Current Status, Roadmap and General News - Updated 2020/05/09

[rijackson741]

It is crazy that they give out a task that requires the players to go to a specific place and for that place (Nor City) Not be accessible.

Not at all. Quests can have pieces in different areas of the game. If a quest is initiated in one part of the game that exists, but also requires a player to go to a part of the game that does not yet exist, what would be crazy would be to not include the start of the quest. If it were left out until all the required areas existed, then every time a new area was added you would have to go and talk to every NPC in the game to see if they had something new to say that would initiate a new quest. Almost nobody is going to go back through the game and talk to every NPC that they have already talked to, so most people would not even realize a new quest existed.

[Zukero]

I finally merged a new feature for mapmakers: global color filters.

By setting the "colorfilter" property on a map (at the map level, like the "outdoors" property), you can achieve visual effects.

The values are the following, with examples:

Default, or invalid value:

at_colorfilter_none.png

"bw" for Black and White

at_colorfilter_bw.png

"invert" for inverted colors

at_colorfilter_invert.png

"black20" for a subtle dim (darken with 20% Opacity)

at_colorfilter_black20.png

"black40" for a marked dim (darken with 40% Opacity)

at_colorfilter_black40.png

"black60" for a intense dim (darken with 60% Opacity)

at_colorfilter_black60.png

"black80" for a very dark room (darken with 80% Opacity)

at_colorfilter_black80.png

This'll all be in Github soon, with accompanying ATCS version.

If you have ideas or needs for other filters, don't hesitate to submit your ideas. Just keep in mind that I tried "animated" filters, like "color rotation" (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vi7npqLssk for example), and while it worked, performance was horrible, so I decided to give up on them. Our graphics engine (Android Canvas) cannot handle this correctly.

[Tomcat]

A red cast might be an interesting addition to the black, for fiery pits, etc.

[Zukero]

Like this ?

at_colorfilter_redtint.png

[Zukero]

Also possible in green and blue.

at_colorfilter_greentint.png

at_colorfilter_bluetint.png

[Tomcat]

Nice!

[Zukero]

Well, they've been added as redtint, greentint and bluetint.
I also ported the Android feature used to desktop Java 2D so that ATCS v0.4.7 enables to select and quite accurately preview all these filters. See upcoming posts in ATCS thread.

[Tomcat]

Fantastic!

[palemantle]

Very nice. This - red/blue/green masks (or whatever they are called) - was something I was going to ask about. I remember killing helpless goblins in caves with bluish lighting (rather than the default warm yellow one) in old Neverwinter Nights and thinking the blue mask made things halfway interesting

[Zukero]

Yeah, the bluetint can give a night effect, but not on all maps. Works great with forests, but poorly with snowy mountains.
This was the way old movies made outdoor night scenes, shoot in the daylight with a blue filter. That technique is called day for night in English, but American Night almost everywhere else.