Interview with Reno

[ElvenKind]

Personal Information

Name : Jeff Raab
Birthdate : 17-04-1987
Country : USA
City : Bellevue

1. Lets start from the beginning. How did you come across TTR and what made you stay?
Originally, I had come across TTR about a month or so before 1.0 was released. I found it through PlanetUnreal\'s mod section. The very heavy emphasis on realism and the good community drew me in, and as i slowly worked my way into the community, and the mod was finally released, i was stuck.

2. You are now lead coder for the game, where did you get the skills you obviously posess?
Honestly, i have to be one of the fastest code learners ever, or danged close to it. Truth be told, I was originally working to be on the team as a mapper (I\'m sure that my map TTR-OmahaBeach is STILL floating around somewhere, though i never got it done really). As I kept having issues with not having interesting enough effects to make me happy, I started to learn UScript so I could add my own effects and the like. And the rest, as they say, is history. I delved into the stuff like crazy, and by the end of my 4 month learning streak, I very heavily knew the ins and outs of the stuff, and likely the only ones who knew more than me where jaeg and LT. I worked on a few \"small\" code projects to show that I would be effective for TTR, which apparently got me tacked on Spunge and Stryker\'s lists, because when the time came, I was called. When jaeg had disappeared, and they needed someone to, at the very least, fill in till they found someone more capable, they picked me up to help out as the lead coder. And from there, I\'ve just stayed.

3. When did you consider getting on the team lending your skills to the development of the game and was there a special reason you waited that long to join the team?
I had started to work towards helping with TTR probably just before 1.2\'s release or so. The main reason it was so far along is because I had virtually no skills and needed to learn at least something first.

4. What part did you play in the switch to Torque?
I had originally spiked the idea to Spunge, who, to begin with, took it with alot of caution. As I showed him all that we could do with it, he slowly agreed. I then helped him convince the others that we could make the switch, and get TTR back on it\'s feet.

5. Being our local Torque oracle, are there any particular benefits switching to Torque, code wise, you want to say something about?
Code wise, first and foremost would be source code. We get all the code to the engine, source and scripts, which sets us leaps and bounds above simple modding, or many other engines out there. Coding\'s rather easy and straigh foreward, and is, if you know how to, capable of directly tying into the source code, allowing you to do some amazing things.

6. Any drawbacks?
Code wise, not too much really. Though we had a whole new art pipeline to try to get used to.

7. The community has heard about trouble getting certain things to work properly, like the grass thing. Any particular reasons for this and how do you respond to such \'setbacks\'?
Mostly it\'s because while I learn fast, I\'m still learning how alot of this works as I go. Del had several months of planning before even touching his main project, I basically dived head first into it, without really having worked out all the kinks or ideas. I was a tad overzealous, and I know better than that now hehe. The best way to deal with it, is to take a step back, look at the main problem and try to fix it, then carry on. Can\'t do much else than to fix it.

8. As mentioned you are the lead coder for TTR:T. How do you handle that ontop of all the coding? How do you coders divide the workload?
Currently, as there is only me and Del coding, we generally have 2 categories of code projects. Dynamics and Aesthetics. Del\'s in charge of dynamics like what happens when you shoot someone, or the like, and I\'m in charge of lots and lots and lots and lots of tiny little effects that pull everything into a more complexe and appealing scene. In other words, I tend to work to make the game prettier.

9. How would you describe the progress so far?
So far, we\'ve had only a few \"core\" projects that we\'ve been working on, such as indieGrass. As we get nearer to the completion, we\'ve started to fan out and look at other projects that would set TTR up on the next level, while still being able to let us work at a resonable speed. It kinda sucks when you have an awsome thing that\'d really set it apart, but you have to shelve it, at least till later, because there are more critical things to deal with.

10. How much time would you estimate you spend coding for TTR per week?
It varies. Of late, I\'ve been helping work on our main TTR core work for the past couple weeks, so my time\'s been fanned out between coding, management, and modeling/skinning. On a week where I mainly focus on code, I can get anywhere from a few hours in a day, to where I\'m up till 5am, and still wanting to code more. So it\'s really back and forth alot.

11. Okay, let\'s get down to the nitty gritty. The community have been allowed to ask you some questions and I\'ll bring some of those up now. Will there be different weather in TTR:T?
Yes, TTR will support dynamic weather. Weather will start and stop on it\'s own based on ambient properties, such as barometric pressure and ambient temperature. You might get snow and the like as well.

