Project Diary

Date of Release : Monday, June 29, 1998
Greg's back from England. Apparently the press tour went well. This is good, since it was the first time since the relatively-controlled circumstances of E3 that we've unleashed people other than our own playtesters to play the game. I tell you, they love us in Europe.

Of course, we made a lot of advances on the way to the press tour demo, too. Flash bombs are in, and seem to blind AI's just long enough for you to either jump in and carve them up, or get out of sight. Just don't expect that trick to work on fire elementals. We've finally got the climbing maneuver where the player-character can pull himself up over ledges, and now we can start finding all of the strange, broken places this allows you to go, and fix them. Chris' explosion physics code is in. Just remember, when you shoot a fire arrow into a stack of crates, it's not a clean break unless two of them bounce off the walls. Meanwhile, Kate, Mark, and Laura are getting new creatures' meshes and animations integrated faster than I can set game statistics for them.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, AI's can hear arbitrary sounds now, and we can tag any sound we want with different types of "significance." So, when you have a near-miss with an arrow now, the jig is up. And if you feel compelled to blow stuff up (and everybody's got to blow stuff up once in a while) the jig is extremely up. -Tim