Myth Wolf Age has posted another article from a recent visit to MumboJumbo, this time focusing on the editing tools which will be included with Myth III: The Wolf Age. For anyone who might have tinkered Bungie's tools 'Fear' and 'Loathing' to make a map for Myth II, you'll definitely want to check out this detailed look at 'Vengeance.' For a change Mac users can rejoice in a game which will have its editing tools readily available for the platform.

Obviously, the biggest change from the previous editing suite is that the tool must now deal with full-3D models as opposed to the 2D sprites of the previous games. Since complex polygonal 3D models can take more time to render on slower computers (especially if there are many on the screen at once), MumboJumbo has come up with a good solution:

While it's typical for a game to let you manually choose the detail settings so on a fast computer the game looks good while on a slow computer the game doesn't look quite as good but has a respectable FPS, Myth III will have automatic internal benchmarking. If only one unit is on the screen, that unit will have a very high polygon count. As more and more units, scenery, etc come onto the screen, the polygon counts gradually decrease so things don't noticeably slow down. On faster computers there will likely be little, if any, noticeable decline in detail, but if you have a slow computer and you've got a hundred units or so running around killing each other detail levels will significantly decline. The good folks at Mumbo Jumbo have a solution for this that is controlled completely by the mapmaker.

While editing a unit's 3D tag in fear (I regret to say that I'm not sure what tag's actual type was), there is a small 3D image of the unit. Using the mouse you can freely rotate that 3D image in any direction to look at it from any angle. Below the image is a slider that adjusts the polygon count on the unit, and using this you can see what the unit looks like with varying numbers of polygons. Once you find an amount that is about the minimum before the unit starts looking bad, you can lock it in. This way slow computers will take a small performance hit when there are many units and scenery and whatnot taking up polygons, but will remain at an acceptable level of detail for gameplay.

Vengeance Preview at MythWolfAge

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