06/16/99

It's a remarkably thrilling thing to play your own game.

After months of developing assets for a title, a cloud of blah sometimes accumulates over a developer. Peoples' nerves begin to fray a little, and they lose sight of why they're in this industry. Having just put together the first fully functioning mission for Nocturne, I find myself reenergized.

The problem with working in the game industry is the tedium. A lot of work goes into making a game. During development, artists and programmers see the same pieces and assets day after day. Each new creature or weapon or set we build provides a little excitement and breaks up the daily grind. But those individual successes provide only a mild distraction, nothing compared with the sense of accomplishment when you see all of those components working in unison. It's highly gratifying to step back from the mundane details - the endless lines of code and the texture maps and vertices - and look at the sum of your work.

A year ago, Nocturne was little more than a demonstration of what can be done when action games borrow principles of simulation from an entirely unrelated genre: flight sims. Terminal Reality had already established its abilities with flight simulations. It occurred to company founder and lead programmer Mark Randel that the real-world physics of flight sims can and should be used in other game types. Until recently, computers lacked the power to maintain a constant, realistic physics simulation as well as the hard-hitting graphical requirements of a fast-paced action game. Now that technology allows it, Nocturne takes full advantage of 32-bit graphics accelerators and high-powered processors to create a world with all the beauty of current action games as well as highly interactive terrain.

Nocturne benefits from prerendered backgrounds. The high-resolution renders approach photo-realism. But at the same time, a copy of the geometry used by the high-end 3D software sits in the back of the computer's mind to allow exact collision and ray tracing. When blood flies - and it will - it comes in contact with the walls, floors, bookshelves, and windowsills. Shadows fall along the contours of the terrain in exactly the same way they do in high-end 3D-rendering packages except, of course, Nocturne's shadows are dynamically calculated in real time.

Using this "real world" approach to a game engine allows Nocturne to effortlessly employ some aspects of gameplay. Because of gravity, reflectivity, and inertia, many things occur "naturally" in the Nocturne engine. Situations that previously required you to use shortcuts or cheats to fake a physical response occur automatically in the normal cycle of the engine. The hero's flowing trench coat is not animated. No artist's hours were spent deforming the coat to make it look like cloth. The mesh was built and hung from the hero's shoulders. The engine's cloth simulation takes care of the rest. Is the wind blowing? If so, the hero's coat whips due to that influence. When the hero runs, his coat trails behind him. Granted, this does not affect the gameplay, but it enhances your experience by making the world of Nocturne far more real. It's almost subliminal, like the shadows. The game would function without them, but their presence draws you deeper into our dark realm.