In addition to the James Ohlen interview, Gamasutra has released an interview with Georg Zoeller. Full Interview here.
This interview is a bit different from the other BioWare staff interviews that have been done recently, in that it focuses less on the actual game and more on the testing mechanisms used behind the scenes. It also ties into Georg’s GDC speech in October.
The “HoloProjector” sounds like a very interesting dev tool:
Can you discuss BioWare’s ‘HoloProjector’ toolkit? What does it do to aid content generation?
HoloProjector is a toolkit that provides a bird’s eye view on the game’s content, from static geometry, sound volumes, and triggers to creatures and vendors.
The initial goal for the tool was to improve awareness regarding the individual usage of the millions of individual game assets that make up Star Wars: The Old Republic.
HoloProjector reuses the highly detailed in-game map assets and auto generated terrain heightmaps to project and combine asset locations, test data, user interactions, performance metrics and other spatial data in 2D and 3D space into a single workspace where artists, designers and other groups can easily create and share custom data visualizations relevant to their needs on the project, from performance optimization to player behavior analysis.
For example, a technical artist can use the tool to generate a heatmap of a planet or sub-area on a planet where the number of budgeted draw calls visual effects is greatly exceeded, add any effect emitters to the map, inspect them for their properties, flag the ones most likely to cause the issue and forward the resulting map to the area artist with recommendations.