Legends of Dawn Kickstarter Campaign Update #10, $34,053 and Counting

With a scant four days left in the Legends of Dawn Kickstarter campaign, the team has taken advantage of update #10 to talk about the mod tools they intend to release if they reach the $45,000 stretch goal. Here’s what we should expect if they bring in another $10k:

Dreamatrix engine is complete RPG toolset. Using an intuitive node system, even those without prior programming experience can produce impressive results.

The Creature Editor allows for the quick creation of AI objects, including non-player characters (NPCs), monsters and animals. Using this module we can assign various animations to AI states (including combat animations, death animations, idle animations, movement animations and more). It also allows us to link various sounds to each of these animations.

Using this plugin you can edit creature stats, parts of the creatures which can be damaged, which spells and/or special attacks they use, scripts assigned to them after they die, spawning rates, etc.

The Particle Effects Editor is used for creation of dynamic particle effects. Using the provided nodes, we can create a virtually unlimited number of various particle effects such as fire, smoke, foam, magical portals, blood drops, waterfalls, dust, various spell components, leaves falling from trees, and even tornadoes.

The Entity Editor is used to create entities. Each entity is created using many different components such as meshes, physics primitives, sounds, lights, effects etc. For example, if we want to create a torch, we’ll create an entity with one mesh, one sound, one effect, and one light. All of these components can be animated using the provided spline-based track editor where we can edit most of the entity parameters.

All materials used in the game are created and tuned by artists using a proprietary node-based material editor. The node-based editor allows us to combine various nodes into complex materials. Each node corresponds to single function coded in HLSL.

World Editor is used to build large “streamable” worlds with thousands of objects and hundreds of living creatures.

The World Editor allows us to create large custom maps. Everything we need to model and texture Legends of Dawn’s maps is found here. Each sector can have multiple materials blended on top of each other using up to 32 materials to texture the terrain sectors. This allows us to have rich and diverse environments.

Ambient Editor allows us to create full day and night transitions with full support to modify ambient parameters such as sun color and strength, depth fog and vertical fog with support for fog density and color. All ambiances are assigned to different locations on the map and the engine automatically creates the transitions between neighboring ambiances.

Entity editing is easy and straightforward: you simply choose an entity you wish to place on the map and click where you want to place it. All entities can be moved, rotated around all three axes without difficulty using the transform gizmos.

GUI Editor is used for creation and skinning of GUI panels. By combining nodes we can create various GUI panels used in the game.

Lens Flare Editor allows us to combine various types of glow, streak and secondary flare components into various types of lens flares. All Lens Flare can be easily added to existing spell effects or can be attached to entities.