12. How about both day and night settings for maps?
Most definetally. Day/night opens up alot of different strategies, and will be fully supported in TTR. A fully functional day/night cycle has already been added and we are still working on all the things this can be used to do.

13. With weather and full day/night cycles coming, will we get to see different seasons?
Seasons tie very much into the weather. The different ambient properties required for the weather are based on what season it is. So the answer is yes, TTR will support the full gambit of seasons, including dynamic adjustment between them. The season system will be set up to have an effect on everything ingame, but that\'s something that\'s still somewhat underwraps, and will be covered in full later.

14. Seeing as it\'s vaguely related - we\'ve seen and read a bit about the HDR implementation. Could you explain it once again - in short?

First, and absolutely foremost, is that i must point out the two types of HDR. The first is Camera-HDR, which is what you see in HL2, and the like. This uses bloom to simulate overbright, does exposure control, etc. Then there\'s Eye-HDR, which has yet to be used in a game to date. The differences start to crop up when we handle \'exposure control\' and overbright simulation. With the eye, unless you\'re looking AT a lightsource, or a surface that\'s completely reflecting the light\'s intensity, you dont have bloom. Your concrete wont glow because it\'s bright outside today. What *will* happen however, is that when the eye gets too much light to register all at once, the pupil will shrink, and lesser colors, or very similar ones will lose their sharpness. This is represented through washout. A surface will get very \"bright\" and lesser details such as cracks or bumps may be washed out, but you\'ll still be able to tell main details apart. This isnt simulated in Camera-HDR. The other area is the difference in exposure control. Where Camera-HDR controls lighting adjustments based solely on the light levels(again, like HL2\'s setup) the eye does it based on colors as well. So when you get very sudden light changes, as the pupil tries to adjust, there\'s still too high, or too low a range of colors visible, so all lesser details are lost. When you walk outside on a sunny day, the sudden change makes it so that your eyes arent setup to take all the color/light coming in, and a lot of lesser details will be lost. Our implementation will be founded on Eye-HDR.

15. Will the player\'s equipped gear matter on movement and world interaction?
We\'re gearing to make just about *everything* ingame have an effect on movement of objects and world interaction, You\'ll have individual grenades on your chest, your gun can knock over stuff on a table as you look around, etc.

16. Can you drop certain inventory items to gain better movement as you could with TTR:UT?
While you will be able to, the chances that the gain would be noticable is very small (unlike in TTR:UT, where you\'d find trails of M1 clips leading out of the spawn haha - Jognt anyone?) So while you CAN, unless you drop some thing really heavy (like all your nades, backpack, etc), chances of you getting any noticible gain is minimal.

17. To what level will the players gear be customizable upon entering the battlefield?
While I dont think we\'d go so far as to let the player pick the gunpowder grain in their bullets, we\'re looking at letting players not only pick team and class, but different weapons based on class as well. Multiple weapon choices per class are set up, and we\'re looking at allowing the players to choose the number of nades, extra bandoleers, etc.

18. Will we get realistic movements of the player beyond the standard running, walking crouching and proning?
We\'re trying to make movement not only act realistic, but feel very natural as well. Movement will handle differently in the different stances, and we hope to make each useful, while feeling completely natural as well.

19. Will the player be able to spin like crazy while prone - as in TTR:UT?
Haha, no, that\'s going to be fixed.

20. How about the HUD? Will there be one or will the game provide the necessary information through other visual or audio inputs?
We are actually working to make TTR HUDless. That\'s right, no more magical numbers, messages, or maps floating on your screen. We\'ve been working out all the kinks in the idea, and so far, it\'s looking excellent. Everything is capable of being conveyed through ingame messages one way or another.

21. How about the players ingame avatar? What kind of customization are we looking at here?
We want to let the players get as much customization as possible. We\'re currently looking at letting players pic things like if their sleeves are rolled up, helmet types, patches, and other various small things that when all different, allows most players to look resonably different from each other. Sadly, we have to stop at a certain point, as we dont have the memory or bandwidth to let people pick how many hairs are on their avatar\'s chin.

22. How about computer requirements? Looking at all that nice green grass, will my cpu and/or graphics card be able to handle the pressure?
*Everything* is being designed to run at TSE\'s minimum requirements. While we\'re stuffing alot of things in here, yes, it\'s all designed from the start to be as un-abusive on the machine as possible. If you have at least a 1GHz processor or so, ~512MB of memory, and a graphics card that can run shader model 1.1 or better, you\'ll be able to run it fine.

