Bungie Weekly Update – 05/09/2014

http://www.bungie.net/7_Bungie-Weekly-Update—05092014/en/News/News?aid=11535

by DeeJ

This week at Bungie, we continued to sort through our findings from the recent Pre-Alpha test of Destiny.

You can learn a lot when a small delegation of highly-trusted testers inspects your brave new world for the very first time. Insights tumble from their unspoiled, eager minds like the luminous heaps of loot that litter the ground after a hearty battle. They teach you about everything from networking to weapon balance.

Sometimes, much to our surprise, they can even teach you about geology.

That’s right.

It all depends on the test subject. Each of them reacts differently to a mission. It just so happens that one of the vanguards we sent into the Pre-Alpha build was an actual explorer of our solar system. The Bungie Community might know Craig Hardgrove as one of the co-hosts of Guardian Radio. We’ve known him for some time now as a guy who’s helping to document the ongoing joyride of the Mars Curiosity Rover. Check out Craig’s other personal vehicle.

Hardgrove spends a lot of time studying terrain. He knows his rocks. While he was on his tour of duty in Old Russia, he studied ours. When he talks about them, we listen. I certainly listened when he started to transmit his feedback.

“I honestly think that staring at landscapes, terrains, and rocks is one of my favorite things to do in video games,” Craig said. “I know that sounds weird, but I just find that it immerses you in the world that much more, and if the landscape/rocks can tell a story I think that’s even more special.

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“I was most impressed by the fact that there are massively-bedded, more resistant layers forming capping units that lie atop more thinly bedded, less resistant layers,” observed our science-wielding Guardian. “We’re clearly looking at repeating depositional cycles of layered mudstone with massive sandstones on top. The whole valley has, presumably, been carved out by a

Most of this was going right over my head like an errant volley of slugs in a firefight. Still, I knew it was too good to keep to myself so I forwarded them to the Bungie team. Once Craig’s words hit our internal email lists, the people who actually worked on Old Russia started to take notice that their work had caught the attention of a purebred rock hound.

Rob Adams is the lead Environment Artist for Old Russia. He wields the powers of creation and erosion in Grognok. With a click of his mouse, he can bend millennia of landscape formation to his will. When he learned that he could swap notes with Hardgrove, a bromance of mountainous proportions broke out across the Internet. Like a mutual appreciation society, two alpha-geeks started to swap notes about laying the bedrock of the world of Destiny.

“I built a functional library of rocks for Cosmo,” Rob shared. “Rocks for general features, square-ish boulders specifically for combat cover, and cliff facades with no backs so they’d be less taxing on our engine when used many times. This ended up providing a good balance of memory storage and visual flexibility.”

According to Rob, designing terrain is about supporting both target acquisition and immersion: “Most of the rocks in the palette I built are designed to keep the overall visual noise levels down in any given scene. If noise-levels are too high, players have a harder time resolving the location of combatants with a glance.”

That’s the image Rob used to illustrate how terrain features can be too noisy for a combat destination. Can you spot the Guardian in that picture? Would you be able to do it at a glance, under the duress of bullets whizzing by your head? These are the sorts of things that our people think about.

Our goal is to build destinations where every last pebble tells a story. Every natural formation, every rusted structure, every broken road should lure your imagination deeper into a world that has moved on. Our tale of mystery and adventure takes place in settings that should spark your own curiosity to rove about in search of secrets or treasure.

It’s nice to know that even the most educated of minds can be drawn in by the scenery.

Next, we need a meteorologist to give us the sweet lowdown on our weather patterns. Anyone out there have a knack for Doppler radar and an itchy trigger finger?