Mod status news

Greetings, friends.
Y'all might have noticed low progress on the mod as of late and I make this article to provide official information about our circumstances.

So first of all what we're working on (not at the particular period of time but following our in-house schedule):

1. 3d Art. We're developing three factions. You could already know the names of these: Rohan, Mordor and Isengard.
- A brief look at the progress, Isengard (developed by Felarund in past and now taken over by enpremi (with huge improvements)) is almost 50% complete.
- Mordor has some asset sketches here and there but nothing fully complete (you've seen trolls, some general assets for orcs and orc itself were made). We had very talented artist Hakan developing this faction but he had to leave the team after he has joined a major game-industry company and now participating in developing a cool game. We now have a beginner who is learning and practising to get everything done but he is still learning and has a lot to learn and many his works have to be revised.
- And Rohan. Rohan is the slowest faction here. Y'all seen those magnificent concept arts made by Robbie McSweeney and that's pretty much all. Yes we have two 3d artists attached to this faction but both have literally no time due to real life circumstances. They've made some shields, helmets and few more assets but that's too few to be counted.

2. Animations. Our great dutch crew (Niels Dinkelaar and Gerre van der Meer) is working hard on animations for not only Rise of Mordor project. They're studying at university and they lack free time same as all of our team members. They are working on animating trolls and up to some more race-specific animations. I believe we still haven't released the MoCap session video from stream to the public but if it's highly requested we can drop it any time.

3. Creatures. Our 3d artist Zak Cowen had some issues with relocating to another city and then some job-related issues but still he made those badass trolls and now is working on Mumakil (which alter will be passed to animation team to create skeleton and billions of animations).

4. Music. Filip Olejka has created many all-new soundtracks for our mod. However music modding in Attila is still restricted and no one tries to discover that side of modding so yet we don't work much on this field.

5. 2d Art. As mentioned above Robbie McSweeney the Great has conceptualised whole Rohan roster and now mostly waits for 3d artists to bring his drafts to life. We also have Luke Martins who produces nice concepts for next factions on our list (Rhun and Harad) and we have Lord Ellessar who is making User Interface. Unfortunately our unit icons artist becomes inactive too often so we rarely able even to contact him not even saying of any progress here.

6. Architecture and maps. This summer I made a huge step forward in making custom settlements possible for Attila and now I can say with full heart it is fully possible to make settlements and we have even more opportunities here than people could make it back in Medieval 2. However with such possibilities there come some difficulties in making these assets. It takes incredible amount of time to produce single architecture asset, not even saying of the whole list of over 100 assets planned.
As with land battles and other levels we have made some lore-accurate maps such as Fields of Celebrant and Fords of Isen. Though these still need to be finished and fixed.
As for your beloved campaign map: We have conceptualised our Middle Earth map projected onto Europe map and created a list of settlements to be used with factions placed on that map. And that's all, I'm afraid. We've seen some persian modders have succeeded in moving the actual settlement in another location and they claim they know how to change province/region borders. This is extremely interesting work and we need more communication to learn from them (and investigate priceless time in learning it).

7. Database and lore. We have a small crew making balancing and creating rosters for factions. It's a tedious work that is usually left behind the scenes and so heroes are left unknown. Caligula the Mad and Maestro the Maester with help of Cshewey are pushing the lore into the base game and make it actually work with some great brand new ideas to the game experience.

8. Misc. Our team leader Vikus van de Merwe has developed priceless tool which eases us to create realistic assets for the mod. It is a shader for Substance Painter and Substance Designer. Briefly: you get in game exactly what you see in the editor. What you see in the editor is the result of some pretty simple manipulations with materials within the editor.

9. Optimisation. We've recently found 2 beginners in 3d modelling field. They've been given a task to optimise (create LODs) to our already existing assets. This should boost your performance while playing our mod. Because Rise of Mordor cares of it's players ©

I actually realised this article became too large while I wanted to leave just few comments so here I end with one last sentence.
The current progress on the mod at this very moment is almost zero. Our team and me, in particular, are all-into the university and studying. I hate making promises and I honestly can say we were planning on releasing the mod to public as soon as possible but we beg your understanding on the situation and I want to emphasise how many hands our team lacks. So please, if you have solid(not beginner, because teaching beginners takes more time than developing the faction as it seems) skills in 3d modelling/animating/2d art, please contact me or Caligula via private message or any other available option.

P.S. Now as you can see, we've removed comments section on our main page on ModDB. In it's stead you can now use FAQ article and ask all questions you have in that comments section.

Sincerely,
Mr.Jox