Stepping out of the elevator on 3rd floor, I was immediately struck by the large Sierra company logo on the back wall behind the receptionist. The lobby is furnished with a number of awards in a display case in one corner, and an Avian from Rama in another corner. I announced myself and waited a few moments as my contact (Hillary Crowley) came up to meet me.
     She took me though numerous cubical farms to David Gehringer, Sierra's Product Manager. In his office were a number of posters and other marketing goodies, including a cool little Homeworld book on his desk called the "Chronicles of Hiigara," which he kindly gave to me when I inquired. (For those of you that don't know, Homeworld is another upcoming title from Sierra, featuring a fully 3D RTS battlefield).
     David gave me a bunch of Babylon 5: Into the Fire swag, including a mouse pad, a watch, four magnets, and five posters. (The magnets and posters will be used for contest material at a later date. The watch and mouse pad are mine! :)) Guy Welch, the much overworked Sierra Webmaster popped his head in, and spoke a little bit of future b5games.com updates. Before taking me over to meet the Babylon 5 team, David asked me a few questions about our site and conveyed his thanks for our making a fan / developer reference along with supporting the Babylon 5: Into the Fire community. David took me across the parking lot to another building, where the Babylon 5 team is caged.
     The Babylon 5 building contains another cubical farm, with offices for the more important people (Like Marc, Dan, and John). David took me to Marc Hudgins' office, who began by showing me a piece of an Earth Alliance space station he was working on in the Lightwave modeler, and talked about how they could use it in a number of different places. Yes, they are using Lightwave to model and texture the ships prior to dropping them into the game. This is done with the knowledge that fans will undoubtedly extract these models from the game for use in their own copies of Lightwave.
     On the bulletin board on Marc's wall, there were several Babylon 5: Into the Fire interface screens. These turned out to be interface prototypes, which had not been entered into the game. They are hard to describe, but lets just say that a few of them looked really intuitive. There was also a hyperspace map on the wall for game use, and it outlined all the star systems in the game. In the game, it will be a 3D map and not a flat 2D interface. One of the most interesting things on his wall was a set of pictures of the actual set they use for Starfury cockpit shots. Everyone will remember all the debates we had on how the Starfury was controlled in "Real Lifeä." Well the prop only has one joystick so everyone who based their control scheme on two will have to go back to the drawing board.
     Marc spoke a bit about the complexities of mission creation due to the dynamics of the Babylon 5 universe. One of the more notable things was the fact that the arrival of ships was not scripted like X-Wing, where ships get there at a specific instant, every single time. In Babylon 5, you'll never know what ships will show up and when. They get there when they get there, and this makes mission creation complex and challenging, but also creative and interesting in the sense that each mission is completely different and you'll never know what's coming.
     I was able to play the E3 build of the game in Dan Foy's office, which I must say looked really good. Even more impressive was the stability of the game, which only crashed once while in hyperspace. I had some fun evading the Omega, doing a little dog fighting, and flying around Babylon 5. Later, they upped the AI abilities of the other fighters, giving me one heck of a challenge. When I tried to engage more than one ship, I was toast in seconds. Unlike Wing Commander, you can't just move the joystick in random directions and fly erratically to survive long enough to for the AI to get confused so you can reverse for the kill.
     The hyperspace effect looks perfect. No banding or artifacting in 32-bit. Those of you with Voodoo 1 and 2's are really gonna miss out on that one (Hint: get TNT's). A couple things missing at the moment are hyperspace whirls, and the hyperspace pull, but it's just a matter of time. One thing though, you really MOVE in hyperspace, not only in relation to normal space, but its like you're flying in time-compression.
     They took me over to Stuart's shared cubical and showed me all the work he had done on the station. The new Babylon 5 seriously rocks…a lot! The three screenshots released by Stuart hardly do it justice. He talked about how the top of the station had modeling errors when it came directly from Netter Digital, which explains why we never see it from a top down view in the show. Stuart took the time to fly around the station and showed me the areas where he had fixed the modeling errors and simplified the model to lower the polygon count.
     One of the problems that Stuart encountered was the defense grid. While watching the show, we never see an origin point for the weaponry. We see a cut scene of them firing, but in actuality, they appear out of nowhere. Stuart was forced to make the weapon emplacements where he thought they would, and should, be, all along the top backbone of Babylon 5. As he mentioned though, this does leave the entire bottom-half of the station completely unprotected.
