Soldiers of Fortune 2 Interview

Cool schon gibt es Zeugs zu Soldiers of Fortune 2, so zum Beispiel ein Interview (engl) mit Ravens Jake Simpson.

Voodoo Extreme - Is the Quake3 engine going to be used for Soldier of Fortune 2? If so, how is Raven going to be enhancing it? Futhermore, will you be creating a new GHOUL system for SoF2?

Jake Simpson - We are definitely using the Quake III Team Arena engine. Id is still unchallenged in creating the fastest, prettiest engines out there, and it would be silly not build on our experience with their technology. I think we started out with a clean 1.17 build and we’re working from that. Of course there is lots we are adding to it to make it suitable for a single player experience.

We didn’t actually take much code from SOF1 into SOF2; we wanted to start fresh. We knew where our flaws were in SOF1 and rather than trying to massage the code into shape we thought we’d just start out from scratch. So lets see - what have we got that’s new?

ICARUS - which comes from Elite Force. This has been polished up and revised so we can do even more with it. It’s worth noting here that lots of people have called ICARUS our AI system. This is incorrect. It’s a scripting system, which is different from AI. AI is where I create a bad guy, drop him in the world and let him do whatever he feels like. He discerns what his goals are, where he should go, how he reacts when shot and so on. Scripting is where we set up specific situations and we take complete (or almost) control over the characters to make events happen. That’s what ICARUS does, although it does have a degree of flexibility for different outcomes of the script. This is a crucial difference because next we have:

LICH - which is being designed and constructed by two new guys at Raven, Chris Reed and Ben Geisler, both of whom were hired direct from the U of WI for implementing a new AI system. LICH is a complete AI system that allows us to do many very cool new things with AI, which we recognize was probably the weakest part of SOF1. This time round we have two guys full time on this to make it the best we can. We’ve got teams going, leapfrogging, an animation sequencer that makes me cry when I see some of what it does, and so on.

We’re also introducing the ROAM terrain system. It’s kind of like the train mission in SOF1, except now the player gets to run around on it. It’s a very large dynamically generated terrain system that has dynamic LOD built into it. This is what John Scott has been playing with, amongst other things.

The Dynamic Mission Generator: The idea here is that you can specify some mission parameters and have the game generate a random map for you to play in. Each mission should have different terrain and mission goals for you to play.

There’s an all-new FX system written by programmer Jeff Dischler.

And then, inevitably, there’s GHOUL2. This is what I’ve been doing for the past few months. Ghoul2 has all the same abilities of Ghoul 1 (well, mostly anyway) and many more. It’s a true skeletal animation system, where we can override any bone in the body so we can do programmer-controlled joints (get the guys to look at specific places, make feet match the floor and so on). We can also run animations on specific parts of the body, share animation skeletons across multiple models, bolt objects on, generate on the fly bolts. This allows us to attach damage geometry to the model exactly where you hit it. Of course per-poly collision detection is still there, as is the multiple bolt-on guys, so you won’t see repeats of the same guy all over the place. Our texture budget has grown hugely, as the screen shots in PC gamer show. We are definitely going for the photo-realistic look as much as we can.

We are looking to try and get EAX support into the game.

Most of these systems are going to be re-used in one of our upcoming unannounced PC projects.

There’s lots more stuff as well that is to small to go into details here, like MP3 playback of speech, the same lip synching tech I wrote for Elite Force, etc etc.

Pretty standard stuff for today’s game systems, I think we’re pretty current with our tech here.

20.04.2001, 13:15 [Joe]