Icarus Studios News

(Continued from Part 1)

With the use of Level Prep, I can add pathing information and modify the details of certain objects within any newly generated level. This tool renders a preview of each change I make, so if any problems occur, I can panic, flail my arms, and scream hysterically; sooner or later, a programmer will debug the technical issues before the level is ever added to the actual game. For example, say I open an object panel and drag and drop a sofa in the tiny room I’ve just finished creating. With my mouse, I rotate it and rearrange its placement in the room, changing its instance properties each time. Then, I open the path menu and click the option to “create a new bounding box.” I use my mouse-wheel to set the bounding box’s measurements. I next select the option to “create a new path.” I click various points around the level map to define a path around my sofa. If I were to use Character Prep and Base Editor to generate an NPC, I could then program that character to walk around the sofa on the path I’ve just laid out with Level Prep, and thus avoid any collision problems. If collision problems occur anyway because a ghost is somewhere deep inside my machine, I typically have a mild panic attack and then bribe a programmer with candy, because, as we all know, programmers are like modern-day wizards with magical abilities to fix technical things mere mortals such as myself rarely understand, but their main weakness is saying no to milk-chocolaty goodness.

Now, the thing that makes the levels of an Icarus virtual world so special, from a technical perspective, is that we employ the use of area portals, which saves so much time and effort. Area portals are special brushes that help determine what content appears within a player’s range of vision at any given time. If the player character is in the tiny room and not the slightly larger room, an Icarus world won’t waste any time rendering the unnecessary polygons of the slightly larger room. The larger room won’t load until a player character clicks on a door, walks down the hallway, and enters that room. It’s almost like Schrodinger’s Cat, except, in this case, it’s Schrodinger’s intricate gaming levels: If you can’t see it, is it really there? Perhaps one day I will give a programmer a Hershey bar and ask them to explain it to me very slowly, using small words and lots of visual aids.

From an artistic perspective, the Level Prep tool is very liberating; it prepares interior spaces with a superior attention to detail—complete with customized furnishings, window treatments, architectural details, pre-design patterns and textures, designated paths, and navigational areas—all on a single, reusable level, which can be combined with other levels to create massive interior spaces. There’s plenty of room to make your own mark; for instance, if I’m making a schoolhouse in a deserted town in the Old West, maybe the window panes are broken, like someone tried to get in and rob the place or did some damage during a high-noon shoot out. Maybe the only light in the room is sunlight streaming through the windows and bullet holes in the sagging wooden walls. Not only are some of the desks and chairs overturned, as if the children had to leave the building in a hurry, but they’re covered with cobwebs and dust—it’s been ages since anyone walked into this sad, stuffy room. Perhaps a few dark-red and brown dried blood stains on the teacher’s desk and scribbled cursive on the chalkboard that comes to a sudden stop in mid-sentence—and you’ve got a really creepy setting, perfect for players to encounter vengeful settlers’ spirits and ruthless phantom outlaws.

Using Icarus’ Level Prep, entire adventuring zones can be created, ready for NPC population and object placement, with a minimum of time and effort, but plenty of room for personal creativity. That way, when the online game is pushed live and players—total n00bs or MMO experts alike—move through the various levels, as the difficulty and complexity of the game-play or virtual experience increases, so too (hopefully) will the intricacies and the ambience of all interior spaces.

-Kara Stambach, Virtual Worlds Team