New Dev Diary: Terrain

My name is Pat Magnan, I currently hold the position of Technical Director, which means I'm the chief liaison between the Design Team, all the other creative teams (Art, Sound), and manage the Engineering/Programming efforts for the Trials of Ascension project. In my 'spare time', I'm also the core programmer working on the Trials of Ascension terrain engine, and a number of other graphical subsystems we use in ToA. The first computer program I ever wrote was on a Commodore PET computer in 1981, every year I marvel at what we used to call a computer, and the possibilities technology is still opening up for us, even today.

I want to go over for all of you in some detail, which I hope isn't too technical, how we have designed the terrain engine ToA uses at present, some directions it can go in, and give you an idea of the scale of the world you will get to experience in ToA. Bear in mind like anything that's still in development, things could change, but I don't plan on compromising your experience unless some other factor overwhelms me (i.e. like rendering models or something).