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Obsidian Entertainment has released another new early development blog post focusing on the creation of its upcoming Project Eternity RPG. The post reveals which elements are currently the focus of the team's efforts, and reveals a picture from an early test environment.

Drawing on classics of the genre such as Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment, Project Eternity will feature character creation, a party of adventurers, tactical "real time with pause" combat, dungeon exploration, and a storyline the developers promise will be compelling.

The Project Eternity team is tackling a number of different things in pre-production including story and world building, creating the look of the Aumaua and Orlans, character customization, combat, and fancy rendering R&D.

Here are a few bits on current developments:

• The narrative team is creating the world almanac which contains all the information about the people and history of Project Eternity. Right now they are fleshing out the pantheon of gods. Do you have any crazy or wacky ideas for gods? Share your ideas in the forums!

• The artists and programmers have been working on character customization. The system allows for individual pieces of armor to show up on your characters such as boots, gloves, and chest armor. When you swap armor, the character's torso model and texture are also swapped out. There are thousands of different armor, weapon, head, and hair customization models for each race (male and female too!), and we need to make sure that the system can organize and manage all of these character assets.

• Lastly, the picture is from an early test environment area using temporary art assets. The red shapes represent collision geometry that will block pathfinding and line-of-sight. The light blue/greenish color represents the walkmesh geometry which determines where characters can walk. We use this area to test tech features that we are building. For example, we are using the cemetery in the lower left to test out complex party pathfinding. If you look carefully, you can see two test characters in the picture.

Project Eternity: Current Developments

Project Eternity (add to watch list)

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