Dwarves and Doors Feature in Project Eternity Update

The development team at Obsidian is delivering yet another update for fans of the upcoming Project Eternity, dealing with the creation of the various character models and with the problems that a simple door can create for the studio.

Project Eternity will include six playable races and each of them will be able to wear a variety of pieces of equipment, from gloves to full armor.

Obsidian also has to deal with the fact that other characters in the world will have similar looks and that means a huge amount of work for artists who are creating the actual items.

In January, the team managed to create a system that allows a human bipedal skeleton to be morphed and the armor it wears to change alongside it, creating a simple and quick way of dealing with all variations for races and characters.

Adam Brennecke, a developer working on Project Eternity, states, “It may cost us time up front, but will save us hundreds of hours down the road in production. The dwarf ended up being our first test case, and now we have dwarves as playable races working in game.”

Doors have been a problem for the Obsidian team because they can interfere with building construction and with character pathfinding.

The team created a clear list of attributes they want from doors and then Steve Weatherly, a game programmer, and Sean Dunny, environment artist, made a system to quickly get them working in Project Eternity.

Brennecke adds, “We found that it was not easy to place a door in the exact space to fit a dungeon doorframe. Steve and Michael Edwards (senior technology programmer) coded a system for doorframe "snap points" that makes the door pop to the exact place that we want it to go.”

Project Eternity will deliver a classic party-based role-playing experience at some point during 2014.