Levels of Detail

I’m a member of Josie2’s Adventure Quest Club; this month I qualified for the monthly chest award for the first time. The image shows the January chest, gold with red jewels inside.

In the top-left corner, you can see the chest from a fair distance; top-right is slightly closer: you can see that the chest has opened slightly! Similarly, in bottom-left and bottom-right you can see the final transition to a “fully open” state.

Given that object builders don’t yet have the ability to “script” objects, how can this be happening? I believe that the designer (Jeff) is taking advantage of the fact that each object in There is actually designed at several “levels of detail” or LODs: the idea being that as you move further from an object, you need to see it at a lower level of detail and a simpler model can be used. In the usual case, the lower-detail models are just simplified versions of the highest detail one; in the case of the award chests the different models have altogether different shapes, thus leading to the pseudo-animation shown.