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WHAT IS AT I-WAR'S HEART?
Michael Powell: There are three components to the game engine - the mission engine, the simulation engine and the graphics engine. The mission engine is basically what runs the plot-line of the mission, making sure ships appear at the right points, handling the branching as the player takes certain choices. The simulation engine firstly handles the AI of all the non-player ships, controlling them in their flight tasks such as combat or docking, the commands from this feed through to the physics routines, which work out the actual motion of the craft through space. The graphics are handled by a combination of Argonaut's Brender renderer, supplemented by our own routines to handle special effects, particularly explosions, lens flares, nebula clouds, particle systems, planets and special lighting effects.
I-WAR LOOKS GREAT, BUT IT DOESN'T USE A 3D GRAPHICS ACCELERATOR CARD. WHY IS THIS? Richard Aidley: At the time the project was started Mike compared all the then-available off the shelf real-time rendering systems - and Brender came out best for our needs. We've added a lot of our own stuff over the top since then, but most of it is written in such a way as we could switch to another 3D system if we need to. We will be supporting 3D hardware after the first release. However, we've honed our current graphics engine and we're confident it looks good even without acceleration - it has a lot of subtle features that we haven't seen elsewhere. We wanted to take the time to do full justice to the 3D hardware available rather than just do a quick-and-dirty conversion. We think that there is a lot of potential in 3D hardware that developers simply haven't explored. THE SHIPS IN THE GAME LOOK INCREDIBLE, DON'T THEY?
MP: A lot of space games feature these boxy, low-detail models; all flat planes and visible polygons. We hated that look and we wanted to avoid this. We were aiming for film level production values, and didn't want the designs compromised by the requirements of the real-time system. RA: The quality of the textures is mostly down to the artists. But that's not to say that we didn't our bit as coders. The artists wanted to try a number of techniques for which there are no tools available, so we wrote those for them. In the game itself there are enhancements that we add - for example, we're pleased with the specularity mapping that we've introduced - something we don't believe has been seen before in real-time graphics. There's also the usual roll call of coloured fill lights, dynamic light sources, lens flares, particle systems and the rest of it. CAN YOU GIVE US SOME IDEA OF HOW THE GAME WILL RUN? MP: The game will run at approximately 15-20 frames per second on a P100 system, rising to 35-40 on a P200. A typical game scene would be made up of 3000-5000 polygons, with a typical ship using 250-400 polygons. WHEN IS I-WAR DUE FOR RELEASE? MP: The game will be on the market in the last quarter of the year; before Christmas. CONTINUES NEXT WEEK
Check out our features archive relevant info: http://www.particle-systems.com/   |
Digitiser's recent trip to Manchester allowed us to finally get our hands on
I-War, which we're tipping as the definitive space combat simulator. It's
being developed by Particle Systems for Ocean Software, and should be
released on PC sometime soon. In the last part of our interview, three of the
team behind the game - Glyn Williams, Richard Aidley and Michael Powell -
discuss its lengthy development.