Thad Clevenger Interview

[Korelin]

An interview with Thad Clevenger, Senior Artist for Vanguard, has just been posted at Sigil Games.

Here's a taste:
What do you feel is the greatest limitation in art and/or animation for online PC games at this time? What is it you would like to do that you simply cannot because of this current hurdle?

Good questions. There are two major limitations in art right now. Texture memory is the first major limitation. With poly counts not being the issue any more we rely much more on shaders to create the look of games. Unfortunately, these shaders require a lot of video card memory in order to run. So in a few years when video cards have 4 gigs of ram this won't be too much of an issue. The other major limitation is time. After shaders aren't an issue, we've almost reached a point in game development where technology is not a limitation. With this much creative freedom it all comes down to how much time you have to create the art assets. I think we are going to see the game development becoming more and more like a Hollywood production. After all, it's much more time consuming to create Gollum than it is to create Pacman.