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Playnet
News Break Transcript #2 - 8/3/00
(Transcribed
by Sixxo)
The second Playnet
News Break audio pseudo-interview, featuring Roger "Frying
Tiger" Long, and conducted by Ron "NewzGuy/Flapz"
Jackson, was recently available for mass-consumption. This transcript
is provided for those that were unable to obtain the MP3 file, or
for those that want to have a clearer understanding of what was
being said. This is part one of a two-part series.
Ron "NewzGuy"
Jackson: Hi everyone, I'm Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson.
We begin a two-part interview with the art director at Cornered
Rat Software and Playnet, Inc., Roger "Frying Tiger" Long.
Roger is among the elite in graphical game design and implementation.
You don't see too many posts from him in the newsgroups these days,
that's because he spends an enormous amount of time cranking out
the kind of graphics that let players suspend their disbelief during
gameplay. Roger's plate is more than a little full; he manages a
full team of artists working on multiple projects. The project that
keeps Frying Tiger glued to his monitor these days is the Herculean
effort that's needed to produce World War Two Online. The game will
sport a tremendous amount of detail to objects and he's glad for
a 'secret weapon' of sorts...
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long: We have the
advantage that we have a brand new graphics engine, so the graphics
engine we've got here was built in-house by our programmer, John
[Kango] Lundy, and it's custom-designed for what we want it to do.
It's really cool when we're able to have the guy that wrote the
graphics engine right there to answer questions, or if we want a
feature, we can just ask him, 'Okay, what would this cost us to
add this feature, or, you know, would this be too much of a framerate
hit if this got put in,' and stuff like that. Or to have him come
and say, 'Oh, I just got this cool idea where I can do x, y, and
z,' and we're like, 'Oh wow, I didn't think that was possible!'
And that's been happening constantly since this whole thing started,
it's just back and forth, having the programmers, the artists, all
sort of in the same room, all asking each other for this, that,
and the other thing - it's been working out very well. Plus we have
the capability of the hardware accelerators which is only very recently
been able to be fully utilized because DirectX and OpenGL have come
long enough to give the proper tools to allow the acceleration to
be worked.
Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson: By the way, John
"Kango" Lundy has made sure that the graphics engine is
fully capable of utilizing new features put into graphics technology
such as OpenGL. If the card designers put in a feature on the card,
it will find its way into the World War Two Online graphics engine.
Roger says he no longer has to reinvent the wheel for each new object
in the game.
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long: Once we come
up with a technique for doing something, we can just use the same
technique over and over on each vehicle, so generally the largest
amount of work comes in making the first vehicle of any type. So
the first thing we did was we made a Spitfire... The reason I chose
to make the Spitfire first was because it's one of the more complicated
shapes we'd be dealing with - elliptical wings, you know, complicated
canopy with a bulge on it, narrow cockpit... So the general goal
was to pick something that was going to be difficult to do and see
if we can get that to work, then with the knowledge and all the
tricks that we've learned in making that one, we're making it possible
to make the simpler vehicles. And that's pretty much worked out
the way we thought it would. Actually, we learned enough from making
the Spitfire so that it didn't really require me to do the sort
of research level that I was forced to do for the Spitfire, trying
to figure out how to do things. That was simple enough so that it
was possible for any of the artists to start making any type of
vehicle pretty much right off the bat, working with the programmers
themselves. So it didn't require me to actually make the tanks myself,
I was able to give that to Kevin [Squirm] Rivas, and he was able
to work with the programmers himself exactly in the same way I did
and come up with the moving tread animations and all that stuff
- no problem.
Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson: The biggest challenge
so far:
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long: Two things,
one is just overall triangle count in each scene, and the other
thing has been texture memory.
Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson: What's the toughest
challenge; designing terrain or vehicles?
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long: The vehicles
are tougher to make accurate; the terrain is tougher to make in
general because it has much greater restrictions on what you can
do, and it's more complex on the level of how things relate to each
other. A vehicle, you can get a blueprint of it; what does a generic
French town look like? So they're difficult in different ways. I
would say, actually, that the terrain is harder, in my opinion.
But I've been doing the vehicles for a long time.
Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson: There's a challenge
to designing for exterior and interior scenes:
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long: We've had
to do a few special tricks to make sure that the cockpits have enough
detail in them, for the instrument panels and things like that,
so that they'll look really good when they're seen up that close,
and since the instruments have to give you a lot of information,
that's really too complicated to have a lot of them for all the
other vehicles floating around, so we've had to do some tricks to
separate out the interior sections of each vehicle from the exterior
and that's mainly because you'll only be seeing your own vehicle
to that detail at any particular point in time.
Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson: The entire game
is being designed in 3D; only texture maps are 2D. There are tremendous
amounts of moving parts in the vehicles and other graphical elements;
here's how Roger and his team tackled that problem:
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long: Well, oddly
enough because of the previous games that I had worked on, they
didn't really have the capability to move anything... that was a
technology that was just starting to become possible when we were
working on our previous project, and now we actually can use it
in the way it was meant to be, the pieces that we need to get stuff
rotating are all in place in our software, that we're using to model
the aircraft, we just didn't have the ability to use them up until
now.
Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson: Roger has seen
great leaps in game design during his career. What will World War
Two Online belly up to the gaming bar with that has his blood pumping?
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long: It's got to
be the complexity of the world. We've managed to get a huge, like,
European-sized land mass that's going to be detailed almost down
to almost the tree level. You'll be able to go from Berlin to England,
and you'll still be able to walk into a farm house in England and
you'll be able to go into a French farmhouse or you'll be able to
go down the street in Berlin, and have snipers shooting at you out
of the window, all using exactly the same technology, and, we can
do that, that's just the most incredible thing. It's like I can
actually, theoretically, I could actually walk all the way across
Europe in our game if I wanted to take the time to do it, you know,
running down the roads, going by the railroad tracks walking through
town centers and stuff, and there'll be literally thousands, if
not hundreds of thousands, of individual objects placed in that
terrain and they'll all work.
Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson: Next time, Roger
talks about how various graphic elements will affect gameplay -
what about the eternal question of frame rates and hardware requirements
- all this and more in our next Newsbreak.
Thanks to
both Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson and Roger "Frying Tiger"
Long for providing us with this great update. We all look forward
to part two of this installment of Playnet News Break. For those
that would like the original MP3 file, it can be obtained here
(3.13 MB).
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