The Lord of the Rings Online: Book 13 Interview

Ten Ton Hammer offers an interview with lead worldbuilder Matt Elliott about the upcoming Book 13 update to LotRO, focusing specifically on world art and landscape tech.

Ten Ton Hammer: In one of the latest dev diaries, someone mentioned that you were using the Mines of Moria tech in Book 13. Can you explain what pieces of Book 13 that might be?

Matt: We introduced new landscape technology, which is dual head map technology. It basically allows us to create a ceiling mesh for our landscapes. You may have been to some places like the Isendeep or the Ancient Lair in Angmar, where it is a seamless cave, but it uses way more assets than what we can do with the dual head map technology. The new tech allows us to use fewer assets and make the cave look much more organic.

We didn’t use it in much in Forochel it just got put in a small location but we wanted to test it out and see how it worked. We wanted to make sure there weren’t any egregious issues with it before diving head first into Moria development. That said, we did want to show it off to people, because we’re really excited about the technology. The results we’ve been getting with it in Forochel and in other places has been really good.

Spotted on Blue’s News.