TresCom Forums

"Just the feeling of environment. At the start of the game, you are walking up a switchback road on a volcano, and can look down and see the whole island, and it is totally breathtaking. You can just stand there and stare at it, and look down and see where you came from. "

"For instance, you need to get to the generator that starts the power; you need get to the town to find the satellite dish; you need to get to the radio transmitter; you need to get to the helipad, stuff like that. In order to do that, you have to deal with the terrain, and the creatures that inhabit it. The island is an amazing, decayed empire."

Seamus (one of the programmers of System Shock and designers on Flight Unlimited) enters the
room with a Pentium 266 and boots the latest build of the game. We find ourselves standing in the middle of a forest, thousands of towering trees dotting the landscape for as far as the eye can see. "3Dfx?" I ask. "Actually, no," replies, Seamus. "Everything you'll be seeing today is software driven. Right here you're looking at at least 40,000 trees which we can render with ease. We're using a whole bunch of new algorithms to draw the outside world and we're running into some snags supporting 3D cards. We think we have most of them worked out. I went to give a big talk
at Winhack a few weeks ago to basically bust the jaws of the hardware manufacturers and let them know that, yes, it's very pretty to draw interior scenes like Quake - a clipping plane at twenty-feet is great and all, but we want 5 kilometers. The problem is, the cards currently available are constructed to run games currently available, and we don't think the consumer wants that. We feel they want something they've never seen before."

"Take a look at Battlezone, which is a great looking game, or a Tomb Raider which is also great looking, but both worlds are very sparse with objects. We can easily have a setting that has over 40,000 trees being rendered on the fly, in software mode. It's real easy to get lost on our island because the entire place is so choked with vegetation...that's the kind of atmosphere we wanted to create.