[Jon Alma]

After a lot of work in recent months a new Legends from the Lost Realms demo has been completed and is now available from the Legends website. To give you the low down on what this demo offers,

It weighs in at 30 megs in total (so if you are still on a dial up modem like me expect downloads of about 2-3 hours!)

In terms of gameplay you can walk around the first island (which is not quite finished, but definitely taking on its final form) and admire the views.

Certain NPCs can be talked to, certain doors (mainly town gates) opened, books read, and info on local landmarks obtained. It's even possible to take a boat ride to the Isle of the Dead. However, most doors and a few of the NPCs are unreactive at the moment (sorry, but if a door opens the room on the other side needs to be added and I just haven't had time yet).

There are a few unfinished 'features' in the game - most glaring is that the most common NPC model is unanimated for the moment (so in one case an NPC glides around as he follows his daily schedule)

The world creator is included so it is possible to edit existing map cells or create new ones of your own. The editor doesn't allow the modification of scripts (dialogues, event scripts, books, objection interaction) at the moment so this needs to be added directly to the data files - I am in the process of documenting how to create these scripts (which to be honest would be very difficult and time consuming to get into the world creator at the moment). Other than that it is possible to add and edit game objects (with 80+ different object models now included somewhere in the game), modify the terrain, change terrain textures, edit lights and particle sources.

An additional tool is included that will automatically convert a bitmap height map into new map cells.

Basic gameplay and world editor manuals are included - these are going to be improved on in the next week or so, but are enough to get people started.

The intention is to use this demo as some sort of base version and regularly provide updates that will gradually evolve the demo into the fully complete game. Future demo releases will as a result be much smaller (1-2 megs in size probably).

I'd be very interested to hear what you think about the new demo and see what people manage to come up with using the world creator (no prizes for the best efforts, but I would be happy to stick screenshots on the website).

Enjoy (I hope!),

Jon.
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Legends from the Lost Realms

[Nodtveidt]

Looks like a pretty solid start. Moves a little slowly and has some minor collision issues but other than that, looks like it could develop into a great engine.
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If you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear demonic voices. The scary part is that if you play it forwards it installs Windows. - wallace

[Jon Alma]