     Stuart was kind enough to explain the process they have to go through to make the models that go into the game. They can't just drop in the show models because they are much too complex and would simply kill the system if even a single Omega Destroyer were flying around in space. As an example, Stuart pulled up a copy of the Thunderbolt they use on the show. Damn, I went slack-jawed when he whipped that out. (I won't explain…). He overlaid the game model, and I saw just how much simpler the game model was. They create the model with the show one in the background, and basically recreate the model to the exact same dimensions. It's lacking some of the finer geometry that they use on the show, but they fix this though the texture and alpha maps. Very smooth, but one little thing they missed was that the atmospheric flaps are down by default. You'll notice this on the shots I posted. The developers said it would be fixed before release.
     They say that Babylon 5 is a special case for the number of polygons. It has too much, and the object is too big, but in staying true to the show, it has to be. The show model Babylon 5 is said to have 95,000 polygons or so, while the one they made only has 6,000. A nice reduction, but it is still a pretty heavy load on the average system. The resulting problems are an increased load on the system and a slight drop in frame rate. I didn't ask how they would be combating this, but Stuart spoke of it like it was no big deal.
     Stuart ran through the unit viewer for all the Babylon 5 ships. His are the most recent, and a bunch of those are really cool. I think I saw a pair of Llort cubes, with one being blown up (j/k), several of the cap ships, (did you know that the Omega is actually black without lighting?), and several other never before seen ships. Game exclusives like the Dilgar ships are awesomely detailed. One of them looks like the Protoss carrier in Starcraft. (Heavy cruiser, you can see it on b5games.com) Luc Mayrand was contracted to design all the ships and stations for Into the Fire. Luc was originally a production designer for Netter Digital / Babylonian and has ships like the Excalibur, Drakh, Minbari Flyer, Thirdspace alien ships, and many more credited to his name.
     Marc pulled out the unedited footage of the FMV sequences they will be using for the game in a blooper hunt. Although we didn't come up with anything, they are definitely filmed on the Babylon 5 sets. Several of the shots had blue or green screen backgrounds so space could be dropped in later. From the few clips I saw, it was utterly obvious that the plot of the game is not something that can be summed up in a sentence or paragraph. Marc mentioned that the entire shoot cost about half a million and that the footage was still in the post-production stage.
     I later asked John Walker some questions about the AI, and got some lengthy explanations. Ones that are much too detailed to remember and transcribe, and even if I could, I can't do it nearly as concisely as he could. Lets just say the AI process is never done, and he's going to be working on that sucker until it ships. Some of the things he's doing are pretty groundbreaking. His whiteboard is filled with flowcharts and ideas (and some Jeff doodles).
     I did take a few minutes to ask about the possibility of piloting the Whitestar, which a bunch of people want. They are in the game, for now as an AI controlled ship, but piloting it is something else. They basically told me that, the character we play is an Earth pilot. A ranger/ISA military person would command the Whitestar. Not to say that it won't be pilotable, but probably not.
     Jeff took me over to his cubical, and showed off some of the music he was working on. Let me tell you, the way the music tracks are blended into one another is seamless. For those of you that have played Wing Commander, you know there is an abrupt music change when you go from a non-hostile nav point to a hostile one. This change is usually abrupt and seemingly out of place. Not so here. It's incredibly smooth. You couldn't tell where it changed even if you were told it was coming. Victor Crews is responsible for breaking up this music so it will dynamically integrate with the game.
     Music is taken from two B5 episodes and a number of different sets of exclusive game music. Jeff said that the game is divided into a number of different sections, and you will always have an exclusive set of music for each section with a reoccurring theme, but you will not hear that music outside its section. While in a mission, the music dynamically and smoothly increases/decreases in intensity, unparalleled in any other space simulator. I asked Jeff about the possibility of co-releasing an album of all the exclusive game music. He told me that he would love to do that, but doing it would require the approval of Warner Bros.
     To demonstrate the music inside the game, he ran a compile of the code. For those of you that are interested, the language they are working in is C++ and a full compile at this point is about five to ten minutes. This code is airtight. While going though a debug process, he showed me what is probably the only major bug currently in the game: A single memory leak. If this keeps up, we're looking at a new standard for game creation. The design of the engine is modular as well. You can drop in and change models without the game even knowing or complaining about it.
     Nearing the end of the day, I went back to Dan's office and played some more of the game. I suddenly remembered something called "screen shots," and began hitting print screen as soon as I saw something half decent. I tried pulling a few moves with the AI, and had a chance to fly a number of different ships, like the Narn fighter and the Thunderbolt. Right now, that Narn fighter is really well armed. You can take out nearly any fighter in a single shot, and the thing is well armored. I took a couple of Omega Destroyer hits and kept right on going. It is, on the other hand, slow, but still, its sweet. It will undoubtedly be more balanced though in future versions.
