Hey there!

Valorian-Aeternum

Valorian-Aeternum

Hi community,

I am developer and admin of the project Aeternum, a german Ultima Online freeshard currently in development.
Since my main part is in graphics like in game art, gumps, etc I can provide some information how to do new stuff and help with custom graphics.
So for all the guys now clicking on the link to our homepage: This is still under development. We like to present as much stuff as possible and it should look not to unfinished.
Our goal is not just to have a german freeshard, but we plan to run a second server in english (I will not translate all the stuff, so when the german version is ready we are looking for some guys helping with a proper translation).

So, some information about Aeternum:

After 8 years in development and gaming I stopped and had a huge break of 2 years. After this time I thought that I could not leave Ultima Online and started all over again. I picked up a crew of artists, world designers and stuff to finally reach my goal: The most detailed fantasy shard ever. So I decided not to give this project some time limit, but to do my very best to make it awesome looking. So we started to fix a lot of stuff in the original graphics and added tons of new designed created with blender and photoshop and a graphics tablet. After some time we found some guys willing to come up with concepts for the gameplay and one guy which owns a server. Since then the workload is massive, but we handle it with fun and a lot of time.
After one year we decided not to just do some freeshard, but to do some project which will be helpful for the community. So we agreed in giving our graphics after the release of the project for free. Also we will provide tutorials in mapping, artwork and building stuff to help new projects to get a more and more individual look and share all the stuff we learned during development.
Lately we decided to run our project on ServUO (It is finally at the point where we need a test server), and this is what brought me here.

Cheers

Valorian

Some screenshots, take somewhere on the map, showing a farm and some small waterfall in a northern forest.

GroßerHof.jpg Im-Grünen.png
 
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Wow, this is gorgeous! I don't see the link to your homepage though? I can't wait for the test server to come up. I don't speak German but I'd still love to just explore your world. Exploration has always been my favorite part of the game.
 
Hey,

thanks for the warm welcome.
We will have a test server for running an alpha test maybe in 2017. Anyone registered till then can get a ticket for the alpha which will be pure testing of the engine, spawns, etc and get an award afterwards. We will plan this carefully.

@m309: Yeah finally I made it here... It was time to run a testserver...So we can check if all the world building is worth it. But it looks nice and even with a lot of spawns still no problems.

@Norman Lancaster: Exploring a world is always the best part. I am glad that we will offer a bunch of different regions including desert and jungle. Also we will have a huge underground region for dwarfs with an unique look and unique plants. This days I am working on finishing the medival stuff for the main kingdom, then I will finish the stuff I need for the desert and then we will start with northern regions, including a bunch of new snowy stuff and some dragon boats for example.
The nice thing is that we can offer a bunch of different places. Cities that look like mediveal cities in the Netherlands, villages near the northern coast that look like vikings build them or some from early mediveal germany, elven towns that look like straight out of a fantasy movie and so on. We will have new roofs, we changed all textures...a lot of work, but totally worth it.
 
I have some more.
One is a part of a casrtle located deep in the woods. There is a creepy old village nearby. Both is far away from the capital and the castle is one of the oldest in our world. The other shows Rychhaven, the harbour city of Eruweron the main kingdom ruled by technocrats. The whole city will look like a city in the Netherlands in the mediveal times and has an huge harbour with some ships (ships won't be usable, cause we just have one huge land....so for the first years I guess we don't need sailing, but the decoration is nice. Ships are done in 3d with Blender, Artwork is done with Blender or Photoshop.)
Everytime I screen something I see where we have to do some fixing, but this we will do on the fly. Actually we are working on increasing the amount of different wall items available. For example the simple stone wall: We increased the thickness to have a more natural look and then come from the original amount of walltiles to a set of round 300 different walltypes for just one wall. This is what makes a house look interesting. Same with roofs and decoration. Also if you play around with new colors you can use all the tiles in partitial hue so that you get tons of new looks for every region. You can go from really dark and evil up to light and beautiful.

Andernburg.png Rychhaven2.png
 
Your work really inspired me to to make transparent water work on the shard I work on. Thanks!
Here are some of your old screenshots from somewhere that I kept as reference!
1.jpg 2.jpg 3.jpg 4.jpg 5.jpg
great stuff!
 
