IFS Zephyr text & details

Today I'm having a peek at the intro movie, in which I've made certain observations. Beware of slight spoilers!

Being interested in aviation, I couldn't help but take a look at the details of the IFS Zephyr and Maxim's flying machines in the initial cutscene. Doing so, I made a few observations about their details. It appears certain things have changed on both of these vehicles during the course of Arcanum's development.

One thing is the propellor and landing gear for the Maxim machines. In the cutscene, they are shown as pushers (rearward-facing propellor) with landing gear (wheels), whereas they have forward-facing propellors and no landing gear in the still image shown during the end slides if Caladon and Tarant go to war. There also appears to be no visible armament (machine guns) in the animated clip - a gun can be seen only on the end-slide plane.






Lore-wise, one can always assume that Hieronymous Maxim, funded by the Caladonian government, makes certain improvements on his design. It is quite interesting to see that the model appears to have changed during the game's development though, because on the Zephyr, there are changes during the same cutscene, which I cannot see an explanation for within the Arcanum universe.

The 'wings' or 'stabilisers' or whatever you would call them on the blimp, have two noticeably different rigging setups during the scene. As you can see, in the first image they at the tip of the wings in pairs of two, but in groups of three on the second image, and with altered placement, closer to the middle of the wings. Even the envelope (balloon) has visible rings surrounding it, which reveals its structure.




Now, could one assume that there were two 3D models for the Zephyr - one low-poly, and one high-poly. This seems highly plausible as most 3D animations, particularly games, utilise a LOD - Level of Detail - system, which uses more detailed models the closer the object is to the viewer. More details, which consist of polygons in 3D modelling, drain computer performance and are often simplified with less-detailed models whenever possible, such as when the object is in the background rather than the foreground.

Finally, this is the most interesting change in different models. The text, the existence of which I'm certain everyone who's seen the intro have noticed, does not appear during the first fly-by view of the ship, which most definitely utilises a different model from the following parts of the film where the actual attack begins.

The text's existence becomes obvious later on, but I haven't been able to make the actual words out completely. Cru...e Aphrodite C... is what I've managed to figure - I could only make out one of what appears to be three words. Does anyone know what the rest is?






Cru...e Aphrodite C...
I'd love to find out the rest of the wording, and what it means.

//on1ondevelopment

 

I've never spotted the text to be honest. As the devs loved to put in Easter Eggs here, there and everywhere it wouldn't be unreasonable to think it might be a slogan that appeared on some real life historical ship or perhaps it's just a known saying. Taking the video frame by frame on YouTube, it looks to me like there's a forth word to it beginning with "L", but I can't make out more than that. The first bit could be "cruise" with the letters you've given.

Good finds and discussion anyway, it's all interesting stuff.