Golden Land Game Elements

Part 1: Graphics

2002-10-29

In this series of Golden Land features we cooperate with publisher Russobit and developer Burut to tackle a single element of the game at a time. The feature is split up in an overview of the feature and a short Q&A to get more detailed information about some of the mentioned aspects.

Overview
Golden Land has many different locations ranging from large cities to small forests. The graphical composition of any location in Golden Land depends not only on the region of the world it is in but also on the current season while you are visiting that area. As such it's easy to distinguish the different locations in the game like the seaport, the desert or the middle zone of Golden Land, but each of these locations will also look differently depending on whether you visit there in the winter or the summer time.

All of this became possible because of the new in-house engine AGE which has following graphical features:

• The areas are constructed without using tiling technology. Instead high polygonal modeling is used to create them after which they are optimized manually. As such it is still possible to realize multilevel locations with slopes and valleys. The results is that the game locations looks much more realistic and pleasant to view than when using low polygonal models combined with a real-time renderer.
  
  
• An original algorithm for interacting with the dynamic world, like other characters, spells, items that move etc. This creates a strong detailed landscape and the illusion of a 3D world.
  
  
• Dynamically changing the content in certain areas depending on the actions of the player and the NPC's.
  
  
• Software sprite rendering support (addition, subtraction, mixing with various coefficients and others) that allow our designers to make their ideas come to live and achieve some of the qualitative high magic scenes.
  
  
• The player characters will be visualized depending on the weapons, armor and clothes they are currently wearing.
  
  
• Support of weather effects such as snow, blizzards, sand-storm, rain and lightning. The look of these effects and their frequency depends on the seasonal and geographical location of the area you are currently visiting.
  
  
• A changing clock, indicating day and night.
  
  
• Animated sequences that bring the world to live such as fire, clothes drying and moving in the wind, water surface effects etc.
  
  
• Optimizing the script cut scenes during the game.
  
  
• Changing the screen resolution

The graphical system requirements for the game are not so high to modern standards. The engine will work normally with all DirectX 7 compatible video cards that also support 800x600 resolution or higher and 15 or more bits of color depth. The 3d accelerator allows watching the weather effects and the clock going round, but it's not necessary.

Q & A
RPGDot: Just for my comprehension. You create a high 3D polygon world and then modify it by hand to convert it to 2D? If so then the world is still flat. How do you implement height differences then? Or can't the character be on a different height then others?

Burut: No, the 3d model is rendered to a 2d resulting picture that will be completed manually after that. Due to the chosen perspective and the algorithms used for checking each of the object's depth we can show the effects of different heights the objects are at.

RPGDot: Are the characters in 2D or 3D?

Burut: All the game characters are in 2d. They look differently depending on what they are wearing due to the dynamic rebuilding of sprite sets in the engine.

RPGDot: Are there just different areas with different seasonal effects or, when I stay long enough in one area, will I experience the change in seasons in one location? How long (in real time) does it take for a day to pass in the game and how long for a season?

Burut: Yes, if you will stay in one location for a long enough time, the weather will change in relation to the season. At the moment the gaming time differs from real time in proportion 60:1. I.e. One gaming minute in Golden Land equals one second of real time. So, the real length of the season (three months) is 36 hours. This speed of in-game time is not final yet, so it can change in the release version.

RPGDot: What resolutions are supported? And can I change them while playing? or do I need to restart the game first?

Burut: Golden Land supports 800x600x16 bpp and 1024x768x16 bpp. And yes, you can change the resolution without restarting the game.