Some thoughts on the demo

[Barry Brien]

Hi. I;ve played the demo, and I must say that I'm really impressed.

I do have one or two things to say, however.

1) In DF Kyle is able to jump (clear his feet) at 8 DFUs, which is exactly the same height as many doors, and crates etc. In this version Kyle is unable to jump as high as he was in DF. Can this be fixed?

2) This version of DF is a lot tougher! This is because artificial intelligence has come a long way in 10 years. In DF the stormtroopers just wander around occasionally shooting in your general direction, and nearly always missing. In JA they are a lot smarter and a lot faster. I'm not saying you should dumb down your enemies, just that youm should keep that in mind when you are placing enemies, especially in the earlier levels.

3) The Talay map is great. I liked seeing the empty Dark Trooper pods, and the dead rebels. Might I suggest that you throw in the corpse of that Mon Calamari seen in the cutscene somewhere (if you haven't already)

4) I didn't like the voice-over used for Kyle in Talay. It sounds nothing like the real DF Kyle voice, i.e. "this is too easy, now to get to my ship". I think it should be gotten rid of.

5) The opening text crawl is nice, but the W in WARS has a little tail on it which it isn't supposed to. Also might I suggest using a proper mp3 of the Star Wars theme, rather than that awful midi version. I know it may be difficult to segue into the Dark Forces theme, but I reckon it would be better.

6) The cutscenes are well done. I hope there will be lip synching in the final version. The only thing I don't like is that default casual JO/JA pose that all npcs affect. It doesn't look right on vader or Mon Mothma. Can this be fixed?

7) Will there be fists in the final version?

8) What happened all my textures. Were they not good enough?

All in all it's looking fantastic though. Keep up the good work.

[Darth_Linux]

HI Barry

 

Thanks for all of your comments. I'll see what I can do to answer the questions:

 

1) We aren't using the MP engine yet (or perhaps ever at this point), so we are bound to the existing physics supplied in the JA SP engine. So in a word, we can't make Kyle jump higher at this point.

 

2) we did make many modifications to the "smarts", accuracy, toughness and other variables of the enemies in JA. Some we made tougher, others dumber. The game is definatly tougher than the original, but the consensus seems to be that it is tough but balanced.

 

3) I like the Mon Calamari idea - I don't know if there is a model available to use or not, but I'll suggest it to Salv and see if we can find the right room to put it in.

 

4) we are redoing those Kyle voices in Talay. THey were rushed at the last minute and definatley not what we had hoped for. No disrespect to Tom Resnick btw, it just didn't come out like we had hoped.

 

5) we are using the default font for the text crawl, and I don't know if we will bother to change it just for a little serif on the W . . . the MIDI thing is a love it or hate it thing. Most of the team feels that the MIDI thing gives the game much of its charm, and we have opted to keep it and not use the live orchestral version that ships with JA.

 

6) Lip Synching and posing the models for the cutscenes was too time consuming for the cutscene artist at the time he made it due to time restraints. He may want to redo it, but I kind of doubt he will - it's a huge amount of work and he'd have to start from scratch.

 

7) We actually have fists and punching in the demo, but I've forgotten what conditions are required to get them going . . . . anyone recall?

 

8) AFAIK, many of your textures should still be in game. I don't recall which ones you did, and some did get replaced along the way . . . can't tell you which ones you are looking for in particular.

 

Any chance you'd like to do some more textures? We have plenty of things to do for levels 7 through 14 still . . . .