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Øystein Eftevaag, lead programmer on the upcoming Funcom MMO The Secret World, has detailed the game’s Dreamworld Engine
The Dreamworld Engine is currently being used in Age of Conan, however it has been improved for The Secret World, Eftevaag explains in an interview with HydraInitiative.
“The Dreamworld Engine is a shared company-wide technology base which is continually being worked on by a pretty huge team of programmers. How it usually works, is that the next project being worked on (The Secret World) drives the main development of the engine, and then existing live projects like Age of Conan) can pick and choose which improvements and features they want to collaborate on and port into their branch of the engine.”
He adds that this aids the ongoing development of the engine, specifically in how much time gets put into improving it.
“The main benefit of this to The Secret World, is that the features being collaborated on (like, say, memory usage improvements, loading time improvements and the upcoming single-server technology) get the full development and testing resources of two whole projects focused on them. Of course, the benefit to Age of Conan is exactly the same! They get new features they want, and they don’t have to ‘pay’ the full price for them.”
In terms of how the engine helps level design in the game, Eftevaag went on to say that “hundreds of thousands” of assets that go into the game can be patched into a beta server within “less than an hour or two”.
“Due to having locations from anywhere from New England to Egypt, the environments in The Secret World are extremely varied. In some ways we have assets enough for half a dozen different games just in terms of variety, and it’s extremely important that our engine and toolchain in general can handle such a huge amount of assets (meshes, textures, materials, shaders, animations, particle effects, etc, etc). It’s something we’ve put a lot of effort into, and the results are really showing.”
The Secret World is scheduled to launch April 2012.
