Back To The Future - January Status Update & DTO 2.0 Devblog 2

Hi All,

It's time to take a look at what's been going on in #DTOv2 development since December!

New lighting for all materials DTOv2 is taking a step back (to the future!) by reimplementing a feature from back when we used an older version of the engine. It's called the Cook-Torrance BRDF, and is what The Order 1866 uses, as well as early versions of DTO. The goal is not only to make DTO's visuals subtly different, but the Cook-Torrance BRDF also lends itself to increasing perceptual sharpness - a win/win in DTO! Here's a screenshot with added bonus, the new playable area ground-contact effect! [img=https://i.imgur.com/39NNjLl.jpg]

Reworked Explosions Using a custom built particle shader that reacts to lighting (and won't get downgraded before release - it's high performance too) [img=https://media.giphy.com/media/26DMYSGa6a99wKlwY/giphy.gif]

As well as explosions, many other particle effects have been reworked (old/new); [img=https://media.giphy.com/media/l4pT770H0nRNKTQe4/200w_d.gif][img=https://media.giphy.com/media/xUOwGpMT8a5EhRMbUk/200w_d.gif]

Underground Areas Thanks to a recent poll on our discord server, underground areas of the map are coming to 2.0! This is part of a broader effort to give more character to the map, and make it interesting to just explore, even for seasoned DTO players. [img=https://media.giphy.com/media/xThtahXNgfVf3Cv8vm/giphy-downsized-large.gif]

New UI Continuing the new UI improvements, with a menu that doesn't look like it was put together in paint [img=https://i.imgur.com/9RVB149.jpg]

Those are probably the most interesting/visual changes in the last month or so, but as well as that, there's only a few more bugs left to squash before a public 2.0 pre-alpha feature parity test can go ahead - join our discord server to get notified exactly when that will happen!

For more updates on what's been happening in 2.0, join the official discord server now!