If I’m not mistaken, I believe the money goes to contracted artists. Their team is not large enough to complete the whole project themselves, so they use some of this money to have certain things created for them under contract, such as armor sets.
Unlike the dedicated core team, contractors are not willing to wait for payment, usually.
Edit: Alexei beat me to it. 
And for this you guys should get an extra applaud. This is going to be the best game ever.
Well we still have to pay for the raw materials our blacksmith needs to create the physical copy of the armor that our artists will “digitize” to create the in-game asset.
or what other people said…
Tuching,thank you for your great words
http://www.grimdawn.com/screenshots/2010-05-01_thekillingfields02_lrg.jpg
New normal mapping technique on terrain - not bad I think…
Although for some things it seems like the old way works better. Cool though to see such pronounced… bumpiness? Looks really cool when the sun is at a lower angle. Of course, still appears flat when you’re viewing it from a low angle - need parallax mapping or hardware tessellation to solve that… GD2?
What’s new/different about the technique?
looks good.
Looks pretty cool, definitely gives the road a very different look…stands out much more than in the previous screenshot and actually looks like it’s made of semi-raised stones. 
Soul
Welcome to the second killing fields.
Awesome screenshot, I’m pretty pumped to see guns in this game because so far this is one of the few RPG’s I’ve seen where they don’t seem out of place. /morestoked
Great screenshot. Have been watching Grim Dawn since January and now finally registered. I love the dark tone of Grim Dawn, there are many colorful ARPG like Torchlight and Diablo 3, so it’s good to be different. Also many Diablo fans would like the darker look. I hope there will be some video soon ;).
HEY! That screenshot almost went by me! You have to make a new thread for every shot!!!
lololol, at any rate, it looks wicked.
Tesselation would be kick ass, though it’s kinda dependent upon DX11 isn’t it? I’ve got no problems with that, but some people might.
Keep up the awesomeness!
Heh, yeah it would, however it is ungodly expensive. We’re trying to ride a very fine line between improving graphics and maintaining performance. We want just about anyone who could run TQ to be able to run GD. If graphics were a priority and we really wanted to make the game look incredible, the first thing we’d do is increase texture sizes. The problem is we can’t really say “oh well, its 2010, lets up the texture resolution by 30%”. Most of the textures in the game need to be power of 2 and have uniform dimensions. So just going up one step in texture size results in files requiring approximately 400% the amount of memory. Game development is a business of compromise unfortunately. We’re always trying to balance these conflicting goals.
Lol, I can only imagine how expensive tesselation is, that tech was released only a little while ago IIRC, and it’s incredibly advanced from what I’ve seen. Oh, this is a straight plane? let me add this map to it… and now…POOF, stairs! it’s like magic I tell you.
But I can see what you’re getting at. I don’t mind dulled down graphics to be perfectly honest, I think the whole graphic race thing is getting a bit silly. Just keep the gameplay solid and make lots of fun bosses.
The difference tessellation would do for a game like GD would be insignificant and negligible.
Heh, if you say so. 
It is a moot point though as this technology is currently impractical for us due to performance demands and development cost.
I disagree and it would rock. Bring on the tessellation I can run it 
Even though I’ve upgraded since TQ and now have a Radeon 5850, I’ll be happy so long as the game looks as good in motion as TQ did. As of now I have no reason to believe it won’t.
You clearly have no idea of the potential for tessellation…
So enlighten me. I’ve seen the demos like everyone else. It’s basically displacement maps in any 3D package, is it not?
My point is that from the camera perspective of GD it wouldn’t make much difference since it’s not close enough to the camera to look significantly different from a normal map (and/or parallax mapping). Unless you zoom in of course. But what I’m trying to say is that a top down hack and slash isn’t the first genre that comes to mind when wanting to exploit the new DX11 features.
That’s just my first thought. I haven’t experimented with it at all, so you might be right about not having a clue.
Kind of interesting, two cons though;
Keep up the good work