You wanna live forever?
To help control all these bad guys, the AI works on the principal of giving each bug an objective to achieve, and unless its interrupted in that task, it’ll just carry on. So if you’re hunkered down behind a rock, out of sight, the bugs will carry on by. Take a potshot at one and the AI routine will kick in, allowing the bug to make the decision whether to carry on with it’s task or stop and attack you. As well as this, bugs in the nearby area will also do a routine check to see if they want to attack you or carry on doing their bug thing. What this means is that although the SWARM engine will be rendering and controlling many bugs at once, the majority of them will need minimal control unless you step in and cause havoc. This keeps CPU overheads to a minimum and produces a realistic result as bugs far away won’t be affected by your actions and therefore have no decisions to make in whether to change what they’re doing or not… clear? Well, if not, just take it from me… it works and works well. Loads of bugs might react to your fire while the majority will carry on streaming by… and it’s looks very cool.
Graphically, Starship Troopers is looking very, very good. Using high res renders which are then scaled down for the game has allowed Strangelite to create bugs with a look and feel very similar to the movie. Using anisotropic shading, they’ve recreated the chitinous look of the bug’s shell very nicely, with the tanker bug in particular looking particularly impressive, even though it lacks the bright colours of the tiger and warrior bugs.
On top of the bug rendering, Strangelite have been working hard on other graphical effects, most notably the realtime atmospheric effects. It’s hard to describe just how much of an edge this gives to the immersion factor, but seeing the fog reflect the yellow glow of an explosion is an impressive sight…
Now, to get all this graphical goodness, you’ll need to have some fairly meaty kit in your rig, but you’ll be able to check it out for yourself with a demo out in September prior to the full game’s launch in October.
