25-May-2010 - The Elemental Workshop III

[Mollerz]

The Elemental Workshop below Seers' Village holds many secrets, long forgotten by the world above. Even as you read this, adventurers are scouring the world of RuneScape to find the means to pass through the body door, eager as they are to unlock more of this ancient forge’s mysteries.

 

Your efforts in the previous Elemental Workshop quest quite literally required a piece of your mind, but you’ll need it in a more typical, puzzle-solving capacity to get the contraption hidden behind the body door working again. Grasp the inner workings of this contraption, another of Vitruvius’s ingenious machines, and you will be able to show off your mental prowess with equipment made from the new body bar, and the ability to create body armour with elemental metals.

 

And for those adventurers who cannot master the puzzle, only insanity awaits...

 

Summary:

Where to start The Elemental Workshop III:

 

Seers' Village chapel.

 

Requirements to start The Elemental Workshop III:

 

Elemental Workshop II

Level 20 Mining

Level 33 Defence

Level 33 Smithing

 

 

In other news...

 

You can now right-click the 'Now playing' song to add it to your music playlist.

 

We've added three more areas where NPCs can now appear and offer to teleport you to the Fish Flingers D&D. These locations are Piscatoris, Shilo Village and Barbarian Village.

 

You can now choose the colour of your split chat. In the in-game options menu, click the Split Private Chat check box and select a colour.

 

We’ve overhauled a core part of our graphics engine to give it four times as much fidelity for modelling and animation; as a result you may notice that various aspects of the in-game graphics look smoother. Because this change has involved modifying many thousands of models and animations there’s a small chance certain combinations won’t look quite right. We encourage you to submit bug reports if you spot anything amiss. You may also find the game client takes slightly longer to update this week while it processes all the changes we’ve made.

 

 

Skillcape and Emote Animations

 

This week, we have made some animation improvements to standard and skillcape emotes. All standard emotes have now been ‘tweened’ (a process that blends together existing frames of animation). This process results in much smoother animations without changing how they look.

 

We’ve applied this tweening process to all of the skillcape emotes too, as well as adding particle effects to them (things like twinkling lights and fire), giving you even more reason to show off your skillcapes. To see these particle effects, you will need to set the ‘Particles’ option in the Custom Graphics Options menu to ‘Medium’ or ‘High’.

 

A handful of skillcape emotes have also been given an animation overhaul to bring them in line both with our original vision and the quality of the other skillcape animations. We’ve only done this for skillcape emotes that either weren’t fully representative of their skill or where we’d previously hit limitations with the game engine.

 

The aim of this update was to ‘tween’ (smoothly blend or interpolate between animation frames) the skillcape emote animations to give them a more fluid and refined feel, and to add particles to embellish their appearance and make them all a bit more spectacular. We also wanted to give an overhaul to some of the emotes we felt were not quite consistent with the overall quality of the others. The more drastically changed skillcape emotes are:

Attack:

When we added the flame effect with particles to this emote we realised that the animation itself wasn’t giving the impact we wanted to really show off the Attack skill. We stuck to the original concept, but reworked the animation to make the poses more dynamic.

 

Constitution:

We didn’t quite achieve what we set out to do with the original Constitution emote, so we thought that now was the perfect opportunity to give you a new emote, much closer to our original vision. The original skillcape emote was restricted in terms of animation due to us reaching limits with the amount of detail we could put into the various models used in the emote. With these limitations in mind we were able to rethink how to approach the emote and give you a new animation with more finesse than the original.

 

Defence:

Much like with the Attack skillcape emote, we just felt that the animation for this emote was a little lacking and didn’t really give enough action for a combat skill. In the same vein as with Attack, we re-imagined the animation to be a more convincing representation of the skill.

Summoning:

Like with Constitution, this was another emote where we hit some limitations in the game engine, which meant we had to cut the idea back. We had to restrict the amount of action in the emote as the original animation didn’t live up to our initial expectations. To enable the update of this emote we had to cut one of the familiar heads from the animation, but this has allowed us to make it a lot smoother and add particles for a much more spectacular result.

Thieving:

We realised the one thing missing from the original Thieving skillcape emote was some actual thieving. Rather than having a bag of gold just appear on the player’s back, we wanted them to actually take the bag of gold in a suitably sneaky fashion, which is what the new emote does.

[Melencholy]

shoot you beat me to it.

 

 

Yay! looks like it will be easy unless it has a heck of a hard puzzle but it should be fun :D

[Mollerz]

shoot you beat me to it.

 

 

Yay! looks like it will be easy unless it has a heck of a hard puzzle but it should be fun :D

 

I beat everyone to it by quite a way :)