Landscape Concept Art

[shoprat]

I found some early design ideas for Sardinia. The first pic has the filename aachon when I copied it. It was either to be another city to explore or the name was changed to Sardinia. Anyone have any info on this? The resolution is low but the art is interesting.

aachen.jpg (38.52 KiB) Viewed 22803 times

4-14-00h.jpg (76.18 KiB) Viewed 22803 times

A pic of Rynn and Arokh from the site.
It's hard to see but Rynn is wearing a skirted style of armor.
The next post has close up views of the armor.

4-14-00i.jpg (51.05 KiB) Viewed 22803 times

[Arokhs Twin]

Yeah it is the city of Aachen - they had to change the name to Surdana as there is already a city called Aachen in Germany. Also they are from the PC version of the game which allowed for a larger landscape and cities. It had to be reduced and cut down to fit into the PS2's RAM along with a new release of the RIOT engine. The 3rd screenshot is an early version of the Andrellian isles.

[Mechanist]

Interesting, so it looks like by the time of Drakan2 they have already modified the engine to fade out distant geometry instead of (or in addition to) fogging it - exactly what I'm doing now with the OOTF engine, since I need that feature for the new MP map we're making.

Also in the 2nd screenshot, the limitations/clunkiness of the Level Editor (when it comes to landscaping) are painfully evident
Nowadays, being able to import high quality landscape meshes into the Editor from external sources does, indeed, make all the difference...

And I really don't get why they used different models for Rynn and Arokh in the release version of TAG. The latter, in particular, is significantly different...

[Arokhs Twin]

The PS2 could display higher polygon count models compared to the average PC at the time but the PS2's VRAM is very limited hence the crappy textures. I don't know why they made Arokh orange. I do remember someone from Surreal, may have been Duncan or Stuart Denman telling me they wanted him to look more like the concept art and back in 1997 - 1999 when Drakan was being developed they could not do that due to the average PC spec being too limited. A lot of PC's then didn't even have a 3D card and they took a gamble making it a requirement to have one.