Star Wars Galaxies Developer Diary
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Finding locations in the world that didn't have any player housing and were also large enough to become a PvP battlefield was a long process. Once the regions had been identified, we quietly pushed out a change to our LIVE servers that made these "no build" regions. This was to prevent people from placing structures on these areas prior to the release of Update 10. Once that was done, I began customizing the identified zones with our terrain editor. There's something soothing about making beaches in video games for me. Massassi Isle was probably the most fun I've had in years. Most of our work deals with code and data tables, but this was much more creative and more artistic. It started as an empty and treeless island and became a vibrant island with bunkers and bases on it. Eventually, I made new particles for smoke and explosions, which brought the battlefield to life.
After making the Massassi Isle, I used it as my central testing location for all the battlefield programming changes. All battlefields function as "reinforcements" style mini-games where teams start out with a set number of points. As players kill members of the opposite team, or accomplish battlefield objectives, they diminish the number of points the opposing team has. Whichever team is reduced to zero points first, or whoever has the least number of points when time runs out, loses.
