BeyondUnreal Interview - Scott Dalton, Senior Level Designer, Legend Entertainment
World Press Preview Event: November 7, 2002
Chantilly, Virginia, USAQAPete: And you guys didn't waste any time showing it off. Right in the beginning of the game, you see your weapons guy, Isaac, smoking that cigar, and you can affect the smoke trail - all particles.Scott Dalton: Yeah! When you look close, you can actually see some ashes dropping off the cigar. All particle-based. He can also blow smoke rings, too. He'll occasionally hack out a big cough and blow smoke rings. What's really cool is using things like this if you're a mod developer. As a mod guy, once you go in and figure out the particle system, you can make totally new weapons, or totally new types of behaviors, just by changing the particle system. Change the Drakk laser, change the flamethrower, change the shotgun. The shotgun is just shooting out particles that, when they hit, they create the decal, they cause the damage, all sorts of stuff. You can do whatever you want to create totally new weaponry. That's pretty cool, I think.QAPete: Will you be working with the mod community, providing support and documentation for the things you guys have added to the Unreal-engine mix, like your particle system?Scott Dalton: I know in the coming weeks, one of the things I'm going to be doing is writing a full tutorial for the particle system, including the basics, how to do more advanced stuff, all the little tricks and things you can do with it. We're going to do similar stuff for our scripting system, which is totally new for Unreal II. We have Golem, which is a really powerful skeletal system that allows you to add all sorts of cool things. It should be really awesome for mod developers. You can basically add additional channels and new blueprints into any existing Golem models that allow you to do really neat effects.One of the things you can do with our system, that you can't generally do, is vertex-based effects. One of the effects we have in the game is, when there's a big explosion, you actually see a spherical 'ripple'. If the explosion is to the right, for instance, you could actually see the spherical ripple affect the guy. It would actually alter all the model verticies, which is cool. Normally, the guy could move around, he could look in different directions, he could move his limbs. Here, we actually control things on a vertex level. We can do all sorts of crazy things like that. It's really nice, because basically, people can do almost anything they want with that.I think our UI system is pretty cool. I don't know if you'll end up using this with mods so much, but you can really easily change how the UI is set up and do all sort of new things. For instance, if you make a mod, and you want it to have a totally different look, it's all .ini files you can change, make things move in and out, like in the intro to the game.QAPete: Those ultra hi-res cut scene movies are rendered in-game, right?Scott Dalton: Yes. For example, we made that intro scene because we thought it was cool. Lots of high-poly stuff, particles, effects, other stuff. There's really no reason to do pre-rendered. I mean, you can do it in-engine, so why not do it in-engine? Especially with the engine being where it is right now - we can make things look really great.