     I took the time to fly around the framework of the different models. The framework that connects the two drive and crew sections of the Hyperion cruiser together is a good one, because it's a really tight fit and the Hyperion is usually moving in a patrol pattern. The Omega Destroyer is even more challenging. There is a little Death Star style trench near the ends of the rotating section, and with some really fine control work, you can navigate the whole length while still keeping with the rotation. I also once flew into the docking bay of Babylon 5, which is easy once you are lined up, but its tough to stop, turn around, and come back out. I took the approach a bit too fast and ended up smashing into the far wall. You can also navigate though other cruiser size vessels of different races.
     Behind me, there was one of the new K7 machines. Dan had loaded up the game on this one, and although you couldn't play it (no joystick attached), the frame rates were astonishing. It was much better than a Pentium II, and this is with all the lights turned on. It hauls.
     Speaking of systems, before I gave it all up, Dan loaded up the game on a Pentium Pro 200 with a Voodoo Rush, we're talking old tech. All the lights and extra stuff had to be turned off, but the game still ran smoothly. So yes, you can play the game on it, but its not highly recommended…it looks terrible.
     Overall, I was really impressed. The flight model is very realistic. Don't try to make a hard turn when you're close to a capital ship or station and are trying to avoid it. Chances are, you can't, because when you make the hard turn, you don't stop on a dime. The thrusters still have to fire for a certain amount of time before you are going in your new direction. In the end, you're slamming into the object sideways.
     Hopping into inertial mode is one of the greatest aspects of the game. The computer will not compensate for your current vector, so you can hit the space bar, turn the ship down, and be able to fire into at the passing object while still moving perpendicular to the object. This is more advanced than the WC auto slide in the fact that you can still maneuver using the controls on the hat and the page up and page down keys on the keyboard. These controls are a bit dull and not very strong. I asked the developers about this, and was told that it was made for fine touch maneuvering. One very important thing on my wish list is a way to control the intensity of the thrusters though a slider or something, so you can adjust the intensity appropriate to the job.
     The controls are pretty good. Keyboard configurations are always a work in progress, so its pretty early, but one of my wishes is that instead of using the Page Up and Page Down keys for forward and reverse thrust in inertial mode, use the Button 3 and 4 on the joystick It saves a hand from reaching for the other side of the keyboard and keeps complete control on the joystick.
     The mission recorder mode is excellent. It will recreate your moves in a particular battle, but to get into the mission at the point the replay is at, just move the joystick, and your playing again. It's kinda like an in-mission constant save.
     The graphics are stunning, especially the ones that Stuart has. Flying around B5 and showing me the details revealed just how much time they are putting into each of the ships. The maintenance bays also exist, which are the exit and entry points for Maintenance Rigs and MaintBots. Speaking of those bays, Stuart has gotten to the point where he can fly inside there, but can't get out. Getting in and out is tough, with the station's rotation spinning that fast.
     Fighter versus fighter battles is interesting due to the slewing aspect of flight and the inertial settings. I was disappointed to see that the Nials don't have beam weapons on them yet. Jeff mentioned that they had taken them out before E3, but confirmed that they will be reentering the game. Also, ships like the Omega and Thunderbolt shoot yellow plasma instead of the customary blue and orange, respectively. Marc told me that they only have a few textures running at this point, and the proper sizes and colors will be implemented soon. Missile tracking is a straight line, and there is a small bug when you look at the Starfury from a side view and see the engine flare lighting up. It flares up on the wrong side of the Starfury, but that will be fixed soon. One other thing though, the missile objects look a lot smaller than seen in Thirdspace, with a pointed tip instead of a rounded one. When the weapons explode, the explosion seems a bit small.
     All in all, this game is defiantly on track and follows the show faithfully. The few cut scenes I saw were enough to convince me that there is a huge dynamic plot. I recall someone mentioning that in a single run through of a game, you may go through twenty missions, but this leaves out another 80 or so that are written in. (These are by no means actual figures, but just possible examples.) Every mission is truly unique, because of the random element to the game.
     As for demos, the developers are planning to have them. However, they will be pretty simple and pretty much like the E3 build. A couple of the developers explained why. The game is very complex in storyline and game play. Revealing too much of the game leads to speculation and early (too early) opinions on what the game will be like when it is released. But giving it a very limited demo teases the fans, and attracts new fans to the game. Doing something in the middle doesn't quite work, because its hard to explain that kind of demo without either disclosing a lot of information or opening the door to plenty of speculation and false opinions.
     I had expected to see more of the elements the developers had mentioned on the board. Stuff like strategy elements and some of the specific missions, but they were not yet in the game. These are still in the planning stages, and rapidly becoming a reality. A lot of the recent work they have done is creating the foundation in the code for these elements. I'll be up in Seattle in the December time frame, so hopefully I'll be able to see a more advanced stage of the game. Yippee!