The biggest secret of Driftmoon is that it's actually 3D! I bet you thought that it was purely a top-down game, right? Maybe you thought that it would be impossible to turn the camera, even a tiny fraction? Actually that was completely true a week ago, when we suddenly started wondering how the game would look from a more angled viewpoint, and in a mad coding frenzy got to work.
The top-down camera angle is something that often comes up when people see Driftmoon for the first time. I've never seen a feature that divides people more, some people love it, and some people don't even want to try the game because they fear the perspective. I believe it's largely an issue of what you have become accustomed to. I started my gaming life playing games with a top-down perpective like Ultima VII, and grew up with isometric games like Planescape: Torment.
The fully top-down camera of Driftmoon has never been an issue to me, but that may just be because I've been playing too many ancient games. And here's the important philosophical point, I'm not here to make games for me, I'm here to make games for other people to play. That's why we're adding controls to change the camera angle! 
The tricky part is that we've originally designed the graphics with a pure top-down viewpoint in mind, and changing the camera even slightly would have resulted in everything looking very strange. That's what we've been doing for the last week, making sure things look good from an angled point of view. Having said that, it won't be possible to change the camera all that much, but I think that even this small change does makes a difference in how the game looks - for the better, of course. 
But the best thing is that in the future, all of our players will have the possibility to choose the viewpoint they themselves prefer.
So, which screenshot do you prefer? The fully top-down, or the slightly tilted one?
Modders: The tilt feature won't be enabled in mods by default, but from the next version onwards, it will be possible for modders to enable it through settings.ini.
Oh, and I was just kidding you, this isn't the biggest secret of Driftmoon. You'll have to play the game to find it out. 
Driftmoon beta 0.993 brings you the Moon Rocket!
How is it that when you want to add just one archery skill, you get two? Playing a nearly purely archer character, I wanted to snipe my enemies before they could get a chance to get to me. Guess what? That wasn't possible, because the range of my archer just wasn't good enough. No problem, make a new skill for it! It's simply called Archery, and will increase your range, as well as your accuracy.
Secondly, I felt that while archery was cool by itself, it really lacked in the territory where the Whirlwind skill is good with melee weapons - crowd control. No problem, make a new skill for it: The Moon Rocket! It fires an explosive arrow that gives a very satisfying boom, and your problems are gone! Naturally you have to be a bit careful with it, you can easily hit yourself if your target gets too close, or if you accidentally hit a wall. Which is to say, playing an archer is now a lot more fun.
Other updates:
- I've fixed the character movement speed on slow computers to be equal to that of faster computers. It should be noticeable if you've been getting less than 30 frames per second.
- It's now possible to run away from the wolves in the Vault area, even if you've provoked them into attacking you.
- For modders, the floor height painting tool now shows the heights in numbers.
I give you the Driftmoon Release Candidate, version 0.99! With this version we've fixed about 200 typos, and otherwise improved the wording of our texts. Writing a roleplaying game is a huge effort, so small mistakes are bound to creep into the dialogues. I want to give special thanks to our testers for helping us find all the errors! Driftmoon couldn't be this great without you.
An important fix with this version is that we've finally had a chance to optimize our rendering code. While Driftmoon works on pretty much any old computer, even first generation netbooks, there are locations in the game that have been visibly slower. The biggest culprit, terrain rendering, is now much more optimized, and runs up to 30% faster in the previously slow locations.
If you haven't tried Driftmoon yet, try out the Driftmoon demo. Not only is there an excellent adventure in it, you can also play all of the Driftmoon mods and even make your own adventures and roleplaying games, completely free of charge!
Game Changelog
- Improved minimap accuracy.
- Fixed characters jumping around on low framerates.
- Improved performance by optimizing terrain rendering, increases framerate up to 30% in certain locations.
- Fixed error where items given to companions sometimes reduced the stats they were supposed to improve. This fixes the bug where companions with agility-affecting items started walking backwards when their agility became negative.
- Physics simulation is more stable on low framerates.
- Holding down shift while moving an item splits a stack of items.
Modding Changelog
- Item graphics can now be set from an object file. This makes it possible to use any type of graphics and even animations for an item.
- To use the new accurate minimaps in mods, go to map settings and activate the "Fit minimap to borders" setting. Remember to re-render and save the minimap.
- When painting terrain, the currently used terrain is now shown without the smoothing effect.
- Added possibility to show terrain layer count. The layer count can be reduced by using less textures per terrain block. Reducing the amount of layers per terrain block improves the framerate.
- Changed the callscript action to run only one script of type Startrandom, if it finds more than one.
- It's now possible to have a separate item image in the inventory and on the ground by using the pictureOnGround property.
- IsTagNear now works for terrain objects and items.
[Update] 0.991 fixes a small error with the new stun effect. Apparently it was possible to attack it.
[Update] 0.992 fixes the companion-repeating bug caused by the previous fix. If you have too many followers, the only way to fix it is to go back to a save where you didn't, and never go back to any areas where you visited before the update.
The minimaps in Driftmoon are very useful, but up until now they've been a bit on the blurry side. Since I wanted to re-render all of the game's minimaps before release, I decided that now is a good time to see what I can do about increasing map details.
At first I thought about using a bigger texture, going from size 1024 to 2048, but then I realized something. Most of our minimaps have quite a bit of black in them, because the available world size is much bigger than what is actually used by the map. So why not use that black space to improve precision? Here's a comparison. Quite a bit more detail in it, right?
Merry Christmas everyone! And oh boy, do we have a special present for you tonight!
I am proud to present the first official Driftmoon beta version, the Fortress of Loom! Download it right here. This is now the first version that contains the full story, from its humble beginning to the fiery end, which is certainly the best part of the whole game.
In addition to the huge fortress and endgame, we've fleshed out the talent tree with four more talents. My favourite is the Goldfish Scout talent, which lets you access a minigame of finding the hidden goldfish in each major area. Another major addition are inventories for party members, which finally enables your friends to wear the armor and weapons of your choosing. I just like to make them wear funny hats. That, and some other features will require you to restart your game, but don't worry, there have been plenty of small additions to the early maps as well, and this time you can finally play Driftmoon all the way to the end!
Finally, I want to extend my special thanks to our excellent beta testing team! There are still some bugs to fix in Driftmoon, but we're getting there. We haven't set a date yet, but the final release is probably only weeks off from now.
Naturally, if you haven't done it yet, now would be a pretty perfect time to buy that Driftmoon you've been dreaming of! But if you do that, you might want to pick up the discount code first.
If the fact that we ourselves had a blast test playing the new complete beta of Driftmoon is any indication, I'd say it's quite possible that you might be in for some good time. We're really hoping you'll find yourself whipped away on a fantastic adventure that'll put a smile on your lips.
Game Changelog
- New area: Fortress of Mors-Sarmeth!
- Follower inventories!
- Four more talents!
- You can now access the world map through the minimap.
- It's now possible to look through previous dialogues.
- The player's feet will now slip on ice.
- Torches last longer on the easy level.
- And many more...
If you are a modder, see the Modding changelog.
As always, we're eager to hear your thoughts. Just press the F-button while playing to open the feedback form. And even more importantly, have fun!
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