May 21, 2007 - Sam Fisher is a wanted fugitive. Shadows will no longer afford him the sanctuary he once enjoyed. His enemies are constantly searching for him, forcing Sam to do his best to blend in to his surroundings. But sometimes, even the best fugitives get noticed. That's when things start to get interesting. The fourth of IGN's five days of Splinter Cell looks at how Sam can interact with the environment. And how it will react back.
Previous Splinter Cell games have had an engine built entirely around the light and dark stealth dynamic. As long as you played by the rules, those being the ones that required you to sit in the shadows and plan out a series of actions before making any moves, you were rewarded. The stealth kills of Splinter Cell games past were exciting, but scripted. You may have been afforded several options for dealing with each obstacle, but the gameplay broke down when you acted outside of the rules. Conviction encourages you to break the rules.
"First of all, everything in Conviction -- and I mean everything -- is dynamic and bound to be pushed over, thrown or broken," says Daniel Roy, Associate Producer for Conviction. "This isn't just a dozen objects in the environment; it's everything, from the staplers on a desk, to the desks themselves."
Sam Fisher's not going to pay a lot for this printer.
A fully dynamic environment is no easy task. Processing power hasn't been strong enough until recently to keep track of the physics for each individual object and still have room for the game. But perhaps more importantly to the game itself is how the controls are configured. A dynamic environment doesn't amount to much if you can't interact with it easily.
Past Splinter Cell games weren't exactly inviting to those who weren't willing to get past the steep learning curve and figure out the controls. Simply opening a door involved a series of button presses as you approached it, peeked through, and then chose from a list of entry methods. The developers at Ubisoft knew this would not fly in Conviction. A game that requires players to make quick reactions must have a control scheme that allows for easy interaction with the environment.
To meet this necessity, a three-button schematic has been put into place. One button will be for grabbing on to objects, say a chair, a doorknob or an enemy. Another will be for aggressive interactions. Depending upon the context, it might be used to kick open a door (or just throw a shoulder into it if you're running) or punch a cop that has the drop on you. The last button will be for stealth. Pushing it near a desk will cause you to duck underneath to hide, slowly open a door, or imitate the crowd around you. You can see how combinations of these buttons will allow for more complex interactions whereby you can do things such as picking up a table and then hiding behind it for cover or throwing it at an enemy as a weapon.
The streets of DC will be full of NPCs.
Daniel Roy walked us through a series of events that you can perform in Conviction to demonstrate just how flexible the new engine is:
"You're Sam Fisher, a fugitive hunted by the cops, and you have to access the data server hidden in the middle of a park in Washington. Walking towards your objective, you quickly join a small group of people moving alongside a war memorial, in order to avoid the attention of a cop strolling nearby. Reaching an open area, you decide you need a quick distraction if you're to progress further. You walk up to a protestor lecturing a small audience, and quickly snatch her laptop and throw it on the ground. The crowd is shocked by this, and begin to call for the cop. The cop begins to walk towards the onlookers, but you avoid his gaze and briskly walk along before he can figure out who's responsible for the commotion.
Having reached the building, you stand in front of a security guard. The guard notices you, and you know he's starting to put two and two together? Very soon now he will identify you as that fugitive that's been all over the news. You turn around and walk towards the back of the building. He follows you to question you? But as soon as you're out of sight of the crowd, you take him by surprise and knock him unconscious by throwing him violently into a dumpster. You quickly make your way inside the building and hack the data server, but now the cops have congregated outside. Luckily, a hot dog vendor is within sight? You take out your silenced pistol and fire, creating chaos and mayhem in the park. Joining the rampaging crowd, you run out of the park, unnoticed by the cops who see you as just another panicked bystander fleeing for his life?"
This Washington Park level is already up and running. In our demo, many of the actions Daniel Roy described above were performed for us and, depending upon the skill level of the player, looked just as smooth as you'd imagine. That's no coincidence.
Ubisoft Montreal spent months working on the animations Sam would perform to pick up a chair. The company literally spent months working to make the simple act of picking up a chair look natural. It took months, because although picking up a chair is an easy task to most people, it is quite hard in the virtual world. In a dynamic environment, a chair can fall in a myriad of different positions. Rather than just contending with an upright chair as most games would be required to, Conviction's chairs can fall in any position. This presents the animators with the challenge of making it look like a natural grasp from ever angle and position of the chair. Predetermined animations won't cut it.
