Glossary

This page describes the terms used describe various concepts in Arx Libertatis.

Ambiance

Ambiances describe the background noises audible in Arx. These can be comprised of multiple tracks, each of which supports panning (to simulate audio coming from different directions), fading, delays, as well as randomizing these effects.

Stored in .amb files.

Cinemascope

A letter-boxed view of the scene with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Used in conversations and cutscenes. The black bar at the bottom of the screen provides space for subtitles.

Cinematic

A cinematic in Arx is a series of static pictures with added effects such as a panning, zooming or rotating camera and lighting, as well as audio. Unlike conversations and other in-engine cutscenes, they do not use the cinemascope letterbox.

Stored in .cin files.

Background

Stored in .fts files. Raw scene backgrounds were stored in .scn files but are not shipped as part of the game data.

Entity

Entities are any parts of the scene that are not part of the scene background. They are controlled by script files, can have a visible object and can be interactive.

Level

Player level

The Template:Wp describes the player character progression and can be increased after obtaining a required number of experience points.

Caster level

The caster level (or casting level) is a number determining a (player or NPC) caster's skill in the arkane arts. For the player it is calculated from the Casting skill and Mental attribute.

Map level

The world of Arx Fatalis is made up of multiple levels layered on top of each other. Each level has a map and can be made up of multiple scenes.

Object

The 3D mesh and associated materials describing the 3D appearance of an entity.

Stored in .ftl files. Raw objects were stored in .teo files but are not shipped as part of the game data.

Scene

A Template:Wp is a part of the game world that can be loaded at once. Only one scene can be active at once.

Stored in .dlf files and .llf files.

TODO: Maybe call this "area" instead? "scene" is currently used to refer to the scene background in some places. "level" is already used and "map" has conflicts as well.

Tile

One cell in a regular 2D grid spanning the scene. Each primitive of the [[#Background|scene background is assigned to one or more tiles. Tiles are used to quickly find all primitives near a position.