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Introduction
Artificial Intelligence
Enter HyperReality
Brave New Worlds
Crafting Strategies
New Role-Playing Systems
2002 and Beyond
High-Tech Games
High-Tech Games: Pushing the Envelope in 2001 and Beyond
New Role-Playing Systems

Dungeon Siege
Developer: Gas Powered Games
Publisher: Microsoft
Estimated Release Date: Late summer or early fall
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What's so high-tech about it: The state-of-the-art 3D engine and content management make a continuous and immersive gameworld possible.

When Chris Taylor's Gas Powered Games set out to expand the action role-playing game, the design team wanted to break some rules that stagnated the genre for years. To pull this off in the best way, Gas Powered built a new RPG engine to dramatically improve upon the areas of graphics, AI, and multiplayer support and created a world technology so that players stay "inside" the gaming experience. As Taylor, also the creator of Total Annihilation, puts it, "We do everything inside the game engine, including story sequences so that it keeps the player connected to the game."

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Thanks to this new engine, Dungeon Siege takes advantage of state-of-the-art graphics to create a continuous gameworld. Using the latest in 3D hardware acceleration, features such as colored lighting effects, weather effects, a bone-skin character deformation system, real-time blending, and a night-and-day cycle are some of the advances that this action RPG showcases. The result is that trees sway in the wind, as do smoke and weapon fire, and spell effects produce stunning visuals.

The making of this gameworld technology "has been by far the toughest thing we've ever worked on," says Scott Bilas, a senior engineer for Dungeon Siege. "A feature like this will shred any conventional game architecture, so we've had to do a lot of crazy things on the back end to get it to work. But it's all totally worth it. Once you've got a continuous world, you can really start to do some fun things that nobody has ever seen before."

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"Working on this engine is almost an exercise in philosophy," says Bart Kijanka, Dungeon Siege's lead engineer. "Our gameworld requirement [for Dungeon Siege] forced us to partition space such that, well, it doesn't really exist. When you're looking at a lush game screen with lots of content and characters, you're looking at something that's no longer there. [In the] next frame, all the spatial relationships change, but what you see will have no perceivable difference. This can challenge [the programmer's] sanity."

The other toughest thing about programming Dungeon Siege was handling all the content management that goes on within the game. "The smallest piece of content, or the simplest feature added, can quickly have a profound impact on the game," says Kijanka. "So, whenever we add something, we often ask ourselves, how will the engine handle 10,000 of these? What will happen to memory footprint or save-game size? The designers need to build a rich world, but we have to make sure it doesn't come on 10 CDs and requires 512MB of RAM. This is a challenge in itself."

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Dungeon Siege engine's real-time programmatic and full-scripting system AI has given the Gas Powered team greater latitude in making monsters, and other computer-controlled characters do virtually whatever they want in any given situation. "One of our goals in creating an immersive experience is to give all the monsters in the world intelligent behavior both before and during battle," says Taylor. On the player side, Gas Powered provided a ton of commands that are available for setting "standing orders." Examples of this include telling characters (or the whole group) to stand their ground, attack all, or target the nearest or farthest enemies.

"We've all drawn from our experience on previous games," says Bilas. "There are a lot of ideas from Total Annihilation, Good & Evil, Gabriel Knight 3, and even hockey games in Dungeon Siege. A lot of [our] experience is the 'don't do that' variety, like 'don't do asynchronous cursor--it's hard.' Fortunately, nobody on the team has done an RPG before, so nobody was able to draw from [his or her] experience and say something like, 'don't do [that in] an RPG--it's hard.' Because, as we found out, [making an] RPG is really hard."
 

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