WoW's secret sauce: tools

Nah, its a good terrain artist, and fantastic level design.

See all those tiny hills that make the mountains in the background? Now, do you think that a designer modeled and textured every one, one by one?

The textures mapping to the crevasses, that can be done and probably is done with a filter, identifying where they are and applying the vegetation to it. Pretty much every current engine has that kind of technology now. Weathering effects that keep going down a hill but not up it, pretty standard.

As for the bumps in the hills, yeah that is the work of a talented terrain artist putting a lot of polish into the game. It is not the only place that blizzard puts a lot of polish/care/love into the game. They do the same thing with little doodads, plants, ambient effects, sounds, and music.

Everything is polished to a mirror shine as far as art direction and level design are concerned.

There is not bumpy-wowstyle-mountainside-button, that would look like crap and would be just plain lazy.

WoW's "secret sauce" is polish, lots and lots of polish.

I believe that a lot of WoW's beauty comes from ground textures and terrain modeling.

Well, yeah, a lot of it comes from ground textures, since that is by far most of the game that you'll see is ground texture. Its everywhere you go.

But take a gander at the complexities of the terrain art in and around the cities, that is just plain old fashioned polish.

Don't know if you have used the Unreal Engine, but I used to make maps for it all the time.

The way that engine worked is, the same I would assume as the engine WoW designers use.

Everything is in layers, the base terrain layer, which is a base color or design for the terrain. It's normally pretty simple, ranging from plain looking dirt to rocky, and gravel texture designs. With a huge number of variations and combinations. You can even combine multiple terrains for a multilayer look. If you assign everything by layers, you can even remove and reapply just that layer or change just that layer. Makes it very easy to change things even after you have the whole map almost finished.

The way the brushes work, are completely customizable. You can make them apply thick layers of a texture or a spread out thin layers. Over a small or very large area. So making a dirt road with rock and them maybe some pits and a few random patches of grass only takes a few clicks and a couple seconds.

You can do the same with bushes, trees etc.

Not to mention it's extremely easy to import you own textures and apply them to whatever you want.

I always just assumed most editors where made this way, or similar as it's extremely powerful, very flexible, and anyone can use it to make decent looking levels. Get someone with experience and you can make outstanding looking levels, in no time at all.

Pretty much every editor is capable of doing Wow-like maps with as much or more quality, it just takes extremely talented people to get it right (and that's what happens).

Same way, pretty much every architect (well, the majority), uses autoCAD as a standard tool. But there are good and bad architects, so some projects are awesome and others aren't.

Generalizing the wow phenomena to their tools is wrong, very very wrong.

Here's the relevant comment, it was something I wrote in 2005 when I was wrestling with the Torque engine:

There's a heirarchy in game programming: Rendering Engine > AI > Game Systems > Architecture > Networking > UI > Tools. Everyone wants to be higher on the ladder, the tools are the absolute least interesting to work on and are generally given to the least experienced programmer, who does everything he can to get moved up to something more interesting. Since everyone else is dodging UI work, usually he winds up there (but he won't want to stay there, either).

So it shouldn't be surprising that no one has bothered to fix blatant bugs in the Torque world-building tools in the last 3 years. Or that the GUI building tool is almost as bad. But it's sure a pain, I'm left with a choice of fixing them myself, extracting the data and building/using other tools, or just do the best I can with them (they are usable, just flaky and unreliable).

That, at least, was easier in ordinary software development. Since none of the work was particularly interesting, you could assign someone a piece of it and expect them to finish it, since the only satisfaction and hope for recognition they had was to do it well. But no-one wants to do a good job on tools or GUI work, because then they might get stuck on it.

WoW's tools do seem to be pretty good. Certainly their world-builder's tweak the output from the algorithms, good procedural tools are not a replacement for world-builders, but a way to create an overall consistancy and improve their efficiency.

--Dave

You're really off-base here.

WoW has very few dedicated, stand-alone, "tools" as far as creating art assets are concerned. The vast majority of tools they have are a few Maya and 3dsmax plugins to help with import/export into the game engine, setting up animations, setting LoDs, and so on. Modeling, texturing, and refining a map aren't really esoteric, difficult prospects - especially given an existing texture and asset library.

As for the NWN2 challenge - just use a Wacom tablet. Paint in grey-scale height maps, use Mudbox, whatever floats your boat. This is not a difficult process, so long as you stop exclusively using the amateur-focused map tools that ship with the games, and start using actual professional art tools.