LANGUAGES

Our friends translated Legends of Dawn to the following languages:

French:

• Alexandre Mangin and his team.
• Equipe RPG France
• Chef du projet, traducteur et correcteur-relecteur final : Alexandre Mangin
• (All_zebest)
• Traducteur principal et support technique : targus
• Traducteur : wacas
• Conseiller linguistique et lexicographe : To_an
• Correcteur-relecteur : Geralt

Italian: Ivano Conte

CAMERA VIEW DISTANCE

Some of you have requested moving camera higher up. In this update we have changed maximum camera height so you can see larger area around the player. There are some technical limitations that we'd like to explain so that you understand how camera position affects world rendering.

LoD world is divided in sectors. Each sector is 48x48 meters square. Number of entities in sector is not limited, but it affects rendering and streaming speed. For example wilderness sectors have mostly trees and rocks and few other objects in them. But towns are another story. You have houses, furniture, NPCs, their equipment and who knows what else. Each of these entities must be streamed in memory to be rendered. Number of visible entities directly affects framerate.

Moving camera higher up is absolutely no problem. It's just number that limits max camera height. Problem that arises with higher camera is that more entities will be visible. If you can see 100 entities while camera is 20 meters in the air, it may be 150 visible entities if you move camera 3 meters higher. That's 50% increase in number of visible entities for just 15% higher camera.

We have slightly modified max camera height. Now you can move it to ~23-24 meters. Note however that this will affect performance. This performance is mostly visible in town. While moving through the wilderness, this will have little or no impact on rendering speed.

Regarding viewing distances such as those in FPS games - LoD was from the start designed to have look similar to games such as Baldur's Gate or Diablo 2. This means camera at fixed distance from ground, with single viewing direction. Over time that changed to freely rotatable camera that can now be zoomed.

Moving engine to first person view is possible but not economically feasible. It would require major changes in level design. And even more importantly, changes in how the game is played.

As we mentioned before if camera is higher viewing area is larger, thus more models must be rendered each frame. Same goes if camera is horizontal. Imagine camera on the hill looking horizontally over entire town. Now you must render all the entities from the entire town (minus small models culled due to distance from camera) and you must stream them in memory earlier.

So that's first major problem with horizontal/FPS camera. Second is graphics fidelity. Models and textures are not made for view from few meters. While playing in FPS mode, graphics will look much less detailed than graphics with camera 15-20 meters in the air.

Most importantly, moving to FPS view would require major changes in gameplay. Right now you can see monsters coming from all directions, you can cast spells on them, even if you are not facing them directly. That would all have to change if the FPS view is implemented.

Note that we are keeping your wishes in mind regarding FPS view, but for now we plan to keep LOD view mostly like it is. With maybe slight modifications.

Regarding streaming - as mentioned before world is divided into sectors. As player/camera moves around, sectors are streamed in and out of memory. LoD has fixed value of 1 sector around current one that will be streamed at any time. That means that at any given time there are 3x3 sectors loaded into memory. Again, this was mostly due to the 32-bit windows per-process memory allocation limit. We are working to make this configurable option so you will be able to change this using Options panel.

As always, check the Steam for the update and please let us know how did you like the patch and if you have more ideas and suggestions.

So that's for now. More updates coming soon.

Dreamatrix Team