Age of Conan Developer Blog Update

Age of Conan lead designer Ole Herbjornsen has added another entry to his blog over on 1UP, this time discussing how the team recently reworked some of the game’s older textures.

Anyway, with a project that has been in development for several years it is unavoidable that gfx assets get outdated and what looked good last year might not be so hot this year. This is also where the ground textures come in since many of them were made quite a while back and before we knew what the render engine was capable of. A vital part of the polish and optimization process is to review the number of unique assets in playfields, and reduce the polygon counts and textures used on these assets to use less memory and reduce CPU/GPU processing time. (I’ll return to this point in a later update and talk more about the tools we use in the polish & optimization phase)

Well, after looking at the usage of ground textures, we decided that we wanted to reduce the quantity of ground textures while at the same time improve the visuals of the game if possible. A lofty goal but a noble cause 😉 First we set about identifying the ground textures which were similar to each other and could be marked as duplicates for later removal. The ones we had left we wanted to optimize (run faster, use less memory etc) and polish (look better, more bling). After some testing and discussion we decided to focus on three key areas: a) add specular map b) normal map and c) remove patterns in the texture so we could use the same texture in a bigger area without it looking like the texture was repeating itself. Regarding a) and b) just look them up on the net if you want more info or just accept that they look great when they work as intended 🙂

There are a couple of new screenshots included in the entry, but if that’s not enough, you’ll find another seventy screenshots over at WorthPlaying.