Jurassic Park: Trespasser - Development

Development

The game was initiated by two former employees of Looking Glass Technologies, Seamus Blackley and Austin Grossman. With the film The Lost World: Jurassic Park expected to be a success and after securing the movie license, the pair approached several movie animation groups before signing with DreamWorks Interactive. Adobe Photoshop 5 and 3D Studio Max were used to produce the game. A 3D model of the island was also built and digitally scanned.

The game had a development period of more than three years. Money was the biggest hurdle in the development of Trespasser and the game went severely over-budget several times throughout its development. Second only to money was time, as the game had to be ready to meet the release of the The Lost World: Jurassic Park film; originally, the game was to be released in the fall of 1997. However, due to a number of problems the project was delayed by a year. The rush to release the game caused many features to be either cut, or left unfinished and unpolished. For instance, due to difficulties coding the behaviour of both arms together developers had to ditch the left arm entirely. A late shift in development effectively changed the game from survival horror to action shooter, and contributed to the many complaints the game received. Lack of experienced management and the use of artists who were unfamiliar with basic game development processes and 3D modeling has also been identified as a cause of problems. Developers struggled for more than two years on some problems and in the end released a game that is set within a very large and open outdoor environment. The main problem was that development started before the 3dfx Voodoo 1 started the move towards 3D hardware. Because of this, some techniques, like the bump mapping and image caching were incompatible with graphics processing units. Near the end of development the programmers developed a renderer that drew bump mapped objects in software and the terrain in hardware, but most objects were bump mapped so the speed advantages of hardware acceleration were negated. Trespasser used many textures for its mip levels and image cache, more than even the most advanced card of the time, the Voodoo2, could handle, and the game used the lower resolution textures in hardware mode instead of the high resolution ones available in software mode. This led to the strange situation that the game ran faster and looked better in software mode, while running in hardware mode meant the game ran slower and looked worse.

The Trespasser engine was, and in many ways still is, unique. In 1998, it was one of the first engines to successfully portray outdoor environments full of hundreds of trees. Unfortunately, not many computers in 1998 could render the complex environments it generated. The result was the worst clipping one reviewer had ever seen with another finding the game experienced a slowdown and frame rate drops. In addition, the Trespasser engine featured the first game world to be completely influenced by classical mechanics and was also the first game to use ragdoll physics. Perhaps the most advanced feature of the rendering engine was the ability to render objects like trees and rocks as 2D sprites, which, when close enough to Anne, would be replaced by their 3D counterpart. Elements using this technique are known as "impostors". Unfortunately, this often led to an ugly "popping", where a low-resolution object suddenly "pops" into 3D immediately in front of the player. This is especially noticeable when playing the game at higher resolutions. The same kind of rendering technique was used in Shadow of the Colossus and Far Cry, although the latter uses higher resolution sprites and the total draw distance of 3D trees is set further away which has essentially eliminated the "popping" problem. Trespasser was one of the first games to feature bump mapping and specular highlighting, however the effects are not overly apparent due to the lack of dynamic lighting and the fact that many of the models used grayscale versions of the regular textures instead of the displacement maps necessary to take advantage of bump mapping. Additionally, an effect was used to dynamically draw an animated texture to simulate the ripples in pools of water. Trespasser also used height mapping to render a full-sized island (split into chunks due to memory limitations). Level designers would simply provide the Trespasser engine with a black-and-white image that detailed the height of the ground – the closer to white the shade of gray was, the higher the section of land would be elevated. Once a height map was created, objects such as buildings, weapons, dinosaurs and more would be hand-placed in a level. Trespasser features a robust physics system but instead of accurate, per-polygon collisions, Trespasser uses a "Box System", where every object in the game acts as if it is encased in an invisible box. Additionally, Trespasser's physics are based on the Penalty Force Method, in which, when two objects collide – rather than stopping movement, the two objects push away from one another until they are no longer colliding. This makes stacking objects difficult, and standing on top of objects even harder. It also led a great deal to a problem called interpenetration; where two objects will collide and then become stuck inside one another, unable to separate. In the final release the dinosaurs were disallowed from making jump attacks and entering buildings to avoid interpenetration from occurring. One of the most impressive features of Trespasser is a system dubbed by the creators as "Real-Time Foley". Theoretically, the Trespasser engine could produce the sound of any two objects colliding with one another at any speed or distance by dynamically mixing several sounds together on-the-fly. As of 2009, the only other significant game to feature this is Penumbra.

In most PC games, characters have "animations" in the traditional sense: an animator scripts a sequence of movements for the 3D model to do, which are played at specified times. Every animation in Trespasser is done using inverse kinematics. No animation in the game is pre-animated; every movement of every dinosaur is generated automatically through their artificial intelligence. Due to the rushed nature of development, this feature ultimately resulted primarily in awkward movement as the dinosaurs performed unnaturally. Andrew Grant was Trespasser's chief artificial intelligence programmer.Trespasser was designed to have a complex artificial intelligence routine, giving each creature on the island its own set of emotions; fear, happiness, hunger, among many others. Dinosaurs will fight together, enemy to enemy. Dinosaurs would react to the player differently depending on what mood they were in. Unfortunately, system bugs in the artificial intelligence routines made it so that dinosaurs would have drastic mood swings and would switch between mood-based actions so quickly, they would actually stop moving, unable to do anything at all. A quick fix was hard-coded in to the game that locked all dinosaurs’ anger at maximum, leaving all other emotions at zero. This fixed the bug, but also negated all the work the team had done on programming the AI, leaving the dinosaurs ultimately simplistic in their goals.