Each sin was represented as an area of the game, each of these areas or "zones" had a chance of being "contested", at which time you could wage battle against the other faction and control contest points in a king of the hill style setting. There are also purgatory city and purgatory valley which contain much of the standard Player Vs Everyone (PVE) style quest content. This gave the players a chance to reach a decent level so that they could feel effective in PVP battles (usually around 20) .My role on the team was that of a Client/Graphics Programmer. This consisted mostly of tools development for artists and designers. Part of the design for Faxion was that of a "visceral combat feedback system", i.e. a post fx system that allowed full screen blood splashes, animated textures for roots, stuns, blindness, and death were represented visually on the screen as an overlay over the scene. This system I designed and maintained over the course of the project.
I also was tasked with figuring out a way to reduce terrain memory overhead in areas that we didn't need the excessive vertex density, such as regions in the mountains of some of the zones. Areas where players were not going to be able to access due to invisible geometry and physical obstructions. The solution that I designed and implemented and maintained over the course of the project involved building tools that allowed for a reduction of vertex density without compromising large amounts of detail. As a team we understood that reducing terrain vertex density would reduce detail, but we wanted to make sure that the resulting geometry was still beautiful and similar in profile as the terrain we were replacing. With the terrain simplification tool, we were able to see on average memory savings in each zone of almost 300MB
Other tasks included player authentication system design and implementation, engine stabilization, engine optimization, memory leak correction, sound systems, player input modifications, tools development including: level of detail (LOD) distance settings for models, precipitation system enhancements, camera/room interaction modifications, environment blending enhancements, particle system changes (additive blending for mesh emitters, additional scale over time settings, sprite sheet emitters), projection system changes (sprite sheet projections, additional scale over time settings) and the login screen design and implementation.
Finally, here is a great link to a PVP video that really captures what Faxion Online is all about.
