Settlers Q&A
A rather short Q&A for Settlers: Heritage of Kings
Tags: Settlers: Heritage of Kings Categories: Features, PC Features
Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Jun 6th, 2004
THE SETTLERS®: HERITAGE OF KINGS TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF THE “ANT-HILL” FACTOR
THE SETTLERS® manifested the term ant-hill factor. The game units are busily moving around the landscape – in fact, everything seems to be buzzing with activity. It is real fun to just watch the settler workers going about their ‘everyday’ work.
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This effect can strongly be influenced by the 3D-technology used for this new opus, THE SETTLERS: Heritage of Kings. The game lets you experience more than ever before – thanks to the performance of the engine and thus high degree of graphic detail. When compared to THE SETTLERS IV, the number of units- and building-animations has multiplied considerably. The quality of the textures, the camera work during the game and the strong zoom (one unit can fill up to a quarter of the screen-height) invite the player to closely observe THE SETTLERS’ world. The development-team of Blue Byte describes this as the “aquarium-effect”.
From the developer’s point of view, how is this “aquarium-effect” being achieved?
Dietmar Meschede (Lead Programmer):
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“During the whole development – meaning game design, graphics incl. modeling, texturing and animation as well as programming – we concentrated on creating a completely ‘alive’ game world. First we had to achieve the impression of vitality from the bird’s eye view. The basic requirement for this is the display of many dynamic objects, which we mostly would have kept static for earlier projects. Therefore we optimized our graphics-engine (Criterion™ RenderWare™). The bird’s eye view should now create the urge in the player to monitor single partitions of the settler’s world, zoom in and contemplate detail. In order to assure the liveliness of the gaming environment, we consequently utilize the full band-width of conventional animation technology. Furthermore, we use special vertex shaders for animating trees and other landscape objects. We also integrate particle effects into the animation system in order to substantially enhance the subjective vitality of the gaming world for the beholder. Another important component is our Multi-Layer-Terrain-System, which we especially designed to meet our requirements concerning the extremely detailed landscape design. This allowed us to design landscapes with enormous degree of detail and variation, not depending on the zoom level or camera position used by the player.
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In order to make sure that our effects (e.g. dynamic weather effects, water, specular maps, …) are always state of the art, meaning that they, at the time of publishing, comply with the best available technology, we apply HLSL (High-Level-Shading-Language). Overall, we simply make more efficient use of the standard hardware-resources that can be expected at the time of publishing.”.
How are game designers supported by technical aspects?
Dietmar Meschede (Lead Programmer):
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“First of all, we emphasized the development of our tools, like e.g. the map editor. Thus designers are able to convert their ideas much more efficiently. Almost any aspect of the game, e.g. mission objectives, behavior of units, unlocking of technologies, key-assignment etc., can be controlled with our scripting system. This facilitates the game designer’s work of creating exciting and diversified missions. Game factors and functions can be configured or allocated by the game designers themselves without having to change the code”.
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Tags: Settlers: Heritage of Kings
Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Jun 6th, 2004 and is filed under Features, PC Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