Daniel Roy explained to IGN how Ubisoft Montreal solved this problem, "In Conviction, we've blended procedural (or code-driven) animation with motion capture in order to create an animation system that will be able to figure out how to pick up a chair in any position. Whenever you're going to pick up that chair, Sam is going to approach the object in a slightly different manner, and place his hands just at the right spots to pick up the chair in a believable way."
Pick up chairs realistically thanks to Conviction's modified Havoc engine.
The team made this work by assigning a number of invisible handles around the chair. When Sam approaches the chair to pick it up, the animation system chooses the handles it deems best and generates the animations from there. The chair was chosen as the first object to nail the animations for because it is one of the most complexly shaped things in the game. With that down, the system could be applied to everything else.
"Once we managed to deal with the chair," says Daniel Roy, "almost every other object seemed easy to deal with."
From the chair came the interactions with the rest of the environment. Circular tables have dynamic handles that move to meet the player, laptops can be grappled realistically, stools can be grabbed off of the ground on the run without, and so on. All it takes is the press of a button and anything within Sam's grasp will fluidly end up in his hands.
Well, almost anything. Enemies can be picked up and tossed over railings, down staircases, or into walls, but they won't stand by idly and let you have your way with them. New AI routines have been made so that the non-player characters (NPCs) can navigate the environment, deal with obstacles that can move at any moment, and fight back with all of the same tools and techniques that Sam has.
Getting an NPC to negotiate a dynamic environment is no easy task. With crowds a primary element in Conviction, having each NPC avoid bumping into each other is a primary concern. To solve this problem, each NPC has an avoidance scheme that works something like similarly poled magnets to push away from each other. NPCs also have to avoid bits of the dynamic environment that have spilled onto their paths. In Conviction, the AI recognizes new obstacles thrown in its path and finds a new route on the fly.
These path-finding techniques will largely go unnoticed, even as important as they are. Things that work as they should aren't usually what piques one's interest. Hopefully, you'll notice the way the AI interacts with Sam. The enemy AI will make decisions as to whether its better to knock a table over and use it as cover in a gunfight or to make a dash for a corner to use the more sturdy wall. We even saw an enemy rolling a round table to stay behind cover as Sam tried to run to the right to get a line of sight that didn't have the table obstructing it. Just as you'll have to improvise, so will the AI. The goal is to have fights be chaotic and tense.
"With such a focus on the dynamic environment at all moments of the game," Daniel Roy said, "firefights really gain that 'Die Hard' quality; at the end of a fight, you'll be standing around the corpses of your enemies, and wonder how the tidy office you walked into turned into such a wasteland?"
Just as a lot of work was put into getting the interactions with the environment to be smooth, extra care has been put into the physics of NPC interactions. Punching or throwing an NPC results in a mix of rag-doll and mo-capped animations. The rag dolls are sometimes turned on for just a brief moment to add emphasis to a punch or kick. By combining the two techniques, Ubisoft Montreal is aiming for reaction animations that look realistic and cinematic at the same time.
Using contextual buttons, Fisher will need to blend in to avoid detection by the police.
Daniel Roy explained,"Imagine that Sam picks up an enemy and wants to throw him in the environment; the grab, and the throw itself, will be driven by mo-cap or key-frame animations, for maximum drama and impact. Then, as soon as the enemy is in the air, we use rag-doll to control how he will interact with the environment." Like the other animations in Splinter Cell Conviction, this combination of animation techniques looks smooth and sleek. Even if the graphics aren't awe-inspiring at this early stage of development, one can easily see that things will look good in motion.
The engine was designed around the improvisational style a fugitive must adapt to use, Ubisoft is aiming for gameplay as dynamic as the environment that instills a sense of awe as you explore just what you can do. As Daniel Roy put it:
"Sam can throw his enemies on desks, tables, containers, etc., or slam their heads against nearby walls, or throw computer monitors, printers, chairs, etc. at them, or momentarily confound them by sweeping the contents of a desk at their face. Basically, we want the player to enter a rich environment, filled with all sorts of elements, and feel, 'Oh yeah, I got an entire arsenal at my disposal.'
The arsenal may not include scores of high tech gizmos that Sam Fisher carries around on his back anymore, but possibilities for what you can do in a Splinter Cell game have clearly multiplied.
), my friends that he got from one of those freexbox360 sites (the one I mentioned in my original post here), it just happened to my half brother about a month ago (his new one he said is even worse as it has a lot of disc read problems), my other friend who just got one for xmas mailed it in the other day, and then yesterday I found out about another friends launch 360 he mailed in when gears of war came out,
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