Jeff sees tools, gets excited.

During a recent visit to Cryptic Studios, we were privileged to see a demo of Cryptic's scratch-made environment design toolset, which is currently being upgraded for use in an unannounced MMORPG project. Level Design Lead Thomas Foss, Producer Serdar Copur, and Environment Artist Nick Duguid were our tour guides as we say an entire zone come to life in less than 15 minutes.

"Almost literally before I knew what I was seeing, Nick had generated some basic terrain and was terraforming it with tools to those that you might find in games like SimCity 4 or (in a nineties flashback) Populous: The Beginning. Thomas explained that differences in terrain heights and edges could be softened using the flowing "hydro" tool or the more dramatic "thermal" edging tool. Flat space for content could be carved out quickly, and at any point, a character model could easily be dropped in (i.e. literally within a second or two) to check for proper collision responses and occlusion."

Read the whole feature right here at Ten Ton Hammer.