Vanguard Videos by the Ton!

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href="http://media.tentonhammer.com/vanguard/movies/VG-Kraelix.avi">Kraelix
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Brad's Notes

Jerrith is using FRAPs to record these videos – doing so takes up
between 7 and 10 FPS (frames per second), so the framerate you are
seeing as well as the smoothness of the animations you are seeing is style="font-style: italic;">less so than what a player with a
similar machine (or even a lower end machine) would experience in beta.
Remember that when the framerate drops, especially under 20fps or so,
animation smoothness and quality really suffer because frames of the
actual animations are being dropped (skipped). Thanks for understanding
– we’ll work on not only continuing to optimize the game before release
but on ways to capture video without losing so much performance.



Note: the beta players involved
have been notified and consented to be part of these videos. They are
still under NDA and cannot talk about the videos at all, much less
answer questions – if you figure out who somebody is, please do NOT
hassle them. Thank you.



Note 2: Animations are not
where we want them – they need to be polished and tweaked and added to.
We continue to do this in Beta 3 and will likely continue to tweak and
add to our animation technology well into Beta 4. Likewise, you may
very well see other flaws – this is still beta 3 and we have a lot of
polish yet to do.



Note 3: As before, these
mini-videos do not take the place of the bigger Marketing/PR plan we
are working on. These are for people who already know about Vanguard
and want to get a glimpse of where we’re at and how Beta 3 is going in
general. We’re still holding back on a lot of things for exclusive
deals with various popular web sites and gaming publications.

Jerrith’s Notes:

This is a random / pick up group of players that I (Jerrith) joined
last night in the Temple of Dailuk. The group is made up of Morgh, an
18th level Dreadknight, Syrok, an 18th level Monk (using hand wraps),
Malacki, a 16th level Monk (using a martial staff), Ladroj, a 20th
level Sorcerer, Cir, a 17th level Psionicist, and myself, Jerrith, an
18th level Cleric. This was recorded on medium settings at 1280x800, on
my home system, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2.4 GHz) with 2 GB of RAM,
and an EVGA NVIDIA 7800GTX w/256 MB. (This system is over 1 year old,
with no upgrades.)



Also, regarding combat durations and damage dealt: We are currently
working on fight durations with respect to NPC hit points and ability
to deal damage. What you see in these videos will be changing
significantly in the next beta update. This should be kept in mind,
when evaluating these fights.



Finally, some notes about settings: I have turned floating damage
number off for these videos, to keep them from obscuring the 3D world.
This UI layout is not the default, it's my personal setup. I've also
set the tooltips to not follow the mouse (which is default, but I had
it on in the previous video).



Jerrith’s Notes specific to the
VG-Kraelix.avi mini-video:



VG-Kraelix.avi – 3 minutes, 5 seconds
style="font-style: italic;">
(Chat window blacked out)



This long fight is part of an encounter route in the Temple of Dailuk
that can only be activated by a player (in this case Ladroj) who has
completed one of the earlier quests in the temple. Early on in the
fight, Ladroj gets a critical hit with a fireball, drawing Kraelix onto
him resulting in a quick death. Around the same time I fail to cast
enough healing on Morgh, our tank, and he dies as well. From there,
Syrok takes over and I keep everyone alive until the end, where Kraelix
starts using his most powerful attacks. Everyone dies but me, and
luckily, my last hit just manages to kill him before he can finish me
off.



Brad's Notes: My favorite
because people DIE!  :)