Aion Chief Designer's Speech at Gstar2009: No New Engine Adopted

AION always gives priority to the graphics optimization instead of quality.

It is generally acknowledged that AION's graphics are excellent. Certainly, there are video games with finer graphics. However, among MMORPGs with hundreds of concurrent users, AION is unparalleled in terms of graphics.

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What is a hard nut to crack for MMORPG graphic design? And how does AION overcome the difficulty? Hanjun King, the chief graphic designer of AION gave an attractive speech at Digital Entertainment Conference "ICON 2009" on the first day of GStar 2009 in Busan, Korea.

Hanjun King, the chief graphic designer of AION, NCSoft
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-Make efficient graphic materials on the basis of the comprehension towards 3D

-Imagine the cooperation between a programmer and an artist

Hanjun King said, "In recent years, because of owning a better graphic engine, some designers only use it to make fashionable designs, whereas, essentially, they don't know how to fulfill the process and what is the best way."

In order to produce perfect effects, graphic designers strive to create texture images, but relaxed work is more important. If they want to realize all their thoughts in the game at a time, it will prolong the second optimization period.

AION's graphics are good, but its graphic engine is old. The graphic technology applied to AION is considerably advanced. To complicate graphics does not mean to improve the quality.

No matter how exquisite the graphics are, the game cannot go smoothly if 300 people get into a store concurrently. Thus, graphic designers have to make an understanding of the programmers' work, think of what is the best way to perform the game graphics and then give some instructions to programmers.

Does the field look desolate? Adding shadows and monsters is enough.
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Take a glimpse of recently released AION version 3.0 trailer, the graphic quality is improved a lot, but the graphic engine hasn't been changed and the structure hasn't been modified entirely either, the graphics have only been perfected and optimized.

Better graphics in the AION future trailer are not resulted from a new graphic engine.
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