Age of Conan - Dev Blog @ 1UP

Ole Herbjørnsen has updated his Age of Conan blog at 1UP.

What does this have to do with game development? Well, we've had some major internal milestones lately and I thought I'd mention some of our "excess ketchup". The first one being hair which moves and animates. Originally, we did not have this feature, and implementing hair physics would be costly. The alternative, going over all the animations manually would be a gargantuan task (with over 1500 animations for each of the male and female characters...). Luckily we have some clever heads who managed to come up with a cheap and excellent solution, and it makes the animations so much more realistic. You won't see it on screenshots, but hopefully once we kick some new videos out the door, you can see it in action and judge for yourself. We may end up using the same approach for something else as well, which I think the fans have been discussing on the official forums...