The public events have lost their lustre. The Mobs just aren’t satisfying your bloodlust any more. The Raids are starting to feel routine. Something is missing from your life, some verve, some joie de vivre that is slowly eating a gaping hole in your enjoyment.
What you want, what you really want, is a big old billowy cape. Then you’ll feel like a real hero. Someone who can stand at the top of a mountain and look like the most stoic man to exist. Which makes it a good thing that Trion World are your developers, because they’ve got your back. Rift is going to be getting Shroud 2.0, Cloakworks’ impressive real time cloth physics engine. And boy are you going to billow.
The software is going to be used in the upcoming Hitman game, presumably to make all those killer Nuns’ habits look extra real, but here Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer at Trion Worlds is aiming for something less bloody. “Ever since Rift’s launch, one of the most requested visual features we get from our players is for capes. Cloakworks is the go-to source for this technology” he told Develop Online. And looking at a few videos on the Cloakworks’ website, it’s not difficult to see why it was picked.
Through a simple tutorial you can see how simple it is to throw these physics meshes onto existing models, turning what was previously an unanimated frame into lovely flowing cloth. If they can throw that into Rift for all the cloaks, and maybe even anything cloth, then the game is going to suddenly get a rather lovely facelift without hurting processing speeds all that much. After all, Shroud works in Unity.