The Lord of the Rings Online Interview

Ten Ton Hammer was able to corner Turbine’s Jeffrey Steefel and Adam Mersky for a lengthy conversation about their current and future goals for The Lord of the Rings Online.

Q: Your DirectX 10 functionality just went live last week, which was a big step in continuing to insure that the game remains cutting edge. What sort of improvements were made to the graphics? Is it worth it for players to go and upgrade their computers? How does the Dx10 conversion make the game look better?

Jeffrey: In LOTRO, we always tend to do our updates in phases or steps. Phase 1 is almost always fairly transparent; we look at the game and make sure that LOTRO doesn’t blow up when we introduce Dx10, which is a fairly large architectural change. Really, that’s about half of the effort when you’re implementing something like this.

The second phase, which we’ve already done, is figure out what sort of systemic things we can do to the game. Instead of creating whole new content to take advantage of Dx10, how can we change the engine so that across the world certain things just look better? For example, shadows are now dynamic; when you run in Dx9, the shadows that are cast from trees are only cast on the ground. They won’t cast shadows on rocks or logs; it’s just sort of baked into the terrain and is a sort of trick that was just necessary to do in Dx9. In Dx10, the trees are casting shadows on anything in their path along with animating. The trees are casting shadows on rocks and trees and brush and people that are walking under it. It just creates an immediately different look. We can also do cell shadowing, so that building with things like gutters, awnings, and overhangs will now shadow themselves. It just adds an overall deeper feel to the game.

While the game was already very deep in the graphical department, the new changes just begin to add up when you switch over to Dx10. Little things – like where water meets the terrain – are now incredibly realistic. It doesn’t look like a computer game anymore; it looks like water lapping up onto the shore.

The next phase, which occurs over the next six to twelve months, is looking at how we can render the shaders in Dx10 to make actual content. It would be like making a stone wall where you can see every single individual stone using shaders and displacement maps instead of having to model every individual stone. It requires us to build a bunch of new content – and we’ll do it – but we want to take baby steps.

That said, there’s definitely an advantage to having a Dx10 card now, and that will become and even greater advantage over time.

Adam: On top of that, the Dx10 video cards are finally dropping down into the mainstream price range. As that happens, I think you’ll begin to see more people switching over to Dx10 and seeing those improvements to the game. And that’s also one of the reasons we didn’t implement Dx10 at launch; we wanted to make sure we did things in a certain order and we did them well. With the drop in the price of the graphics cards and the general conversion over to Vista and the graphic cards integrated into those systems, we’ll probably have a large portion of the LOTRO community running on Dx10 systems post-holiday.