Asheron’s Call 2 Dev Diary

Turbine’s official Asheron’s Call 2 website has been updated with a new dev diary written by content designer “Full Metal Bitmap”. In it, he discusses the designing and building of Knorr. An excerpt:

Just prior to joining the Legions Team I had been doing a lot of Worldbuilding on Middle-Earth Online. We have some terrific tool makers and tools at Turbine and there was a handy third party landscape-shaping tool that had been integrated into MEO’s production path. Unfortunately it did not work with AC2’s production path. I was determined that it would. Currently large-scale landscape creation in AC2 was done using Photoshop because our game engine uses gray-scale values to generate terrain. Photoshop is fine but does not provide the 3D visualization that the third-party tool allowed, plus the tool tends to make smoother terrain. I really felt that AC2 would benefit from the use of this tool. Well, after a good deal of trial and error I found the right combination of settings that allowed it to work with AC2’s production path without having, say, the buildings of Arwic end up a mile underground. I leave such cataclysms to Bael Zharon. Well, mostly I do. A certain percentage of Live Team work requires destroying parts of the world. Circle of Life and all that.