6/14/99

In today’s update I would like to take you behind the scenes a little and show how some of the technical decisions are made on a project like “Torment” and what thoughts influence those very decisions. Although I know this excursion will not make friends only, my belief has always been that it is easier to live with decisions if you know what lead to them, instead of taking them as erratic behavior. One question comes up time and time again. Why does the game support a resolution of 640x480 pixels only? After all we all have heavily invested in our Pentium-III 500s with 21” monitors, to get the most out of computer games, right… not! Although creating computer games has a lot to do with idealism, the bottom line is that we all need to earn the butter on the bread, and as a result, computer games are driven as much by pecuniary reasons as they are driven by creative individualism. Although many of you invest heavily in your hardware the majority of people do not and cannot keep up with the fast pace the computer industry is dictating. As developers and publishers of computer games we have to be aware of that and although it might be fun to write a game for the latest hardware frenzy, the sales for these types of games usually flat out somewhere way beyond their profitability. They have their value and usually drive hardware awareness and publisher profiles, but that’s a completely different story. The main reason why we decided to limit the game to a 640x480 viewport is mostly technical in nature. For every picture you see on the screen, there is a boatload of things going on in the background. First of all before things get copied to the visible screen, all image content is layered so that different layers can be manipulated independently. We are currently using up to 5 different layers which contain special effects, characters, backgrounds, spells and so on. This way we can apply effects to each layer independently and then combine the resulting effect with all underlying layers again. It is part of the magic we go through to achieve some of the flashy effects we do for the spells. While this is a wonderful technique, it has one intrinsic problem. It is very memory and CPU intensive. Each of those layers takes a lot of video memory and it takes time to copy them with and without effects until we end up with the final image you see. Every time something on the screen moves, new information needs to be grabbed from the machine’s memory and placed in one of the layers, where it is then manipulated once again. This puts a lot of stress on the hardware, especially the bus. Fortunately most video cards are very good at handling 3D environments, but unfortunately many manufacturers completely forget about 2D applications. The result is rather sluggish performance in the bitmap department and sub-par data-throughput. With our 640x480 pixel resolution we are already maxing out a large number of these boards and if we increased the resolution, the performance would drop below acceptable levels. What about my fancy hardware then? My machine could handle it. It’s a powerhouse after all. You might be right, but that’s where other aspects come into play again. In order to create a game that supports multiple resolutions we would have create art in multiple resolutions, if we wanted to maintain the general aspect ratio and content of the screen, or we would have to take certain gameplay factors into consideration if we would extend the visible area. Creating art for various resolutions is simply not practical. We have enough work on our hands to create the data for a single resolution game and multiple resolutions would explode our art budget. Extending the visible game area would introduce a large number of design problems all of which would have to be evaluated and carefully implemented in the design. However, again we need to support multiple solutions for all the different configurations. It’s not fair if in a crucial situation one player sees the monster ahead, while the other one runs right into it without warning. Those are completely different outsets and we definitely wouldn’t want to penalize people because they have small monitors, or give bonuses to those who do. We want to make sure everyone has the chance to have the same gaming experience, which in turn should be the same one as the one we are working on. This game has been designed for a 640x480 resolution and that’s the resolution it’s intended to be played. You can’t really change the resolution on your TV set either, can you? After all, yours might be three times the size of our neighbor’s, so why do you get less movie? I guess you see my point. It’s the content that counts, not the presentation. Guido Henkel Project Director

Planescape: Torment & Design: © 1998 Interplay Productions. All Rights Reserved. © 1998 TSR, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Planescape, the Planescape logo, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Torment, the AD&D logo, and the TSR logo are trademarks of TSR, Inc. and are used by Interplay under license. TSR, Inc. is a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. Interplay, the Interplay logo, Black Isle Studios and the Black Isle Studios logo are trademarks of Interplay Productions. Exclusively licensed and distributed by Interplay Productions. All other trademarks and copyrights are property of their respective owners.