Wave of Darkness Update 1.06 |
Written by Administrator |
Tuesday, 24 July 2012 08:57 |
Hi all, The new patch 1.06 is out, along with the new mapĀ We have updated maps panel. Previous Maps panel had serious problems. One of our primary concerns when creating GUI was that each and every GUI panel must fit into minimal supported resolution for the game - which is 1024x768 pixels. That means no panel can be higher than ~700 pixels. This is all fine but most players today play at 1680x1050 of HD resolutions which means they have extra space and no panel uses it. Smaller panels are not a problem for most of the time. Characters panel, or Legendary Items panel never need extra size, but maps panel could really benefit from being bigger. So we started brainstorming. First thing we decided was to expand maps panel to fit almost entire screen. This gave us much needed space. Game will always rescale the maps panel to fit almost entire screen (there will be 25 pixels on all sizes around the Maps panel window but that's it). In addition to that, we cut extra space at the top of the Maps panel which gave us almost 100 pixels. Coordinates label at the bottom, region title, X button and other panel components will be placed on their positions depending which resolution you use. So now map area is much larger. One thing to note is that, since map area is larger, background map image is blurrier. Previous map image had 2048x2048 resolution. New image has 4096x4096 resolution. If your graphics card does not support 4096x4096 textures, it will be scaled to fit the maximum supported size for your card. In addition, we decided to remove zoom in/zoom out buttons. They were ok for the previous map, but they are seriously lacking for upgraded one. At the bottom of the maps panel, there is new zoom slider. You can use it to zoom in and out much more easily than before. Previous Maps panel had checkboxes with various location types such as entrances to dungeons or locations of god shrines or other points of interest. We have removed those checkboxes since they took large amount of screen space. In order to toggle display of various maps components you can use new Filter button at the bottom of the screen. Clicking on it will activate popup window with various filters available. You can toggle on and off each filter entry as you wish. Default state is that everything will be displayed. We have added new icons and new location types to the Maps panel. From version 1.06 forward you will be able to see all previous locations including new ones: wells, campfires, signposts, metal ores, plants, oracles, respawn points, teleport stones and legendary items. We are working on adding even more locations. Reason for long wait between 1.05 and 1.06 is mostly that we had to rewrite large part of this panel which included both code change and graphics change. We are aware that some features are still missing. The button to center the player and the mouse wheel capability to zoom the map in and out are coming in the next patch. Those are not implemented yet. |
Last Updated ( Saturday, 04 July 2015 20:58 ) |