Haha, think I presented this at StaticZs site. Yeah, very cool you found it. Really, the transparent water is such a thing... Make things looking great.
I am very happy we changed the layout of the name "Aeternum" again. When we get the homepage online you will see the layout fits perfect with it.
Hope to show some more stuff till then. This is really challenging, we are lacking staff (yeah Germany isn't filled with good world builders...there are just a few :-/), but anyway we try to get some things done this year and I think we will manage to fill at least half of the world and to set up a bunch of text and illustrations. Also new gumps are planned, cause I like to change the UI completly including a much more detailed version of the paperdoll.
 
Oh wow, looking at these screenshots I forgot this was in the UO engine! Seriously, I got this confused with Wild Terra. What you guys are doing is blowing my mind!
 
A new one... First impression of the largest castle in our world. It fills many screens and is mostly in a high mediveal style. Hope you like it. If any and I mean it! expertise is needed of help, just ask via PN or ICQ whatevr. Contact me, I am glad to help with graphics or worldbuilding stuff.
Val Erintra Feste.png
 
WOW! Thanks, this is very nice Norman!
Yeah, they did a good job I would say, but you can improve everything in the end. I hope Aeternum gets better over the time as a classic online RPG. We will translate our content to english aswell, but we will need lots of help, cause nobody in our team is a native speaker. But first we will finish it in german. But my tutorials for basic graphics I will do in english (even if my english is crap and I have this weired german accent). Worldbuilding I will first do in german, then in english, cause this tuts are mainly for our worldbuilders. The problem is that I do everything with our arts which you don't have. But I will try to explain how you can improve your style with less graphics aswell by getting to some basic points. I hope I find someone helping me out a bit with a nice intro or something, cause in the end everything I do and everthing we do is for the benefit of the whole community. Later on we will even look for some guys willing to run and host the english version of Aeternum to make the project more international and bring UO players together from all over the world. (In fact we have a guy from Paraquay in our Team and are open for guys from all over the world-> I can explain everthing you need to know in english and help you through our stuff ;-) )
 
I was extremely fortunate to be given a visual tour of some areas in Aeternum. I was given permission to share some of these areas with the community. Enjoy :) Thank you again for the tour.
Rychhaven.jpg
*The image's visual quality is less then what it would look like in person.

Edit: Another area.
ruins1.jpg
*The image's visual quality is less then what it would look like in person.

I'm not affiliated with the Aeternum project or team. I just like their map a lot!
After re-thinking about it, I'm not sure many many area's I want to share. I don't want to spoiler the sense of exploration too much.
 
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I can't freaking wait for your shard! Having a new place to explore is making me drool, and it's so beautiful! Honestly, you folks need to get down with Broadsword and make this their next expansion. It'd blow people's minds. Then again they might not want it. It'd make the rest of the game look out of date :)
 
Thank you,
we are still working to get the Homepage to run. Latest work include an overhaul of the brewery originally made for the project UO-Mittelerde, which offered its files years ago. So we will be able to add this and some more nice features to the dwarven stuff. Also we are glad to announce the start of the work around the northern lands, including viking style houses, a bunch of new plants and some other fancy stuff. Worldbuilding in this region will start within the next two weeks so that we hope to present some new stuff soon.
We are still a bit outnumbered, so any skilled help is highly appreciated. With the homepage there will be a job system available where you can apply for any free position.
We will make sure that decicions are made within two weeks, so no long term waiting for answers.
I am also working on some fancy stuff like 1-2 wallpapers (including our custom painted worldmap and some artwork) and some banners you can use everywhere. Tutorials are on hold since I am a bit out of time lately...

SO hope to show you something soon... :D

Cheers and thanks for all the nice support and all the likes we receive here, this helps us to go on with everything.

Valorian
 
Simply wow, Valorian you have some pretty spectacular level map work there. Hats off to you and your team for the really awesome work. As well as double mad props for choosing to share your art resources down the road.
 
Sorry guys, I was so busy the last weeks, but here is another screen directly out of the construction site of the dwarven empire. I lowered the light level and I really loved what I saw. Hope you like it, too.

