UFO: AM > devdiaries

Developer's diary: Part X

(March 31st, 2003)

Now that we have moved into the area of double-digit installments of developer's diary for UFO: Aftermath, I want to again thank everybody for taking their time to read them; especially to those of you who are with us from the beginning.

The last diary caused quite a stir on our boards (in as much as such gentle and reasonable people as populate the forums can get stirred) and led to a very useful exchange of ideas and opinions. Thanks again to everybody who participated – the rest of you can at least take a look at the discussion at http://www.ufo-aftermath.com/forums.

Diary: A Day in the Life

These diaries have traditionally consisted either of my fragmentary recollections of dealings with various companies, i.e., with the history of the project, or of various explanations and exhortations about the supposed pros and cons of the game.

Now the former thread has run its course, and you, the kind reader, are completely up-to-date, and the design of the game is fairly stable, and there are no dramatic changes I would have to report (though I think there are bound to be some, and I will speak about them in the next installment). But for the time being I think it might be interesting for you if for once you could actually read what you were supposed to read all the time, that is, a diary.

Dear diary,

Today I got up late; playing Warcraft III till 2:00 a.m. didn't help things much. I knew I had to write that wretched developer's diary the first thing I get in the office, so maybe I was just trying to postpone the inevitable. However, when I arrived, the lead programmer told me about a subtle problem with alien AI: as you know, dear diary, we compose the city missions from blocks. These blocks have pre-computed values of "cover" for each square, i.e., how much a given square is covered from enemy sight (and fire). This calculation is pretty expensive and cannot be recalculated in run-time. Therefore, whenever a wall is knocked down, the aliens will gather there in droves, as no spot is better protected than the one inside a solid structure. Furthermore, squares just behind a wall or in a corner between two walls have high values of cover as well.

We talked about it for a while, then decided to set the cover to 0 for the squares the walls stood on and mark out every square the alien tries to hide on that does not meet his expectations – that is, if he stands on a square with a high value of cover and still can see four soldiers, he will mark that square as suspicious and try to go somewhere else.

Then we discussed some subtle issues related to the heads config – an Excel file that lists all available models of the soldier's heads and hair and their combinations, as well as animations for speech. We try to have as many data as possible outside the codebase, usually in Excel files (we then export the data into plain text – our program cannot read and parse native Excel format), but is an uphill battle. Yesterday, for example, we – the project manager and the programmer responsible for it – talked for an hour or so about the integral mutant weapons (i.e. their claws or maws or slime they spit). These should be in the same table as other weapons, along with M4 and AK-47. But how should we mark them as belonging only to a particular type of mutant? Should this information be rather in the weapons table or in the creatures table? And just how general should this solution be? Can there be more than one integral weapon for melee attack? The solution we arrived at was not very general but easy to implement and time is of the essence for us.

But that was yesterday, so let's return to the present. After going over the heads list, I went to see the chief artist to tell him about it and also ask him about some problems we had with one of the transgenants. Just before I got back to you, my diary, a call came from our producer at Cenega Publishing, about his visit scheduled for tomorrow. Just as I hung up I realized I don't know if we agreed that he is coming this Thursday or next Monday. I contemplated calling him back, but then decided time will tell.

Then there was nothing that I could use as a pretext for not writing this article. I hope you enjoyed it and I promise next time I'll speak more about the game than about myself.

Outlook: The coming of E3

As I am writing this, March is about to end and the last snowflakes of the year drift by the windows of my office. But by the time you read this, it will be the beginning of May and the E3 will be just around the corner. Therefore I will share the information about UFO: Aftermath vis-à-vis E3, such as we have at the moment, with you now.

We are going to be located on the stand of our publisher, Cenega Publishing, in Kentia Hall, at booth 6323. While many call Kentia Hall the "Hall of the Damned" for being a refuge of hundreds of manufacturers of the most useless and weird peripherals and paraphernalia imaginable, it is also home to many medium-size publishers, like German CDV or French Monte Cristo; indeed, out of the 400 exhibitors currently listed on E3 website, 199 are located in Kentia Hall. We do believe that Cenega's booth is not going to get lost in there but will become a center of much deserved attention and a stepping-stone to a large stand in the South Hall next year!

We will be showing a beta version of the game: it should be working more-or-less as the final game is going to, but with a lot of tuning and tweaking still ahead of us. Not all mutants and transgenants are going to be ready, nor all graphics and sound effects. E3 is a show and we must take this into account: it is much better to show one really polished part of the game than half a dozen work-in-progress scenes. Besides, the more important a person you are demoing the game to is, the less time he or she has for you, so it is very important to have a very short and focused presentation.

Obviously a lot of "useless" work goes into making these demos. The programmers (who shoulder the main burden of their preparation as the art assets usually need little alteration) constantly grumble about the extra code that prevents them from working on more important and critical sections of development and which will be thrown away the moment the show is over. Still, you can have the best game in the world, but does it matter if nobody knows about it? The hype, despised as it is, is a part of making a game, just as code and sound are.

The returns on the extra work going into a demo are measured in terms of people who saw it. So stand up and be counted: come to visit us and enjoy our demo.

Martin Klima, ALTAR interactive

In UFO: Aftermath you assume the role of the Earth's last hope, the commander of the last, scattered humans left on the planet. It is up to you guide your forces through the planet's time of crisis, and overcome the alien threat.

Gameplay highlights include:

•	Simultaneous turn-based combat: combines the best of the real-time and turn-based combat systems;
•	Randomly generated tactical missions: Each playing field is unique, no two games are the same;
•	Strong RPG elements: your soldiers will improve as they gain more experience, allowing you to make specialists like snipers, medics, and many more;
•	Intricate, rich, and frighteningly alien setting displayed in full 3D.

Buy UFO: Aftermath online!