Every story has its bad guys. They’re often a one dimensional, single minded villain that wants something like money, or power, or world destruction. An antagonist who everyone hates and whose defeat drives the plot. In the case of the Diablo games, it’s Diablo himself.

And while Big Red is nasty in appearance and intent, he’s not much for conversation. In fact, during the series so far he’s had no more then three lines of dialogue! Some might not even count the speech of the Dark Wanderer as Diablo, in that case, two!
We love our bad guys, but occasionally we like them to be a little less… “Grrr I’m bad, kill me”.

That’s where the Douchebags come in (Note: not an official authoring term). Stories often need side characters to give one-dimensional-bad-guy some support. Sometimes they’re working for him as ultra-skilled or ultra-humorous body guards. Sometimes they’re protagonists that can never get things right. More often then not they’re double-undercover-secret-triple-serial-side swappers, who started off good but turned bad on the road to revenge (and will probably come good again in the end).

The way it works now is that when an item drops the name shows for about 5 seconds and then they fade out and disappear. Pressing Alt shows all dropped item names for again about 5 seconds and then the names fade out and disappear.

I actually didn't like it at first, I liked the on/off state of pressing or not pressing Alt, but with the names showing immediately after drop and having a sort of "grace period" after just tapping Alt, it's really grown on me and is a lot more intuitive. It's a lot easier to see what just dropped quickly and decide if you care, and it isn't necessary to constantly hold down Alt while scavenging after a large fight.

I still want to see -nopickup return but I haven't really asked anyone what the possibility of that is. I don't think it would work well with the current system, so options may have to be a possibility.

The Diablo 3 Bestiary now features a new creature from the realm of Sanctuary: the terrifying Dune Thresher.

As I was preparing to set pen to paper to begin recording my thoughts at the beginning of my epic undertaking to gather the world's knowledge together in one tome, the hand of providence tapped me on the shoulder. The news that a rogue burrower had killed a citizen just outside the city gave me the wonderful opportunity to see firsthand one of the more disturbing creatures we share this world with – the savage dune thresher.

Check out the new entry now!

We've also expanded the media galleries with four new pieces of artwork and four new screenshots.

Excerpt

As I was preparing to set pen to paper to begin recording my thoughts at the beginning of my epic undertaking to gather the world's knowledge together in one tome, the hand of providence tapped me on the shoulder. The news that a rogue burrower had killed a citizen just outside the city gave me the wonderful opportunity to see firsthand one of the more disturbing creatures we share this world with – the savage dune thresher.

Long ago driven away from settled locales to the deep desert wastes of the Borderlands, the dune thresher is rarely seen by city dwellers. Every so often, however, whether due to injury or old age, one of these unholy beasts ventures to the edge of civilization to feast on the frail human animal. When this happens, a professional like Franklin Burroughs, the famed guide and hunter, is called in to put an end to the threat.

Fortunately, Burroughs and I, both being men of travel and adventure, have naturally crossed paths before (frequent readers of my works will no doubt remember this grizzled, rough-hewn boulder of a man from my classic, Xiansai Chronicles). Thus, I contacted him so that I was able to take part in his quest to rid us of the burrowing nightmare. He acted reluctant at first, but I could tell he was happy to have me along.

Bashiok: Our lead tech artist Julian and I talked a bit yesterday about some of the effects and fading, and he gave me some more insight as to how they're working and being changed. We also went in to some of the questions you've all brought up, and so I'll hit some specific points too (with quotes!).

Q u o t e:
or just disconnecting corpses from the physics engine when they come to rest, and have them fade out

Bashiok: Aside from my previous comment of this not being nearly as fun (it would also look/feel kind of lame), Havok already knows when an object has come to rest and so they already have a lower cost when they're still. Additionally with the proposed method there is no reliable way to determine when or even if a body will come to rest. In a single player game with a class that maybe doesn't use a ton of skills that interact with corpses in a significant way this could work, but in a multiplayer game there could potentially be hundreds of corpses piling up as they've never come to rest due to all of the player skills firing off.

We're also taking extra care to minimize the ability of a player to impact the performance of another player, as was sometimes maliciously done in Diablo II.

Q u o t e:
I am wondering why you just use an object's age and don't specify a complexity and priority attribute for each object. By combining these two with the age method you would be able to fade out highly complex physics and low priority (tiny) objects earlier.

BashiokI'm just going to quote Julian from an e-mail at this point so I'm not rewriting his words and acting like I know what I'm talking about here - "Because most objects in the game that use the age method aren't different enough in anatomical complexity for this to yield significant benefits. The size of objects generally isn't a factor. It is the number of unseen physics meshes that the technical artists add to these things that matters and they tend to be pretty similar from actor to actor. This is largely due to the anatomical similarity of living things in nature..."

Most things have appendages, a back bone, head, etc.

Julian also made the point that while we have our new system for determining the number and age of a physics actors, we still have the old tried and true "disappear after n seconds" method. We can actually choose which actors use which system, so our intent is to make sure that a destroyed table won't make a corpse disappear, for instance. The corpse probably being the more important of the two to keep around.

Quite a few of you were discussing options, sliders, ways to control how long something takes to disappear, etc. and that may be a possibility. The current setting, which is around 20, is just our initial implementation. There's always the possibility for that number to change, or for it to potentially be variable by the player. We do want to keep the game options uncluttered and consistent as much as possible though. -- source: Battle.net

WC: Could you please introduce yourself for the WarCry community?

Ben: Greetings! My name is Ben Boos. I'm an author and illustrator with a past in game development. I spent nearly 8 years in the trenches at Blizzard North during a fabulous time of that company's history. Then I took the adventure a step further: I leaped and pursued a crazy dream.

For the last several years I've been pouring my heart into the crafting of a book that I hope gamers will like. It's called SWORDS: An Artist's Devotion, published by Candlewick Press. My crazy dream has now come true; thoughts have turned into things, and now the book has released! I can't tell you what I'm going through. WooooHooo! It's a very scary, exciting time. So hello everyone! Sorry I'm freaking out; it's awesome to be here!