The War of the Ring Diary #1

RPG Vault have posted part one of The War of the Ring Diary. In this first part Jack Davis, The War of the Ring designer, chronicles the events of one day on the job:

I set in to work on the single-player mission I've been working on lately. It's one of the late missions of the evil side campaign, and it takes place in the pass of Cirith Ungol. You control an army of Orcs and other baddies led by the Lord of the Nazgul. The humans have fortified the pass with a large watchtower and your mission is to capture this tower from the forces of good, allowing the rest of your horde passage. (For those unfamiliar with LOTR: Cirith Ungol is a mountain pass that leads out of Mordor, the land of evil. The Lord of the Nazgul is the leader of the ringwraiths, super evil minions of the Dark Lord, Sauron.)

Cirith Ungol is the home of a very nasty creature named Shelob, an ancient and immense spider. Shelob makes a guest appearance in my mission, but currently we have no Shelob model. We do, however, have a Giant Spider unit in the game. But still, this unit is not large enough to represent the great Shelob. Rather than creating a whole new Shelob model, we can save time by scaling up the existing Giant Spider model and doing some texture changes to make it look unique. To find out about scaling the model, I visit the programming area and talk to the programmer who is responsible for scripting my mission, Jacob Aldridge, and he tells me they already have a script function that can alter the scale of a unit as it is spawned into the world. Great!