In this issue of the Dev Diary, James Casey takes us through the blood, sweat and tears of one of 1.1's most exciting new features: Player statues!
Who's the Man (or Woman)?
The central theme of WAR is well, just that: war. It's everywhere. Defending your realm and taking the fight to the enemy requires blood, sweat, and tears. Players in WAR are rewarded for their efforts through the accumulation of renown. Renown gives you access to training, equipment, and abilities that show off your dedication to the cause. But sometimes you need more; sometimes you need recognition. After all, what good is fortune without fame?
With that in mind, WAR tracks player accomplishments and we currently have a number of great leaderboards available on the Warhammer Herald to track your character against other characters in the Realm War. (Check out the Realm War and Leaderboards here.)
That's fine and dandy, but how do players in game know who's number one? You might know it, but it's no fun if no-one else knows it. (If you're like me, you like to tell them as often as possible, even if it's being the best at dying...) But it's not like you can tell everyone right? You can't just put a statue up to yourself and have people praise you... can you? Wouldn't it be cool if you could? We think so!
Coming in December, patch 1.1 will introduce an in-game Top Ten leaderboard system that will put up statues for the best of the best right smack down in the middle of the Cities! But, before we go into that more, let's talk about the blood, sweat, and tears that it took to get this system into the game.
The Blood
The desire to add in-game recognition has been an ongoing project for some time. The idea for the statues came about as a way to tie the recognition into our living cities and have it seamlessly integrate into the game and remain in-character. To accommodate this, art was commissioned for statues of every class in game in both male and female varieties (where applicable). With plan in hand, the artists went to work and created some great statues that look very much at home in the cities. Check out some shots here...
From there, we needed to figure out how to set up the statues to be dynamic. We wanted the Top Ten statues to update themselves as players clawed their way into the list or got pushed violently out. To do that, we enlisted some clever coders to work out how we could setup a system to do this that would be self-sufficient. The coders worked it out, but it brought us to a point where we needed some additional help pulling this off...
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