Development/Production
AC was developed by Turbine Entertainment Software and published by Microsoft. It had a multimillion dollar development budget. It was designed by Toby Ragaini (lead designer), Chris Foster, Eri Izawa, and Chris Pierson. The development team consisted of 30+ full-time developers, including 6 artists, 4 game designers, 15 software engineers and 5 QA testers.
Critical development software included Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0, Visual SourceSafe 5.0, Lightwave 5.5, and Photoshop 4.0 Asheron's Call uses Microsoft SQL Server for persistent game data.
Asheron's Call was technically innovative for its time. It did not use zoning, a technique of partitioning the game world into zones that ran on different computers on a cluster. This caused delay when moving between zones. Instead Asheron's Call had a single seamless world. It used dynamic load balancing to determine which computer in the cluster controlled which location area. If one area became overpopulated and sluggish control of part of that location would pass to another computer with a lighter load.
The finished product contained approximately 2 million lines of code.
Asheron's Call took 40 months plus 8 months of beta to complete. It was originally scheduled to ship during the fourth quarter of 1997. Production was delayed over a year because of the inexperience of the production team.
On launch there were six servers available. These were Frostfell, Harvestgain, Leafcull, Morningthaw, Thistledown, and one player-killer server, Darktide. Servers added later were Solclaim, Verdantine, and Wintersebb.
Asheron's Call allows computers to use either 3D or software graphics acceleration.
Read more about this topic: Asheron's Call
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