The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria Preview
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"What we did to allow our technology to make these huge cavernous spaces was alter the technology so that the ground players are walking on is actually landscape terrain and the ceiling above the player is actually inverted terrain," Steefel noted. "We make two pieces of terrain and actually put the world between them. This allows us to treat everything in the world - walls, floors, ceilings - as landscape. It has physics. It has form. It's not skydome textures."
And the proof of Steefel's claims were staring me right in the face as I ran throughout Moria. Even with the game settings cranked up to the max of the DirectX 9 settings, I never dropped below 30 frames per second until the few times that I fired up FRAPS to catch a video. Even then, the strength of the Turbine engine was evident throughout the demonstration. Turbine's technical team should be proud of this particular achievement.
As we walked, Steefel explained some of the basic philosophies upon which they created the entire Moria expansion. "We're not building a series of dungeon spaces that connect up to create the land that is Moria," Steefel said. "Moria is an entire city - an entire civilization - that exists underground. That forms everything that we do in terms of the space, the content we put in it, the creatures that populate it, all that." To hear a developer discuss that type of thought process for an area is relieving, especially when it comes to an area as loved and cherished by Tolkien fans as the Mines of Moria.
