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Gencon '99 SoF Report

Jim Gaynor
August 8, 1999

Soldier of Fortune

I unfortunately missed Rick yesterday, but caught up with animator Jarred Showers and chatted with him for some time. The catchphrase (the developers talk about trying to make it a marketing phrase) is "26 Gore Zones". That's how many spots are on the models for various and sundry gory reactions.

Jarred told me that motion capture was used for the base for much of the basic animation, but that it was all highly optimized and tweaked from that. Jarred was, understandably so, a bit uncomfortable about saying that mocap was used for a the animation basis - too many people assume that mocap means that an animator becomes unnecessary. It's not the case - that's like saying photographs means you don't need someone to do skins and textures. The animations need to be optimized, extraneous information removed, and tweaked for the models that they're being used on. And Jarred's been doing a helluva job, which you'll know if you read the information I sent yesterday.

One little animation that I forgot: the dance. Your bad guys don't just take bullets with a jerk - repeating shots give that intensely painful looking "dance" of death. Owie. Another touch is the weapon-change animations. I was told that they wanted to give an impression of your character being very confident and self-assured, so a lot of the weapon change animations show little flourishes. A spin of a knife, a handgun getting tossed from one hand to another, that sort of thing.

Two things not related to the animations include textures and model detail. There's been a lot of detail work put into the textures, and variable level of detail has been put into the engine for the textures (not for the models). So the closer you get to an object, the more detail will be visible in the textures. The other item is a bad news / good news thing. The models themselves have, actually, a bit less detail - fewer polys - than folks might expect from a game at this time. But the trade off is that the skinning is gorgeous, and the /reason/ that the models have fewer polys so as to be able to fit more baddies on the screen. So, by inference, expect to see levels with several bad guys - not just one or two.

I also spent some time talking with Mike Gummelt (or so Rick later told me - Mike was wearing Brian Pelletier's <sp> badge, and didn't abuse my notions as such, since I'd never met Brian face-to-face). Mike's the AI/scripting man on ST Voyager Elite Forces, and we talked for a good while about the scripting that'll be in Elite Forces. Frankly, it looks like Half-Life is the target - and they're aiming a good bit past it. I'll send you more on that when I get back, though - I'm getting dragged out to the Safe House now. :) So you might not want to print this paragraph. :)

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