Chris Parker and Pete Meihuizen Interview
I believe you have stated that the artists will be redoing all the spell animations for those spells that were already present in the game's engine. How many spells do you plan to keep from BG and Tales of the Sword Coast and how will the animations differ?
(Chris Parker) There may be a few spells that stay the same. I think that some of the spells like the Ward and the Skull Trap and some of those will stay. And I think we will keep Magic Missile because it's already perfect. All of the generic spell effects and most of the big spells, like Lightning Bolt and Fireball, will be re-done. These are just going to be tweaks or changes to make them better and different.
Some 3D effects are planned. What will they be used for? What does this capability permit you to do that is not possible with just 2D animations? Will a 3D video card improve performance or is it rendered solely by software?
(Chris Parker) The 3D acceleration will not affect the great majority of the game. What it does mostly is keep the frame rate up at a more constant level and allow for better translucent background animations. The reason the frame rate is better is because the place where the engine bogs down the most is in combat when a lot of spells are going off. The spells all use translucencies and processing them through software is extremely slow. Therefore, 3D acceleration speeds up this process.
As the game is largely underground, what changes will be made to the World Map and the mapping system? Will it be possible to annotate or zoom in on the Area Maps for each dungeon level? Will there be some sort of directory so that you can access maps of regions you have already been to?
(Chris Parker) The World Map was on the cutting block for a long time, but I think it's back in the game now. Because the game is designed around a series of dungeons, we chose to speed up travel by giving the player access to gates, other quick transport routes that are only usable once you have reached a certain area. These would be similar to how the stairways up to town in Diablo worked, except that ours vary more and sometimes you would have to take two to get back, etc. So we didn't think we were going to need the World Map, but now I think we want it again because we thought it would be nice to have some gates that went multiple places, making the boring travel easier. So to cut to the chase and actually answer the question, we just decided we were going to keep it, and we haven't yet figured out a way to represent a series of dungeons on it.
How many screens worth of backgrounds do you expect to have in the final game? How many have been completed in rudimentary form? How many dungeons and cavern systems are you up to so far? Would you describe a few rooms in one?
(Chris Parker) The number of screens is significantly smaller that Baldur s Gate, but I'm not sure what the number is, it's probably only 2,000 or so [Baldur's Gate was advertised as 10,000]. However, we planned early that the game was going to be physically smaller than BG and that we would just try to use space more effectively.
There are eight major areas in the game, and each of those areas has a varying number of levels within it. The designer maps are done for all levels except the last few levels of the last area. The artistic concepts for those maps extend up through the sixth area in the game. The first four areas are essentially finished art-wise.
On describing a few rooms:
(Pete Meihuizen): There are crypts located in a point in the game that all maintain the dark gloomy dungeon feel. Mossy, wet, dank, with creepy little accents to get that crypt feeling across. The crypts are really well done, with a lot of attention placed on detail and design. I think you'll like what you see.
Outline the process of creating a monster model, from concept art to the animation? How long does it take?
(Pete Meihuizen) The model is referenced and quickly concepted, then handed to Aaron "Master Modeler" Brown to build and texture. When Aaron is finished with the model, he hands it to me to skin/envelope, and in the end, animate. Then, when all that is done, the eight different angles in which the character can animate are rendered out. This process, when all goes smoothly, should only take about a week. Depending on the character, of course.
What were your most and least favourite encounters from BG and why?
(Chris Parker) I don t know that I have a least favorite encounter. I certainly remember the one that I think was funny just because of how it happened. I was wandering around in the eastern section of the wilderness someplace and I see this mage standing near some ruins. He walks over to talk to me and my party and just as the dialogue comes up I hear all of these spell effects going off, but I wasn't really paying attention since I'd played the game so often at this point. So I go through the dialogue, which essentially amounts to him saying, "Sorry kid, I'm gonna have to kill you because we're Red Wizards of Thay", and I'm thinking, bring it on tough guy, I'm so gonna wipe your wimpy mage butt right off the face of Faerun . I end the dialogue, pause the game, give my party its orders, unpause the game. Then something like two stinking clouds, two fireballs, and who knows what else comes flying onto the screen from the right from his four mage buddies that I hadn't bothered to scroll over to see. My cocky attitude was pretty much gone when my main character and some morale-broken NPC with little fireball flames licking off him were all that was left of my previously glorious party. For kicks, I tried to run my character away to the left. Didn't last very long.
What were the best and worst features of BG based on your experience?
(Chris Parker) There were some bad things about BG: pathing, dialogue and store problems in multiplayer, curving projectiles (which will never be fixed, by the way), annoying voice-overs on common people, the journal was a mess and there were a lot of little things. There wasn't anything major though, and the list of best features would be really, really long. I think that Bioware, with a little help from me and the rest of the geeks at Black Isle, really put together the best CRPG ever.
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