AoC dev blog update looks at the polishing process
The latest entry in Age of Conan lead designer Ole Herbjornsen's 1UP Blog discusses, in quite some detail, the process of optimizing and polishing the game using the "tools of the trade". His emphasis is on the fact that this cleaning up is done on both the code and data, not just one or the other, and often both at once.
Along the way to arriving at this point, Herbjornsen lists off a number of scary sounding developer tools, like "showmeshid" and "occluder monsters". The reassuring explanation of the especially frightening occluder monsters is that they are flat rectangles with a very low polygon count, that can be spawned in the game world, and are used to test (among other things) how a system's frame rate is affected when they block out certain parts of a picture. Check out the blog for more of Herbjornsen's interesting developer antics.
