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Gamezone has the first production diary for Warhammer Online By Destin Bales, Content Director.

Ten thousand pages. That’s my best guess at the amount of finalized documentation that our content team will produce before the launch of WAR. We should start an office pool, or a printing press. Ten thousand pages for a game based on an existing property rich with detail. I can only imagine the number of pages we’d be writing if we were coming up with a world of our own!

What in Sigmar’s name are we writing about in 10,000 pages? Well, way back in the beginning of May 2005 after the signing of the deal with Games Workshop at E3, we started with the basics. You see, pre-production documentation serves several purposes. At the most basic level we outline things like:

It reads more like a QNA, but hey, who am I to judge?

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Gaming Steve has Episode 34 up in which he talks with Guild War's Jeff Strain. Mentioned in the conversation is the upcoming expansion Factions. Enjoy your listen.

Our very own out of this world Guild Wars site

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Thanks to Blues for the news

It's been awhile but Heidi is back with a new log on Portals and the Nav Zone.

A portal system is a way to more intelligently decide what we draw and simulate within a scene. Basically, we divide the level into a series of “rooms”, which is essentially an group of stuff you expect to see at a single time. Connecting these rooms are volumes called “portals”. Those allow me to tell which rooms I should expect to see from other rooms. So when I’m in a room I can quickly determine which portals I see, which I can then use to quickly determine which other rooms I can see from which I can determine … etc. etc.. Anything not seen is discarded and not drawn. Not terribly exciting, but it allows us to have bigger “play areas” and to allow you to stay in them longer before we have to have a giant load from the disk. One of the problems found along the way was that our art really wasn’t created with this system in mind, so I had to write some code to appropriately split the art along the boundaries of the chambers. While this wasn’t terribly tricky it was gruelingly slow. Hence the part of my job where I go back and make existing stuff work faster.

The nav zone uses this system but was a bit tricky because it is so VAST. Our normal pipeline for rooms is to simply export from Maya, and then run through a conversion program to get it into the game. Unfortunately the file that got spat from Maya was close to 2 gigs size. When we went to convert it, our machine simply didn’t have enough memory to handle it. In the end we had to redo our process to be more piece meal – processing smaller files which are then added to the overall scene, but cached to the disk instead of wiping out your machine.

More News and Info on Pirates of the Burning Sea

Awen goes to studiously brush up on her pirate speak

MMORGP.com has a Dofus review.

Following the tutorial, players are dumped into the world with very little direction as to what to do or where to go next. There are a few minor quests they can accomplish at the start, but they feel very shallow for the most part, and often involve a simple delivery or kill quest.

That is not to say that the world players enter is not a pretty one. The Dofus world is undoubtedly beautiful in its own way. If you are looking for a game with cutting edge graphics, stay far away from this game. Everything is done with simple 2-dimensional sprites, which are animated well enough. The environments have a beautiful, hand-drawn look to them, and the game certainly has an anime theme and inspiration behind it. Some may enjoy this simplicity, while others may be put off by it, but there is no denying it all looks great.

Are you Dofus material?

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