, is it large or small, and at least one piece of concept art. The third step takes it from paper to actually crafting the creature. The modelers create and texture the monster, the technical art team does a first pass on its visual and attack effects, and the animators take their first shot at bringing the monster to life. It then moves into an implementation phase of bringing it into the game world with things like health and damage stats, immunities and resistances, movement speed, and its basic attacks and powers. Then it’s actually seen in-game for the first time. After reviewing how it acts and reacts, and how the design and art goals have been reached, it goes through further refinements of each step. After creating texture variants, rare/champion variants, fine tuning its abilities and interactions, and finalizing the art, the monster is now a full addition to the world of Sanctuary. More Monsters! The next stage of the panel showcased specific foes. The process began with two new enemies seen for the first time in the BlizzCon demo, the snakeman and sandwasp, then moved on to everyone’s Diablo family favorite, the fallen. Three varieties of fallen were shown -- the rank-and-file fodder imp, the resurrection-happy shaman, and the crazy-cousin lunatic. While the panelists talked about how these monsters interact with the world around them, and even their relationships with one another as they work against our heroes, they moved on to an interesting topic of how design can sometimes end up very differently than originally planned. The dune thresher, originally announced in September of 2008 on the official Diablo website, served as their example. The original design of the monster had a key goal in mind: getting across the idea that “the sand isn’t safe.” It was originally inspired by the movie Tremors, and that connection definitely brings across the idea that the soft sandy areas are vulnerable to attack from below. Other goals of the thresher were to have it able to submerge freely and require the player to make it vulnerable to attack by luring it onto some of the rocky outcroppings in the area. This would encourage tactical fighting by using the environment as a way to make the enemy vulnerable. Instead the results were that the player was confused, they didn’t notice when the thresher was attacking while submerged, and ultimately they would simply ignore the dune threshers to instead blow up the many easily noticeable fallen and cultists in the area. So to fix these issues they went over some of the solutions they’ve used so far. They made the thresher harder to escape, increased its speed while submerged in the sand, discarded the sand/rock mechanic and instead had the creature submerge when distant from the player, and finally removed the ability to attack while submerged. While they explained that these changes have helped remove a lot of the confusion, they still haven’t quite reached their original intent, which is to make the player feel frightened to be walking on the open sand, so there’s still more work to do. The development of a monster doesn’t always work out the first time, but the team will keep at it until it’s right. In Closing The panel then closed, before going to crowd Q&A, by showing some of the mistakes and accidents that sometimes happen during game development. They showed a series of videos of effects, programming, and art errors. The crowd favorite was certainly the “burrower” (briefly seen in the Worldwide Invitational announcement videos) that had its texture accidentally replaced with Deckard Cain’s -- creating a thin, rodent-like version of the Horadric mage, digging and burrowing in the ground. "For no pact may be struck, no secrets may be learned, no good can come from these beasts." Community Team - English |
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