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Gencon '99 SoF Report

Jim Gaynor
August 5, 1999

Stream of consciousness stuff here - edit as you see fit.
(editor's note: I didn't touch a thing -- Blue's News is historically very stream of consciousness friendly--Blue)

There are a lot of companies showing computer games at Gencon this year - well more than last year. The number just keeps increasing. I'll try to give you a full list tomorrow. Today I spent some time at the Activision area. It's larger than last year's, and they dedicate all the floor space to demo machines (no Mech this year). There's a huge Activision sign hanging above the area.

Activision is showing the following games:

No Press CD this year, so I don't think I'll be able to get you screen shots. Sorry.

Rick Johnson of Raven spent a chunk of time demoing SoF for me, showing me the features of the game. Soldier of Fortune is running a highly-modified Quake II engine, using Raven's own model system. Today they were showing a single-person mission that involved clearing out punks from a rail station, then getting on a moving train to disable a nuclear device. Tomorrow, Rick said, they'll be showing deathmatch.

The demo systems were PII/450, 128MB RAM, TNT2. Rick said the minimum system was a PPro200, 32MB, Voodoo 1. Hardware acceleration is required.

Weapons I saw included:

The major attention-grabbing thing in SoF was, frankly, the animations for the other characters on the screen. Nice modeling, very detailed skinning. But where the detail for the animation showed was when bad guys were hit/damaged. Shoot a guy, the wound appears and a minor gout of blood comes. Shoot with a major weapon, and you'll see a larger wound - with the big weapons, you'll have decapitations and de-limbing. The edges of the removed limbs are ragged and... well... pretty nasty. Heh.

Rick shot a guy in the leg, he grabbed his leg and hopped around. Shot another baddie in the crotch, and he screamed in a much high higher pitch and dropped. Head shots will drop a baddie. A very nice little feature was the ability to lean. Rick edged up to a corner, and leaned around the corner to peek around and spot a baddie.

I recall how Raven's Heretic II really showed off a lot of model/animation detail - SoF is really a step past the kind of stuff I saw in H2.

Much interactivity. Breaking glass, you could shot weapons out of hands, some characters have glasses or helmets that can be shot off or that they'll drop. Some minor cinematics were shown using the game engine. Fog is going to be in the game, but was not on for the demoing.

Nothing else regarding SoF that I can think of at the moment. I'll try to stop back tomorrow and get a look at the deathmatching, and try to check out ST: Elite Forces as well. There's a slew of RTS and RPG games here as well. Let me know if you want any info on any of those.

Batteries runnin' low - time to shut the laptop down. I can send along some pictures of the convention floor if you're interested...

- Jim Gaynor gaynor@mux.net - http://mux.net/~gaynor
"If you can't see dreams, your eyes are blind." - Moxy Fruvous, "Fly"

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