Venom Interview

A whole lot of juicy Venom info in this one, folks... Just read our first look if you're not up to speed on this addictive tactical FPS powered by the versatile and very powerful Vital Engine ZL. Lead Designer Sergey Zabaryansky goes all out, as he talks in detail about the "under the hood" engine stuff, the handling of outdoor/indoor environments, AI routines, game's arsenal, and multiplayer modes. Well worth a read folks, so dig in... Oh yeah, we've also managed to get our hands on a batch of exclusive screenshots - for your eyes only.

Action Trip: Tell us a bit more about the Venom multiplayer maps, and what do you think is Venom's multiplayer strongpoints?

Sergey Zabaryansky: Venom contains multiplayer maps for Cooprerative, CTF, King of The Hill, Domination. It also introduces a new mode of play. We think it would be the best among these five and will attract attention of Counter-Strike players. All these modes are available both over LAN and Internet. The second Venom demo helped us understand our strong and our weak points. Strong points are our outdoor levels and Vital Engine ZL network system. Huge outdoor levels occluded with trees and bushes introduce new vivid paintball-like gameplay. Vital Engine ZL possesses a unique server system. Each machine acts like a server but one machine is chosen to coordinate the work of others (hybrid of Quake and Doom schemes). While Vital Engine ZL takes all the advantages of pure Client/Server scheme it is almost free from its disadvantages. For example, Venom is nearly ping-independent (compared to Unreal and Quake) and you may play normally with the ping of 500-600. When Venom is released, I assume many players will be amazed with the quality of network support.

AT: The AI in the patched demo seems pretty darn advanced. Tell us, what tricks did you use to make it so life like? Does the AI have a limited field of view or not? That's pretty important considering the size of the maps.

SZ: Venom utilizes powerful pathfinder library from Vital Engine ZL. This library makes possible really complex paths, which depend on player's position. For instance, the AI may find such a path that each of its points will be invisible to the player (i.e. it can sneak behind your back). All AI soldiers can see and hear, and their actions are based on the information they receive in that way. We provided soldiers with the most common tactics in real life: rushing, taking cover, using flanking tactics, calling for help, ambushing...

AT: Give us a detailed (if possible) overview of the 3D technology powering Venom. Tell us a bit more about the engine in relation to how it handles indoor and outdoor environments. It's all done by the same engine, right? Hmm... how do you manage to have so many trees and bushes on the terrain at the same time, and still keep a decent frame rate? Some special optimization tricks?

SZ: The basic characteristics are as follows:

Rendering:

• HW-Rendering via Direct3D
• Texture-mapping with full support for: 128x128 and 256x256 8/16/24/32-bit textures Alpha blending with any blending mode (normal, additive, modulate)
• Automatically generated mip-maps
• Detail texturing
• Animated textures
• Procedural textures
• Programmable software-based procedural texture effects
• Advanced texture caching and download manager (for managing different video-card configurations, consider 8,12, 32, 64 MB video-memory)

Lightning and effects:

• Dynamic ambient, directional, and point light sources
• Full 24-bit true color lighting
• range-z- and volumetric fog
• Particle effects
• Lens-flares and light-coronas
• Water-caustics effects

Geometry:

• portal technology
• LOD objects support
• object morphing

Thanks to algorithms used, all the above-mentioned characteristics work rather fast. In many games, activating a function like dynamic shadows, results in annoying slow-downs. Even a scarce look at engine features clearly shows that most modern games can be built on it. Each parameter is highly scalable, making it possible to create levels, which greatly vary in complexity. Corridors are not the limit for your imagination any more - the engine excellently copes both with confined and open spaces. It is optimized to simultaneously render a huge number of polygons. Within one level a player can cross an immense outdoor area, and then enter a building with complex architecture. Frame rate problems in big outdoor areas with a great number of objects on screen are solved with the help of automatic detail-level changes. The engine uses a model of the level needed depending on the requested speed and quality. This gives you the possibility to create levels with lots of objects, like a dense forest. Particle Manager is yet another powerful engine subsystem. It allows creation of the following objects: fire, smoke, splinters, sparkles, air bubbles beneath the water etc. In case the Particle Manager doesn't suffice, a programmer can write his own procedural object, generating the needed geometry in real-time. The engine also features a procedural textures mechanism for displaying animated textures like lava, stains of blood on monsters etc.