A fence kit, baked the way the companions were
Every wooden and stone fence in the Sunmeadow Vale, the crash site and the balloon graveyard now uses a new baked fence kit. It is made the same way as Razor and Blade: a 3D model, a five-tone colour ramp, and a render at 4x that is reduced to the game's resolution by majority vote.
It fixed a 23-tile fence that had been drawing as a one-pixel line, and it replaced fence pieces that had been cropped out of a gateway picture. Fence collision did not change.
The dialogue box can speak
The dialogue box can now play a voice clip for each spoken line. Confirm skips the clip, and a Voices level in Options turns them off. The clips are generated offline and play as ordinary audio files, and every voice file can be removed with one command, after which the game plays as before.
Only 30 audition clips exist so far, one per character, and the casting is a guess until someone listens. The full set of 419 villager lines would run about 29 minutes and about 12 MB.
The Vale loads in half the time
Building the Vale took 12.1 seconds in the editor and now takes 6.3. Three loops were checking every polygon edge for every pixel.
A tool dependency that moved
All the model baking pages (beasts, castle, fences, spell effects) pulled their 3D library from a folder that no longer existed. No new art could be baked, and the failure gave no error. A copy of the library now lives inside the game's own Tools folder and the pages point to it. The lesson is the usual one: a pipeline that depends on another project's folder breaks silently when that folder moves. Because the new copy may differ slightly from the old one, the next bake will be compared against a known piece first.
Icons and props
The game has 208 weapons, items and armour pieces, and 16 of them had no icon: three shields, two memory cores, a trophy and ten gloves, gauntlets and leg pieces. They were drawn in the existing icon style, approved and installed, and a new test now fails if any weapon, item or armour piece ever lacks one.
Four Vale props had no art at all (an anvil, a garden hoe, the West Gate camp tent and the blossom tree), so the game skipped them and warned on every Vale load. They are now baked, approved and in the game, and the warning is gone.
Characters already had no black outlines, and that rule now covers everything except terrain and the player characters. Every edge is a darker shade of the thing it belongs to. It was applied to the fence kit, all 71 item and armour icons, the three shields and the four props; 503 near-black edge pixels became coloured ones.
The houses and trees set the bar
All the art made this week now shows up in the Area Workshop, the studio's map editor. A showcase map stands the new props, all 25 fence pieces, the painted shields and the new icons on the grass beside a village cottage and the hero. That is now how new art is judged: before anything is shown for approval, it stands next to a cottage and the player character and has to hold up. Trees have their own bar, the Sunmeadow oak, birch, pine and bare tree. The first comparison was not kind to what had just been installed:
- The Vale cherry blossom is a 96-pixel sprite. The oak beside it is drawn at about five times the pixel density, with dense leaf clumps, gnarled bark and roots. It will be repainted.
- The camp tent is flat stripes with no folds and no light.
- The main finding: the houses and trees are painted at roughly 80 to 90 pixels per world unit. Props built at 16 cannot reach that, so any new piece that stands beside a house or a tree has to be painted at the higher density.
Levelling and prices
The new levelling curve is steeper than the old one: the same level costs 1.6 times as much at level 2 and about 5 times as much at level 22. Prices were written against the old curve, but they are plain Vestige prices and will not scale with levels, so nothing was repriced.