JE Sawyer on the Velocity Engine

Saint_Proverbius · Post by **Saint_Proverbius** » Sat Jun 22, 2002 5:47 pm

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While browsing through the <A href="http://feedback.blackisle.com/forums/fo ... >Lionheart forum</a> on the <A href="http://feedback.blackisle.com/">BIS Forums</a>, I noticed that JE Sawyer mentioned what's good about the engine <a href="http://lionheart.blackisle.com/">Lionheart</a> will be using. Here's what he had to say: <blockquote>We don't have any plans to (that I know of), but I really do think the engine is quite versatile. These are the things I really like about the Velocity Engine: * You can run an "editor" version of the EXE which is fully functional, but also gives you level run-time access to the editor. This is really terrific. You can move around objects, swap out scripts, and change object properties while the level is running. * From what I can tell, it's almost entirely script-driven. There are drawbacks to this, but it makes the engine very flexible. * The engine is 2D, but gets around a lot of the traditional 2D problems. 1) It uses software anti-aliasing. This smooths the edges of sprites into the background, removing the pixelated edge that you often notice in Icewind Dale (look at a screenshot of a dark character standing in the snow for a good example of this). A lot of the press folk looking at the game thought it was running at a much higher resolution than it actually was. 2) The graphic data files are .jpgs with an excellent compression:quality ratio. They take up very little space, which is often a big concern for 2D games. 3) The character models and animations are 3D. Animations traditionally take up a lot of storage space because you have to save off every frame to a separate 2D image and play it back like a flip-book. The character models in Lionheart are rendered in 3D, then put in the scene as a 2D image, so the main memory hit is in RAM. * The engine has been used in at least three very different games: Zax, Ricochet, and Star Trek: Away Team. Whether you liked those games or not, they do show that the developers can easily modify the engine for a number of different roles. </blockquote>Now if only JE could say what he didn't like about the engine, because that's what I'm more interested in hearing than anything else. It's a neat looking engine, but surely there are faults as well. However, it is interesting that the engine has built in editting capabilities. Let's hope they leave those in there.