Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Blog Update

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures lead designer Ole Herbjornsen made a quick stop to his blog on 1UP to talk about some of the testing tools available in the game’s debug mode.

Two other useful tools are the showmeshid and the paintball tool. The former is a mode where you can target graphical assets in the game and get information about filename, placement in playfield, texture size etc. The latter can be used to tag or “paint” a certain area in the playfield which has graphical glitches. Say you are running through the jungle outside Tortage and to your horror you discover a tree which has been placed half a meter above ground. In addition the leaves on the tree have a strange checkerboard pattern. The question everybody would ask by now is What would Conan do? He would probably be quite skeptical due to the obvious magical nature of the tree which keeps it suspended in air. He might decide to charge it or chop at the empty air underneath the tree. Luckily our devs and QA have experience dealing with this kind of foul sorcery and know better. First they would use the showmeshid to find out which tree has a texture problem (the checkerboard pattern) and may also tag the area around the tree using the paintball tool. Next time a world designer is working on the playfield in the world editor he can get a quick overview of these paintball reports and fix them.

On the subject of graphics we also have debug shaders, which when turned on allow you to isolate and focus on whether a graphical asset has specular map or normal map. If these are missing it may degrade the graphical quality, and so these debug shaders can come in handy during graphical reviews where you can turn them on and off run-time. Also another debug shader which I think is cool is the texel density filter. It calculates the pixel/texture ratio and shows if an object has high, medium or low texture resolution. Think of the density filter as a temperature scale which goes from blue to green/yellow and ending at red. Ideally you want the scene to be green/yellow. So the texel density function is good for revealing meshes which have been scaled up or down, making the texture too low or too high resolution. In other words it is a good way of getting visual unification of the scene, making sure everything looks good together.