Darkfall: Dev Diary #3 - Digital Building Blocks

Human structures are inspired by the traditional fantasy setting, with cozy houses made out of wood and stone, much like the houses of ancient Paris. For the Orks we're using huge stone blocks, making most of their architecture solid and battle-ready. The Orkish buildings are inspired by the Aztec civilization architecture. The dwarves also prefer the use of stone, but they use different kinds of metal in decorative borders around their buildings. They build their stories downwards, into the ground, leaving all their buildings with no more than one visible ground level. The Mahirim architecture is inspired by the old Norse architecture and they build their structures using wood, thatched, and tiled roofs. Their buildings are usually oblong, keeping everything on the same floor just as the old Vikings did. The Alfar and Mirdain elves prefer the organic look, with mystery and magic as a theme for their structures.

[/a]Planning

There are several architectural challenges when it comes to modeling all the different buildings and places of interest for a game. With an online game there are even more limitations and restrictions than usual, but this is not necessarily a disadvantage if you can take full advantage of the capabilities you have at your disposal.

Our designer, BT Oren, describes all the different architecture of Darkfall down to the tiniest detail, which is a valuable reference for the 3d artists to work with. Designers and artists dig through the available research material, in order to capture the look and feel we're searching for. In Darkfall we have six playable races each one requiring their own unique architecture. In addition to this, we have also created architecture for several NPC creatures. Creatures like gnomes, goblins, and sadayel have their own unique buildings and villages that can be visited, and/or destroyed.

The way we do it: one piece at a time

When there are that many different architectural designs in one game, the available memory resources always present us with a serious challenge. The way we work within these constraints is by limiting the amount of different "pieces" loaded into the game, while still retaining the architectural diversity of Agon. This is where our "building blocks" enter into the equation. Using modules ranging in size starting at 3x3x3 meters and up to 24x24x24 meters, (some even bigger than that,) we can build an almost unlimited variety of structures in our worldbuilder. For each set of modules there are different kinds of corners, straight walls, stairs, and large halls which fit perfectly together just like the Lego we played with as kids. Memory resources are conserved this way: Even if one of the corner modules is used hundreds of times ingame, it only has to be loaded once into the world.

The worldbuilders play around with the modules in a 3D grid system using the worldbuilder, creating all the different structures and prepare them for interior decoration. Using different levels of templates, it's very easy to update all the different house templates scattered around the world without having to manually fix each and every one of them.

Variation is key

Architectural diversity is one of the elements that give Darkfall it's immersive look and feel. Darkfall gets a lot of variety for free thanks to the existing modules for all six races, and more for certain monsters, giving us a huge number of possible combinations to use. We can go even further by making several different kinds of variations for the same module. It's also possible to ask the worldbuilder to randomly replace suitable modules, giving the world even more dynamic capabilities.