Early screenshots location?

[codemuk3y]

Swamp
After navigating the lake into a valley where it becomes narrower and narrower, the raft suddenly bottoms out near a partially-submerged wooden bridge. This area of the valley has been a swamp for quite some time, and the lake flooding didn't affect it much. The water here is much shallower, too shallow to allow the raft in, so Anne is forced to return to foot. There are a series of islands here, with crude footbridges between them that some gung-ho InGen party had set up for hiking the area, back when the island was inhabited. Time and hurricanes have taken their toll on the bridges however, and now there is hardly a complete section to be found. There are many pieces of bridge planking scattered about on the islands, however, so Anne can construct herself a way across most of the gaping holes in the bridges.

If Anne decides to take the direct route and splash along through the water, she will discover that there are some sudden drop-offs in the bottom, which will unexpectedly slow her progress. In case she still thinks that this is a good idea, it will soon become clear why it is not: the swamp is populated with raptors.

The swamp should be a fairly intense experience - the player will have to think on her feet to quickly figure out where to go next, how to build a gap, and how to avoid or fend off raptors, all the while dealing with the constant possibility of falling in or running through the water, with the reduced mobility that entails.

[tatu]

This part is something we want to recreate in Isla Sorna later on. It will be interesting how we deal with it. CE may come in handy here as it added some extra script allowing you to make a water object thicker (or thinner). You can even make the water really bouncy with it, which could allow people to make a trampoline

[MinePass]

Can't remember if I've brought this up on the forums but since we're talking about the tar pit area.

Screenshot_20220411-065725.png (1.4 MiB) Viewed 13050 times

So in this image I noticed that the stick in the "pool" is off, going back to the partial drawing from the magazine with the monorail track there's clearly a shadow in the water. But here, nothing. Another note is the water looks off from what one would expect water to look like, to me it has this syrup look, no transparency and these waves or ripples. But the most important bits are a crushed barrel and hose on the right side of the image near the pools edge and a broken sign up on the left ridge, lying flat on the ground.

[tatu]

One thing I do notice in this image is how blurry the water looks, as well as the top-right of the water. I guess it is just artifacts due to the scan, or possible low quality image the magazine used, but everything else in the image looks good.
The image itself is really interesting, as it is one of the main landscape ones!

[Draconisaurus]

We can keep in mind that those pre-release images were named "Lagoon". Maybe a dev thought lagoon water is black?

[glitchhunter09]

As Tatu has been saying when I asked Seamus a while back, a lot of these locations were made for the Marketing Team. It seems quite a lot of time and effort was put into marketing the game and showing off the early engine. They switched codebases a few times during development prior to 1998 according to what Seamus told me, which indicates work had been started on things prior to 1998. Hell even some of the mystery models have dates all the way back to late 1997. From what we know they finally got AI in sometime in I believe January 1998 maybe? I am going by notes and documents found with the Trespasser source as well as stuff Seamus has told me.

Also it seems that at one point they may have been experimenting with skyboxes rather than what they ended up using in the final as many of the marketing levels seem to indicate that. Notably the round shape of Shackscene. Why change though? I honestly don't know could have been said skyboxes were made once again as a marketing only thing.

[Draconisaurus]

Hmmm I never considered that the sky boxes might have been considered for the engine. There are custom backgrounds as well, mountain shapes and such, maybe that was part of the engine as once too, or considered for it.

[MinePass]

As Tatu has been saying when I asked Seamus a while back, a lot of these locations were made for the Marketing Team.

While I do agree that the test levels are cobbled together scenes for the marketing team, these drawings are something else. Many of them can be connected to in game locations. Probably something made during meetings to give visualizations to what they wanted to make in various places in the game. For example, the chopper in the tree, the smugglers plane, monorail, and probably the most valuable one we've seen so far, the swamp plank path. Reason being as we have long since had the individual pieces but until then we didn't know how they would have worked had they been implemented.

[Draconisaurus]

That helicopter one still gets me going. Would love to see a version of IJ where it's implemented.

[glitchhunter09]

That helicopter one still gets me going. Would love to see a version of IJ where it's implemented.

a year late to the party but one of the prototypes actually has the helicopter parts in the map data. they are buried underground in the monolith location for some strange reason. iirc the helicopter crash theme is scripted to play there.

[tatu]

That helicopter one still gets me going. Would love to see a version of IJ where it's implemented.

a year late to the party but one of the prototypes actually has the helicopter parts in the map data. they are buried underground in the monolith location for some strange reason. iirc the helicopter crash theme is scripted to play there.

Yes, build 22 has the helicopter stick buried below the monolith location. And yes, there is a music trigger for it there as well, so it may have been a planned location, or just a location they would use to show it off.

[ThatZenoGuy]

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[tatu]

Probably, at least if you go by Anne's script.

[glitchhunter09]

That helicopter one still gets me going. Would love to see a version of IJ where it's implemented.

a year late to the party but one of the prototypes actually has the helicopter parts in the map data. they are buried underground in the monolith location for some strange reason. iirc the helicopter crash theme is scripted to play there.

Yes, build 22 has the helicopter stick buried below the monolith location. And yes, there is a music trigger for it there as well, so it may have been a planned location, or just a location they would use to show it off.

oddly enough, some pre-release screenshots show it in the dead/burned forest area. or at least one does anyway... also iirc it's more than just the stick, it's most of the chopper. albeit scattered

[tatu]

a year late to the party but one of the prototypes actually has the helicopter parts in the map data. they are buried underground in the monolith location for some strange reason. iirc the helicopter crash theme is scripted to play there.

Yes, build 22 has the helicopter stick buried below the monolith location. And yes, there is a music trigger for it there as well, so it may have been a planned location, or just a location they would use to show it off.

oddly enough, some pre-release screenshots show it in the dead/burned forest area. or at least one does anyway... also iirc it's more than just the stick, it's most of the chopper. albeit scattered

The early screenshots is close to after build 32 (or build 55, as IJ is almost identical here):

Build32IJHelicotperPreRelease.png (751.2 KiB) Viewed 793 times