Ambosstorbau.png
 
So, here is something new which I am trying out this days. It is a carriage, which will hopefull be useable... The thing is that I have to do it in eight directions (done) and also with animated wheels (done) and... finally get it to work in game (to come...)
Anyway, I hope you like it. Next step are some animations. I am more or less spending some time on the Ultima Online Horse, to make it more natural and normal looking. Also I miss some stuff around the horse, like a mediveal saddle and stuff, so this is ongoing, but with 500+ pics I am thinking about rigging a 3d Horse and using this instead of working my way through the whole pics...
Somewhere I saw a transformation from animations (Oblivion-Elder Scrolls) to Baldurs Gate, so I think it is possible to do this for Ultima Online aswell. Normally you can use the animations from Baldurs Gate quite easily.
I guess one can import the animations to Blender/ 3ds or Maya and export them in the right direction with the right animation steps. I will give it a try...Maybe someone else can come up with an idea.

Ok, but here is a pic of the carriage

Kutsche.gif

This thing is partitial hue, so you will be able to customize it in the end.
 
And after a ong time (busy with work again..) here is a sneak peak about the castel I am working on. It is called Caldfirst and located at the border to the northern realms in the mountains. Hope you like it.

Caldfirst II.png
 
Thanks! Yes, it was a lot of testing, but now I think we are quite able to build some very nice stuff. Anyway, I will have all the stuff packed on our homepage sooner or later and I am working on tutorials how to use this graphics.
But I can tell you you need to expand your art. We have now 32k full slots and expanded to 64k slots to have enough space for the rest of the stuff. With this you need something like UCS or a new client to get your project to run. So we are still looking for developers helping with the scripts, statistics and stuff and also we are looking for skilled worldbuilders that are willing to learn how to work with our stuff and help to bring Aeternum to life.
 
we also ran into the same issue a long time ago with not enough slots, so upgrading to the client with 64K really helped.
I would love to learn more about the methods and techniques you used to create the graphics. Were they hand-drawn or was some 3-D software used like blender or 3DS Max?
 
@Rex

They are hand-drawn using a graphic tablet and photoshop. For example for the rocks I used some pics to see what thex should look like. Then I simply redraw what I saw in the right angle. After that I used our textures to match the rocks to them. Another step was to create colors with which you can easily change the rock for example from granite to slate or something else. For the upcoming ships I used Blennder to create a basic shape. But even if you add some nice textures you have to do at least some pixelwork to create fitting boats to UO.
The trees for example are fully hand-drawn. I start with the tree trunk and match it into the whole picture. You will always need to draw at least 4 different shapes of trees. then you can create a base for the leaves.
Same with the walls and so on and so on.
There is a bunch of stuff out there and some is pretty good, but most of it does not fit into UO so well and even if you add some new stuff it will always look a bit out of style in the rest of the OSI-style graphics. This is why we are redrawing nearly 90% of the graphics.
I can tell you we already spent 2 years to have the base with which we are now working and we will spent two more to finish most of what we need....

Which shard are you on?
 
Sorry guys for the long delay, but real life hit me hard... But know we are again working on some new things... Next step is to enlarge the files, we ran out of slots. After that we will start to add new textures and stuff. What I really like is that with the next year we will finally start with the tutorials for everyone interested.

Also the layout of our project has changed. We wanted something more proefessional.
I hope we can open the homepage as soon as possible. If you like to join us, you will then find job-applications there for almost every group like worldbuilding, scripting, concepts, storyline, whatever.

I woud recommend to stay tuned and take a look on the tutorials we will offer from the beginning concerning worldbuilding.


Cheers
 
This looks absolutely brilliant!

You say you plan to share your graphics in the future. I am absolutely breathless from your "rocks" terrain and rock and boulder statics. It looks so much better than the osi, just amazing.

Do you think you would mind sharing just these few tiles with the community before you open your home page? I would gladly share some stuff I have prepared in return (I am also planning on sharing with the community, but unfortunately my custom tiles are really not amazing enough as yours)

Anyways keep up the great work!
 
You can get a fair amount of Valorians work already at uo-pixel.de, including I think a lot of the rocks.
 
Hey tasartiran,

m309 is right. A lot of my old work is already online and available for example via uo-pixel. The rest I will share after the release of the projekt. Not all of my stuff, but some bundles time after time.
I guess that our webpage is coming soon (hopefully, but I am on it...) and there will be some information about this also available in english.

Some of my work I will somhow trade agains other unique work, so from artist to artist to leave it a bit more unique.

Happy new year ;-)
 
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