New Item: February 10, 2009 - Peek #2 @ RPGVault is up!

[BasiliskWrangler]

RPGVault has posted the second peek at Eschalon: Book II. In the article we talk more about the gameplay and a bit about the storyline. They have three exclusive screenshots as well, so get over and look at it!

Link: RPGVault Eschalon: Book II Peek #2

[Kreador Freeaxe]

Great stuff and cool screen shots. I like that the quick buttons have been relocated. That should make them easier to use.

[IJBall]

Lookin' good!

Love the new Spell Journal with clickable areas for Elemental vs. Divination.

Quick question - what's the new button to the left of the Stats Screen button? Is that the one for controlling the type of combat play (e.g. Finesse vs. Power vs. Parry)?

Well, if I have any more thoughts, I'll probably share them after I've had some more time to mull this over...

P.S. And if you feel like sharing a few more screenies on the Book II page soon, I'm sure no one here will object!

[Yeliu]

Wow! I love it, I love it, I love it. Can't wait to start beta testing! Any idea about that date?

And ditto to IJBall, I'm sure none of us would mind terribly much if you posted a few more here :)

[Rune_74]

Another great peak....got me even more excited....

ditto on the beta info:) (I just want to see my name on a comercailly released game again j/k)

One thing the quick task bar looked a bit bright, didn't seem to match the rest of the screen...any way to tint it down a bit??

[Randomizer]

The game looks nice and not having to scroll through all those divination spells to get to an elemental spell will really help. The interface looks much better.

[Saxon1974]

Awesome, glad to see this game gets some nice attention on a big site!

Hey Thomas, can you post a screenshot of the arctic region? Assuming its completed enough to post one

[BasiliskWrangler]

Hey Thomas, can you post a screenshot of the arctic region? Assuming its completed enough to post one

Yes. In about a week, we'll post these 5 new RPGVault screenies on our site, plus we'll throw in an extra screenshot. Since the arctic tilesets are about done, we'll show you a bit of that.

[Saxon1974]

Hey Thomas, can you post a screenshot of the arctic region? Assuming its completed enough to post one

Yes. In about a week, we'll post these 5 new RPGVault screenies on our site, plus we'll throw in an extra screenshot. Since the arctic tilesets are about done, we'll show you a bit of that.

Excellent.

Hey a bit off topic question; Is it possible to download the soundtrack to book I in a format I can play in media player? Im not sure how to play the .ogg proprietary format.

[Getharn]

Hey a bit off topic question; Is it possible to download the soundtrack to book I in a format I can play in media player? Im not sure how to play the .ogg proprietary format.

Media player as in the Microsoft Windows software? Or do you mean a portable MP3 player or similar?

In the former case, you have three basic choices:

Firstly, you could try installing a better media viewer (I suggest Foobar2000 for audio, or possibly Winamp). Most of these will support OGG out of the box, and as a bonus are typically not quite so resource-hungry and generally less annoying. This is clearly a subjective point.

However, I can appreciate you might want to keep using media player, so your second option is to install the appropriate drivers to allow Media Player to play these files. Follow this link and follow the instructions (you almost certainly want the "Win32 installer" version, unless you're using 64-bit Windows).

Your third option would be to transcode the OGGs to MP3, or similar format that Media Player supports natively. I'm not going to go into this one, because it's probably moderately fiddly to set up the software required, and I'm guessing more effort than you're prepared to go to. Also, any time you transcode between lossy formats (neither OGG nor MP3 represent a perfect reproduction of the original sound, hence "lossy") then there will be some incremental reduction in sound quality. This is generally undesirable, so either of the options above seem more sensible.

As an aside, OGG is commonly regarded as having better quality than many other audio codecs for an equivalent bitrate, so it's a handy format to be able to play.

[Saxon1974]

Thanks Getharn!

I wonder if Media player can burn to a CD after downloading the codec? I will find out.

Sorry to sidetrack the topic.

I hope the artic area of the game is rather large, i find them quite interesting. I also hope its difficult to survive in the icy regions as well due to the cold\weather effects etc.....

[CrazyBernie]

I gotta say, I'm liking the textures on the walls. Very.... shiny! I should probably stop putzing around and get LtF back into commission though... at this rate Book II will be out before Lewis even gets out of Aridell....