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Apr
09
2009

Creating Skira Island Q&A – Third And Final Answers!

Sadly everything has to come to an end, and the last final answers have been issued.

Early this morning, Helios the Community Manager for the OFP2 Forums introduces the Third batch of your questions.

Their are only Four New question and answers this time round, But Helios posted something interesting “Apologies to those people that didn’t get their questions answered, but stay tuned for further Q&A’s coming soon” Hinting more answers maybe issued at a later date.

The Third Batch of answers can be found here

Again Helios quotes the final answers as follows:

I’m going to be out of the office for most of the day, so best to get these posted now

3rd and final batch of answers below. Apologies to those people that didn’t get their questions answered, but stay tuned for further Q&A’s coming soon!

11 -Apache-Cobra – With such a huge view distance (35km?), it baffles me and everyone I have spoken to how the island will be projected in-game without performance drops. Are there any special or new techniques/technology you used to conserve frame rate?

On any modern hardware, the resolution of the player’s display is in many ways the limiting factor for what can be shown at any one time. (There are only so many pixels on the screen to draw with.) One of the greatest challenges on Flashpoint has always been to provide maximum draw distances without sacrificing the high bar we set for ourselves visually.

A standard technique in gaming is the use of something called “Levels of Detail” or “LODs”. Through the use of LODs, we can display very high resolution characters, trees, vehicles, etc. up close to the player, but as they move farther and farther away, their size on-screen diminishes allowing the game to use a lower-detail stand-in without there being a visible difference to the player.

We use this same principal (along with a whole lot of proprietary home-grown technology in our Ego engine) to deliver the beautiful environments and content that can be seen in the game.

12 -Jump Artist – How much did game balance influence adding objects for the map design team? IE are there 2 airfields? Or 2 possible bases?

Frequently, villages aren’t really close enough together to be used for opposing sides of a battle. A better view on how we use villages in-game for a multiplayer PvP example would be to have players spawn in the forests on either side of a strategic village, and then their job is to sweep and take the village from each other.

There are also some locations on the island where we have placed strategic objects (like some old abandoned WWII concrete bunkers) in a manner that can be used for head-to-head battles. That said, we have always tried to keep the placement based in realism within the environment.

13 – Brave27heart – What was it about Kiska that made you decide to use t as a template for Skira? What stood out about the island above any of the others you could have used?

At the start of the project we went fishing on Google Maps to find a suitable location. We found Kiska and moved it to suit our geo-political scenario. The vegetation and habitats are all based on south Sakhalin, but the real island terrain around that location just wasn’t interesting enough to build good gameplay out of.

We needed something that was of a certain size, looked dramatic, and above all had varied terrain (to allow varied tactics). Kiska has a great mixture of terrain, with mountains, valleys, flatlands, cliffs, beaches, and a huge extinct volcano. The steep mountain ridges and passes are ideal for interesting MARSOC and infantry combat. It even includes great coastline areas and lower altitude ‘flatter’ regions which is where the main mechanised assaults can take place. All these things and more played together in our choice to select Kiska as the base to use as a starting point.

14 – Apache-Cobra – What is the size of the team dedicated to creating the island and how long did it take to get the terrain into a complete stage?

While we can’t go into too many specifics, the number of artists dedicated to building the island has grown and shrunk over time with around 40 artists participating at the peak depending on the need.