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Playnet
News Break Transcript #3 - 8/11/00
(Transcribed
by Sixxo)
The third 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 two of a two-part series.
Ron "NewzGuy"
Jackson: Last time when we visited with Playnet's art director,
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long, he emphasized how players could
walk across the entire European continent, passing all kinds of
terrain, towns, factories; literally thousands of objects. That's
a lot of polygons. How will Mr. Long's team pull off such a large
task?
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long: That is sort
of the art involved in making the terrain, the fact that it's essentially
modular, and we just need different variations to put it together,
but that is not so bad because if you get even, you know, a few
different variations of some things, that multiplies the combinations,
multiplied geometrically, so we can get a lot of combinations from
a very few set of objects. You know, 8 objects gives you 64 different
ways to combine them. The buildings are essentially not going to
have anything inside of them, really. There are going to be floors
and stairways and banisters, but there's not going to be any furniture
or anything like that. We'll have probably a number of different
designs that will be varied, either by different textures, different
window configurations, different locations, different orientations,
combinations of different floors, and we're going to vary it as
much as possible. One of the things that you've got to realize is
this is where the sort-of gameplay/framerates stuff comes into play.
In the early part of the open beta, we'll probably have a fairly
simple set of objects; they'll be more complicated than what you've
seen before, but they won't be what we're fully capable of, and
we'll upgrade that as time goes on.
Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson: Okay, let's say
a footsoldier is spotted hiding behind a tree. A tank decides to
fire a round, the soldier disappears, of course, but does the tree
go down as well?
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long: Eventually,
that will most likely happen; as it stands right now, one of the
limitations we're facing is bandwidth for transmitting changes to
the terrain to people. Given the number of trees we're going to
be talking about, you know, imagine a carpet-bombing raid of an
area of a forest - think how many trees would be knocked down, and
then anybody who comes in range would have to know the status of
all those individual trees to have it display properly on their
computer. So that's one of the technical limitations we're running
into. We can model the tree giving you cover, we can model whether
or not fragments hit you, whether bullets hit you, whether a bomb
blast hits you, we can bounce you off the tree, but the tree itself
might either not disappear or maybe an entire, say, like, square
of trees might go away when they get enough damage. So there are
ways to simplify that. As bandwidth goes up, and as technology increases,
we'll just be retrofitting more and more individual objects that
are damageable into the game as time goes on.
Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson: How about the
realism of the terrain? Will there be built-in cover for large objects,
like, say, coves for ships.
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long: What we're
doing is we're trying to get as realistic type of terrain as possible,
so that it's representative of what was really there during World
War Two, but we're sort-of not designing deliberate, like, hidey
spots for ships or things like that. If there happens to be one,
the players can figure it out and use it, but we wouldn't build
in anything other than what we think is a realistic level of cover.
For instance, if this area was particularly broken, in, say, a part
of France or Holland or something like that, we'll do our best to
make that area, like, very broken-up and hard to see through, and
short lines of sight, and things like that. But that's pretty much
more the level we're shooting for is to give the proper engagement
range, essentially, for the weapons of involved and the people involved,
rather than, like, specific little places to hide or ambush spots.
Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson: Human movement
is complicated to reproduce in games - what innovations will gamers
see?
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long: Well, there's
a couple of things that have been potentially possible to do in
games for quite a while that nobody seems to have really done, that's
like more of a simulation of your head versus your body using more
realistic physics on how your body moves, things like inertia; most
first-person shooters don't really have inertia on their characters,
which is something that's always kind of confused me, because it
makes smoothing them really hard, when they can do instant 180-degree
turns or back up as fast as they can go forward. We have a very
capable graphics engine that can push a lot of triangles, we have
a new animation system which should allow us a lot more sophisticated
characters, including seamless meshes, more like what modern first-person
shooters use. We're going to have animated sequences that they will
be able to execute, they're going to be able to be combined; we
won't have to say, 'make a reloading animation for the character
when he's standing still, or when he's walking, or when he's lying
down;' we'll be able to make one reloading animation and play it
while they're walking, while they're lying down, while they're running,
that sort of thing. If it's indeed possible to reload while you're
running, which it might not be. So we've got a lot of capability
there, essentially the level of quality that comes out of that depends
on how much time we have to build the objects, and how much time
we have to build the actual animation sequences. In the closed beta,
the fairly simple set of routines, but with the view system and
the weaponry systems operating completely, and then we'll add more
and more movements and fine-tune the ones we've got until we get
a very good simulation of that. You're going to be able to kneel,
crawl, lie down, probably dive, there's going to be hand-to-hand
combat, as well as gunfire combat, all sorts of things. But that
will probably come in incrementally over the beta period.
Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson: Wondering if there'll
be any Easter eggs hidden in the terrain of World War Two Online?
Roger answered this one:
Roger "Frying Tiger" Long: Oh, of course
not, we have absolutely no history of ever adding anything odd to
our games, no no no. There would never be anything like a giant
dinosaur or anything strange like that, or big pyramid with an eyeball
- it would just be completely out of sorts for anything like that
to happen. I mean, that would, it would just be wrong.
Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson: Wish you could've
seen the twinkle in Mr. Long's eye as he answered that one. Stay
tuned for the next Playnet News Break, and be sure to direct your
questions and comments to newzguy@playnet.com. For Playnet News,
I'm Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson.
Thanks to
both Ron "NewzGuy" Jackson and Roger "Frying Tiger"
Long for providing us with this great update. For those that would
like the original MP3 file, it can be obtained here
(3.46 MB).
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