OK, here are mine (standard questionnaire):
1.- How did you end up working on Trespasser at Dreamworks Interactive?
2.- As a programmer, what were you tasked with on the Trespasser Team?
3.- How did the various team members get along?
4.- What happened with the team between when Trespasser was finished and when it was finally disbanded?
5.- What projects have you been involved with after that?
6.- Regarding Trespasser, if you were involved in programming the AI routines, would you be able to answer the following?
a.- There are comments in various old interviews and articles about AI activities being disabled in order for the dinosaurs not to just stand there undecided between different choices of behavior. Forum member Big Red, who's analyzed the executables, found out this:
Big Red's ATX ReadMe file wrote:
* for all CActivityxxxxxx classes, bit 2 of member
[CActivityxxxxxxx+34h] is boolean for enable/disable act (instance-specific)
Does that mean that it's still possible to re-enable activities which are marked "Not implemented" such as this one?
Big Red's ATX ReadMe file wrote:
[CBrain+028h] = Pointer to CActivity class ("Not implemented" - type activity)
(This one in particular corresponds to ActJumpBite. That one and ActJump are of particular interest, as users have been able to get some others working, but these two apaprently not...)
b.- The dinosaur activities currently listed as "Not implemented" are the following: ActJumpBite, ActShoulderCharge, ActJump, ActMoveAway, ActDontTouch, ActStalk, ActCircle, ActDash, ActLookAt, ActTaste, ActBackAway. Could you describe how they were supposed to work, and if they were meant for secific dinosaurs only? And were there any others which were not just disabled, but completely removed? (For example, there is a "ClawReach" parameter which may be all that's left from a removed activity.)
7.- Since, according to your page, you were responsible for the rendering engine, what other features did the Trespasser engine originally feature which had to be "dumbed down" for the final release? Like the "draw distance" (actually, the distance at which 3D objects get replaced by 2-D "impostors") in order for the game to work on the hardware available at the time, for example. I've found several papers from 1997 and earlier which probably you used for reference when designing the rendering engine...
8.- Likewise, being in charge of the audio engine, could you give us a better description of how the Foley system works? I know it uses the two sound materials and the speed at which the collision takes place to mix two sounds (sometimes it wil use just one) calculating the volume and pitch for each of them using a transfer function, and a similar calculation for "sliding" sounds, and each Foley table entry is basically like this:
Quote:
Each line corresponds to 4 bytes in the table. The first 4 bytes are the first SoundMaterial, the next 4 bytes are the second SoundMaterial. The next 4 bytes are an integer value that shows how many sound effects are to be played, either 1 or 2; besides, if bit 7 is set to 1, it means there is also a friction (sliding) sound effect for these two materials.
Next are two 4-byte floats which I guess have something to do with how the sound effects are to be played (volume and duration, maybe? Or attenuation and volume, like in the "Play sound" action types?). The next three 4-byte entries are the sound effects, both collision ones and the friction one. The entries are 0 if no sound effect is used.
Finally, there are three sets of 10 4-byte floats, each set corresponding to each of the three possible sound effects, apparently. For non-used effects, the corresponding values appear to be just garbage (though they may be something else, but interpreted as float values they are absurd). These 10 values seem to be organized in pairs, similar to the pair that comes before the sound effects.
(See this post:
http://trescom.3dactionplanet.gamespy.c ... php?t=5690 )
Could you clarify what each of those parameters is for? And could you give us the names of the various sound effects sored in the .tpa files and the sound materials available? (I've been "reversing" the CRC algorithm used to store sound effects/materials names on the .tpa files, but still have about 10% of unknown names left).
9.- Did you ever play Trespasser after its release to see the results of your work? If so, what did you think of it?
10.- Do you think Trespasser would have fared better if it had been done more recently, with the advances in PC hardware that only became available after that time?
(BTW, I think people should take a look at
this page to get an idea of what he was responsible for)
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