Greyhawk Interview Part 2 at RPG Vault
Posted Thursday, February 13, 2003 - 18:36 CET by Mollusken

RPG Vault have posted the second part of their Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil interview with project leader and lead designer Tim Cain from Troika Games.

What kinds of opponents can players expect to face in Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil? Will the game include the Juggernauts and fungal growths that were first introduced in the module?

We have a large variety of creatures, from the common bugbears and gnolls to cool outsiders like demons and efreeti. There are lots of undead too. I think we are at 60-plus different types of monsters, and counting. We have lots of variations on each type that are not included in that figure. For example, there are seven different bugbear models, depending on temple affiliation, and there's a separate model for female bugbears too.

Of course, we have elementals (you can't have a temple of elemental evil without them). And yes, the Juggernaut and the fungus creatures (ascomids, basidironds, phycomid, zygoms, etc) are all in there. I think the artists had some fun with these creatures.

What factors prompted the decision to use 3D characters on pre-rendered backgrounds? To what further extent are you using 3D technology for spell effects, fog, lighting et al? And what do you think the system requirements and recommendations will be?

For a given amount of memory space, 3D characters give us a bigger range of animations and personalization than sprites. Pre-rendered backgrounds give us more detail in the scenes than 3D backgrounds, so we like that combination. And we are using 3D particle effects everywhere, from smoke in the village chimneys to magic items like flaming swords and frost arrows, to each and every spell having an individual spell effect.

Our min spec is a 700 MHz processor, with 128 Meg of RAM and a second-generation 3D video card, running DirectX 8.1. We are using a system like this as our in-house test system, so the artists and programmers can see how the actual maps run in the game.

We haven't made a recommended spec yet. In-house testing shows the two biggest factors that improve performance are video cards with high fill rates and CPUs with lots of on-chip cache.

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