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TREKCORE >
GAMING >
ST ONLINE >
DESIGNER DIARY > Creating Environments
PUBLISHED: July 14, 2007
AUTHOR:
Mike Stemmles
This was originally published on the official Star
Trek Online website. Entry 1.0 - Hailing
Frequencies Open
(a.k.a. "The Coolest Thing")
Stardate 60998.6 (July 14, 2007)
Welcome to the first edition of the STO DevLog, a
periodic behind-the-scenes look into the development of Perpetual
Entertainment's Star Trek Online. During the months before we're ready
to roll out STO in a big, BIG way, we hope you'll make the DevLog the
place to go for informative, entertaining, and intriguing peeks into
the making of the most ambitious Star Trek game in the history of the
galaxy.
I'm your host and STO Story Lead, Mike Stemmle. I'm also, as my
friends, family, and coworkers can attest, an unabashedly rabid
Trekkie. How rabid? Let's just say that music from Star Trek: The
Motion Picture was played during my wedding ceremony and leave it at
that, okay?
As a big ol' Star Trek fan, you'd think that the coolest part of my
job is working with Gene Roddenberry's fabulous creations. And make no
mistake, wiling away one's days adding to the legends of Kirk, Picard,
and Sisko (among hundreds of others) is an exceptionally spiffy way to
make a living.
But it's not the coolest thing.
The coolest thing about working on a project like Star Trek Online is
the host of unexpected little surprises that emerge as the game takes
shape. Because STO is such a large undertaking ("massive," even), it's
pert-near impossible to keep one's eyes focused on every single aspect
of its development at all times. A fortuitous consequence of this
phenomenon is that sometimes I don't get a look at a lot of the really
keen stuff going on in the game until it's nearly fully-formed.
Exhibit A: Recently, I was absolutely floored by a demonstration of
how we'll be crafting our exotic alien environments. For years, the
process of constructing believable landscapes (alien or otherwise) has
been a grueling, painful endeavor. But these days technological
advances have come along to help designers and "world builders"
rapidly assemble huge environments that look like they were shaped by
natural forces, while simultaneously providing all the necessary
gameplay "Points of Interest" laid out by the design team. Here's how
it more or less works:
- World and story designers talk for a long time
about what they want to do on a planet. This is a mysterious process
that involves french fries, meetings, and much frozen yogurt. It
eventually produces a somewhat drab (but very informative) wiki page
like this:
- Taking cues from the wiki page, a world designer
creates a rough 2D map of a planet's layout, which highlights the
dangerous areas, the safe paths, the significant
structures/towns/cities, and anything else an artist might need to
know. These first maps tend to be both colorful and crude:
- A world artist takes the designer's 2D sketch and
uses it to quickly create "height maps" of the landscape, which are
more than a little bit eerie and foggy:
- The world artist takes this height map, and uses
it to extrude a rough 3D layout of the area. The resulting map looks
remarkably like it was carved out of a block of strawberry ice
cream.
- The world artist and world designer pore over ice
cream map, iterating on it until they're happy with the overall
shape of the world.
- The now-finished height map is fed into World
Machine, an intensely insane piece of software that generates
realistic landscapes using height maps and user-configurable "rule
sets." These rule sets govern things like "Rocks on this planet are
powdery" or "Mountains on this planet are 90% eroded" or "Streams in
this area are stagnant." By carefully configuring these rules, our
artists can swiftly create an absurd range of environments, from the
striking deserts of Vulcan to the sodden swamps of Ferenginar, to
everything in between and beyond:
- Once all the rules are in place, World Machine
procedurally applies them to the height map (among other inputs),
and begins to generate a landscape. Thanks to our artists' suite of
recently-purchased 64-bit machines, this process only takes about 20
minutes, giving our artists just enough time to
squeeze in a
quick round of Guitar Hero II check their company email.
- When the World Machine is finished, an amazingly
detailed in-game landscape pops out, ready to be populated with
surly Klingons, giant radiation towers, and maybe even a tribble or
three. Thanks to the blazing speed of World Machine, any major
changes we need to make to the landscape at this point can easily be
made in less than a half-hour. Just to wet your whistles, here's a
small tease of a typical in-engine terrain generated by the World
Machine:
Pretty cool, eh wot? It reminds me a bit of a quote
from Wrath of Khan:
DOCTOR MCCOY: According to myth, the Earth was
created in 6 days. Now, watch out, here comes Genesis! We'll do it
for you in 6 minutes!
We're not down to the six minute mark yet, but we're
getting there.
Join us again next time on the DevLog, when we'll have some more
interesting looks into the Star Trek Online development experience. But
before we go, here's a completely random, utterly cool "Star Trek Online
Image of the Moment," brought to you by concept artist extraordinaire
Rob Brown:
Gosh.
Jolan True,
Mike Stemmle, Emergency Story Hologram
PS Special thanks to Adam Murguia, Dan Fuller, and Greg Faillace for
their help with the imagery and tech clarifications.
Mike Stemmle is the Story Lead on Star Trek Online. He has spent much
of the past two years deep in the plak tow.
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