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There is a lot more dialog in LBA2, the story is much more 'twisted'
LBA1's story was relatively simple, so now there's more story
but there's also more action, because we doubled the surface
but the game is only slightly bigger,
this way, you may be kicking around a bit more
but above all there's a better repartition of things.
In LBA1, you had to fight every time to progress
now it's more: “I'm outdoors - I'm going somewhere”
and when you go inside it's more like a 'dungeon'.
I think we have adjusted the progression
with the moments which are a little more thrill-less, the moments with some fights, and reflection, etc.
Outdoors you were given space to run around, but indoors you got hurt when you ran into the walls
The players didn't like that at all.
Now you can run everywhere and slip on everything
so it's less realistic, but it makes the game much more playable.
As a result, in the same state of mind, we added something.
Usually, you have to be in 'Normal' mode to make things like
searching cans, finding coins, talking, and things like that...
Now, as we decided you can effectively stay in 'Sporty' mode without being hurt
we added a key to use the 'Normal' action - talk, search, etc -
while being in any mode.
Something important we also improved is the holomap.
The holomap permits you to see the planet; that's the same planet as in LBA1: Twinsun
and you had arrows, because each time you learn something important to the story,
an arrow points the place where you're supposed to go
and so we added a new layer to the map, where you see the precise island you are on.
I'm in Twinsen's house here, and I already have something to do there, at the Pharmacy
because in the story, the Dino-Fly crashed himself down, so you have to find something to cure him
but that's just the pretext to introduce all the disasters that will happen afterwards.
So this makes the players' life a lot easier, because the world is big,
and we didn't want him to loose his time running in every direction
So, this is the tool to edit all the places you go through.
If you want an idea of the number of polygons
well I don't have the figures for the houses, but there's between 100 and 400 polygons for all the objects here,
and if you just count the grounds, they represent an amount of polygons (...)
The program checks on which processors it runs.
It checks if it's a Pentium, a Nx, a Cyrix, etc
and according to the processor, the program jumps to the routines best adapted to the computer.
We will certainly try to make a 3dfx version, for future use,
but it won't be ready for the program's release...
In fact, this is the coding tool, which is made to give life to all the data
all the resources brought in by the artists, by the musician, by the scenarist, etc.
So the coders use this tool. Once the maps are built,
once all the sets are ready, the coders can integrate a character into the scene,
using the mouse, by double-clicking at the place where they want to create the object.
So here I'm going to (......) here it is, I've placed a character in the scene,
and then, this character can be programmed.
Each character has two phases of coding,
one to edit all his trajectories, when he moves... You just create some flags.
You create some flags like this, and so he moves from one flag to the next.
So this his the 'motion' section, and there is also an 'events' section
where you code his reactions to events.
If Twinsen tries to talk to him, what will he reply ?
If he tries to hit him, how will he react to Twinsen's aggressiveness ?
Ect, ect.
For example, a character, a 'warrior' will have the job of guarding a door,
and Twinsen will for instance kick another guard
and the guard who has been kicked can tell him: "Watch out! I need help!"
so he will set the other guard a new job in which he will run toward the hero, try to hit him
and then in turn he will think:
“Well, the hero is too far, I'm going back to my door!”
The hero too is programmed, for each scene,
to know which 'events' are set there.
He can know at anytime what's his position in the zone,
and according to this, behave the right way.
For example, if I go near this object, I mean, this point,
and if I've got the right object in the inventory,
he will position himself here and open a door.
All those things are programmed in the hero's life in which he is told:
"If you are in front of this zone and you choose this object in the inventory,
then open the door".
So this is a tool that allows to build characters with 530 polygons,
which is a reasonable number to make fluid animations.
Once the character is sculpted, it has to be animated.
You can set the position of each joint and sub-joint, to build the animation,
and each time it refers to the 'keys'.
You can see here the number of key positions that have been drawn,
for example there are 6 key positions in this animation.
- Well, I have sort of ruined the first one -
when you play the animation, the engine creates much more frames
because between each key frame there are a lot of interpolated frames.
In the first place, Didier Chanfray explains his ideas,
lets us participate in the storyboard elaboration,
the story, but on technical things too,
because we have to check if it can be done in Softimage.
We can do almost everything: Softimage is a powerful software,
though we have some production orders, we have to make it in time,
so we try to do as many things as we can with as many effects as possible
while keeping the whole thing coherent (artistically speaking).
A lot of time is needed for calculations and preparation,
for example, I've been working on (??) for 6 months,
and sometimes I additionally prepare some databases or some technical things that
Merlin (PARDO), Ludo (RUBIN), or Ben (BOUCHER) can't do,
and I bring them Softimage's easiness to model to produce some objects.
In fact it's a whole. It's truly a team work!
In fact, I kept the same state of mind from LBA1 to LBA2.
For example, I chose to make it sound very much like orchestral music, etc.
The difficulty in a video game as opposed to a movie,
when you watch a movie the music fits exactly the take you're watching.
The main difficulty is to achieve a music which is dynamic and progressive
enough for the player to stand the repetition.
Because when you play you usually go through the same level
a certain amount of time.
So, it has to make sense.
The composition, creation part is made here,
and then the final artistic production is made in Delphine's Studios in Paris.
The soundtrack is extracted from LBA1.