Turbine's Game Platform features top-of-the-line graphics designed to give the user the best possible feeling of immersion and interactivity. Because of the variety of client system specifications, Turbine custom-designed its 3D components to be highly scalable, taking advantage of the latest, most powerful graphics hardware as well as older hardware by using dynamic level of detail technologies such as material degrades, variable-frame rate animations, and multi-resolution meshes.

At the heart of the client is the Turbine Renderer, which takes all of the data provided by multiple subsystems (such as the material system, particle system, etc.) and renders it on the screen with state-of-the-art visual quality. The Turbine Renderer is capable of conveying sophisticated lighting and material effects that portray breathtaking scenery in dungeon, city, and landscape environments.

Some of the features of the Turbine Renderer include:

Cube map reflections and bump mapping Hardware shadow mapping Vertex and pixel shaders Stencil buffers/shadow volumes Point sprites for particle effects Texture compression for high resolution textures Volumetric shadows and landscape shadows Dynamic visibility culling for increased scene density Z-buffering Procedural animations with blending and modularity High definition audio capabilities Per pixel lighting & bumped reflection mapping

Environment mapping (spherical and cubic) Projected texture mapping for dramatic volume lighting Specular mapping for detailed shiny surfaces Emissive maps for glow-in-the-dark effects Surface texture decals Degrade system for optimum performance Robust particle effects system Ambient lighting, direct lighting and even colored lighting Light coronas, reflectivity, lens flares and other effects Blended terrain textures Vertex coloring Weather system, sky and cloud material effects

Turbine's Game Platform has also resolved several critical technical issues on the server side. The Internet itself hinders game play through communication delays (latency) and connection speed (bandwidth). Since customers increasingly expect low-latency game play in seamless three-dimensional worlds, Turbine developed a scalable client and server architecture that hides latency to the player and also addresses the multitude of load management issues that are inherent in massively multiplayer games.

The multi-server architecture allows for virtually limitless scalability and includes dynamic load balancing and fault tolerance capabilities, which allow the game to continue even if a server crashes. Because players are inherently unpredictable and interact in unexpected ways, the primary systems (including server load balancing and bandwidth consumption management) are built to adjust automatically for optimum performance.

The central tenet of the Turbine Engine is to provide robust toolsets for the rapid production of massive, persistent online worlds. The main tool suites the Turbine Engine offers are:

World Builder
Turbine's internally developed content creation tool, WorldBuilder, makes development of game content both easy and efficient. WorldBuilder uses the same rendering pipeline, showing the user the world exactly as it would look in-game. WorldBuilder also incorporates a suite of asset management tools for artists and designers to create a variety of different characters and objects for the users to interact with.

Scripting
Turbine's technology is among the best in the industry. The majority of the game systems code, both on the client and on the server, is written in the proprietary Turbine Scripting Language (TSL). TSL removes the complexity of writing a persistent, multi-server, distributed system and permits engineers to focus on the quality of the game play rather than worrying about the details of a large scale distributed multi-server environment.

Content Database
The creation of massive landscapes leads to another challenge in the development of online games: tracking the prodigious amount of generated content. In order to maintain game balance and ensure that the design goals of the game are satisfied, it is necessary to obtain a high level overview of the content of the world. To serve this purpose, Turbine has developed a content database that can automatically generate profiles for all the created content.

Testing Tools
Rigorous testing is critical, but it is much more difficult and costly in the development of persistent online worlds than in traditional game development. A full analysis may require thousands of players logged in concurrently, which is not realistic during the early-stage of game development. Thus, Turbine has developed sophisticated testing tools to rigorously test its games under high load scenarios. Hundreds of test clients can run at one time to rigorously test any aspect of Turbine's service to ensure a successful launch.