An interview with a Kylotonn

Bet on Soldier - Interview
Info: betonsoldier.com

Within the gaming industry a lot of buzz has been made regarding Ageia's new Physics model add-in card, shader models, modern graphics cards, etc etc. Here at Guru3D.com we always look at all the cool gear and features from a consumer point of view. I figured it would be nice to swap for a change and ask a game programmer how they look at new technology, implementation of that technology into games and basically to get an idea how the game developper is actually developing :)

We do this in a little Q&A session with Benoit Treins from Kylotonn studio about one of the more interesting titles of the year, Bet on Soldier that will be published by Digital Jesters and developed by Kylotonn.

Let me start off:

Hello, welcome and thank you for participating with the Guru of 3D in a little Q&A session. We at Guru of 3D would like to ask you a couple of questions regarding your upcoming title, the technology and of course in relation to that, the new Physics model / PhysX PPU.

Hilbert: Hello Benoit, please give us a small introduction of yourself and what is it exactly that you do at Digital Jesters/Kylotonn.

My name is Benoit TREINS and I work as a game and graphics programmer at Kylotonn studio.

Hilbert: Bet on Soldier is a new title that will be brought to the market in the near future. After doing a little research I must say that this title will stand out from other titles considerably (in a very positive way). Can you explain to this audience what kind of title it'll be in regards of story line, type of game and most of all what to expect? Also tell us a little about its multiplayer options.

First of all, thank you for your interest. We tried to build an interesting plot driving the player world-wide, as a mercenary, making the solo campaign non-linear.

The world of Bet on Soldier is set in a contemporary but different world. The war has been going on for 80 years. The two mega corporations fighting against each other have turned the war into their primary source of income. But to make even more money, they’ve created a TV show where the best soldiers fight against each other to the death. The viewers around the world can bet on the outcome of the fight.

You play Nolan Daneworth, a soldier whose wife has been killed by BoS champions.

To find the murderers, he decides to become a BoS mercenary.

The game is fast-paced arcade oriented action. We wanted the fights to be intense yet enjoyable and the destructible armours push into this direction…  One of the biggest challenges is to manage your armour condition and ammo to go through the missions in one piece as you have to pay for everything. There are about 40 weapons and you can hire mercenaries to help you during your missions. You wil be able to use Exoskeletons, which are heavily armed and very resiliant.

The multiplayer is a mix between soloplay and teamplay.

The goal is to reach a pre-set amount of money. To achieve this goal, the best way is to cast BoS fights. But to do so, you’ll have to take control of zones on the map where Ticket Terminals are located. With these, you can cast a BoS fight against a enemy player. You have to join him in a closed area to begin the fight and the others members can’t interfere with the duel.

We believe that this unique mix of different gameplays and the  betting system will attract all the online gamers.

Hilbert: Here at Guru3D.com we have a lot of gamers that just love enthusiast hardware. That's why I'll get a bit technical with my questions from here on. From a hardware point of view what will be the minimum required to run this game decently, in addition to that which will be the recommended hardware to facilitate this all this game's needs?

Actually, the minimum requirements aren’t finalized yet.

The minimum spec is a GeForce3 series or equal, 2 GHz processor and 512M Ram.

The game will run nicely full detail on a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz, 512M Ram, GeForce4/ATi 9800, DirectX9-compatible sound card.

But the ultimate experience is achieved via a 64-bit processor with the latest graphics hardware (6800 PCI Express, X800) with 1024 MB Ram. Of course, this config must be already wide-spread among hardcore gamers.

Hilbert: Now I've seen some demos and screenshots on the game and must say it is looking absolutely fantastic. It looks like the game will facilitate the latest technologies including specular effects, dynamic lighting, maybe HDR and I 'think' I even noticed some soft shadowing in one of the screenshots. Can you tell me a little about some of the key techniques used to make this game look and behave differently compared to what we've seen in recent gaming titles?

Although the engine is very flexible in terms of rendering and can achieve bump-specular-cubemap everywhere, we decided to stick to light-mapped environments and keep bump-mapping for the dynamic entities. Lightmapping is more suitable for outdoors as it can be pre-computed efficiently by external libraries with a great deal of realism. Still, there is some dynamic lighting over lightmapping. There are some shadows (still being worked on) based on projection and with softening process. There is no HDR in the pure meaning of the term (overly misused unfortunately) but post-processing including blur and bloom effects.