23. What about the shaders? Will people get excluded from the game because their card doesn\'t support x.x shaders?
TSE supports a procedural fall back system, so if your card can only support ps2.0, then it will scale everything back to what you can support. If your card doesn\'t support ps3.0 shaders, it will use the next best thing. At the lowest level, ps1.1 is *required* and we cant change that sadly. The terrain engine gets alot of it\'s speed from using shaders to optimize it, and we cant go letting different players have different terrains and the like, so ps1.1 is the lowest we can do. However, ps1.1 cards cost about $30 at most these days, so it shouldnt be hard at all to get at least that.

24. Will the game support non-shader cards at all?
Currently, we arent very seriously looking at it, but it\'s a vauge possibility. The problem lies in the fact that TSE\'s terrain engine, Atlas, is shader based, so we would have to find a way around that in order to implement a fixed function version.

25. Will the MAC, PC and Linux versions be fully compatible?
Yes. While TSE is currently being developed only on PC\'s, once it\'s OGL implementation is finished, we can quickly port it to the other platforms, and they will all work with one another.

26. What graphics and sound API\'s will TTR support?
Currently, TSE supports Dx based stuff only. The final version, however, will use both Dx based graphics and sounds, as well as OGL and OAL.

27. How big a download will the first release be?
Since not all the content has been created yet, we dont really have any final counts yet, but it will still be small enough where it can be downloaded feasibly. Likely a couple hundred megs.

28. Last technical question. A comparison shot emerged some time ago, curtesy of JoeB. I have it with me here. Could you explain what we\'re actually seeing?

Ahhh, releif mapping. This thing, put simply, is amazing. In current and next-gen games, you have 3 types of spiffy surface rendering effects. You have bump mapping, normal mapping, and parallax mapping. Releif mapping, however, fits in another category all together if only for one reason. It simulates a complexe 3D surface solely through the video card, meaning you can have a simple wall model, apply a brick texture and a releif map, and presto-changeo, the releif mapping shader makes it so that the individual bricks displace the surface. It\'s not just an illusion either. You could walk and see the profile of the wall, and you could still see the individual bricks protruding from the surface. But that\'s not all, not only can we do that, but it will work with shadowing as well, meaning your dispalced surface will cast and receive shadows accordingly. Very, very, very impressive stuff. So what\'s the catch? Releif mapping can only run on ps3.0 cards. While we support fallbacks to the other effects for other ps versions, if you have a ps3.0 card, we\'re going to take some serious advantage of it. You\'ll be happy, we promise.

29. A few closing questions. What are your hopes for TTR as a game?
Honestly, I want TTR to be what we use to define not just WW2 games, but shooters in general. I hope TTR is a truely industry shaking game, just as TTR:UT was a modding scene shaking mod.

30. Do you have a certain something you will fight to get into TTR.
Lol, only one thing? Dang.
I\'d have to say it\'d be an interesting little sound system we recently came across. Sound in games would never be the same.

31. Anything in particular you would like to convey to the community now that you have the chance (promise I won\'t sensor you )?
I want to thank all you guys with putting up with our secrecy stuff, thank you all for holding on, and hope that we all can stay to see TTR get to where it should be.

[ElvenKind]

I\'d just like to say that the news are built/designed to be viewed at our news section on the main site. What that basically means is that it might look a bit different here in the forums and we\'ve gotten comments on that before.

So, if you want to read this post as it was intended, please see this page.

Thank you.

[tomcat ha]

Nice nice

[Gego]

Nice interview. TTTR\'s gonna rock I just hope that this time we\'ll have more servers & players than any other online game

[Big-Al]

OMG :o RENO IS TEH SEXEH!!!


oh, and TTR is cool

[Constrictor]

Nice! I don\'t care if TTR is released tomorrow or in a year, I\'ll be waiting to play it.

BTW: smilies don\'t work. ->

[Reno]

Yeah, the smilies where lost in the site move, looking to fix that though

[ElvenKind]

Thanks for letting us know Pun. Still a few things remain to be fixed from \"the move\".

I\'ll add it to the list.

[shift]

Nice one, Elven & Reno :tup:
This really gives the signal that everything is REALLY starting to warm up again

[Big-Al]

just like our sunday game we had

all good stuff