Developer: Relic Entertainment
Publisher: Microsoft
Estimated release date: Late 2001
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What's so high-tech about it: This real-time strategy engine lets you design your own units to create a wide range of new gameplay strategies.
Raising mutant beasts already looks like the hot gaming trend in 2001, as evidenced by Black & White and Sigma, the latest to come from Homeworld creator Alex Garden. While Black & White mixes elements of the god game and strategy genres, Sigma at its heart is a traditional strategy game with a gameplay twist based on the timely subject of gene manipulation. You combine the genes from animals found throughout a South Pacific island to create armies of hybrid creatures, which you use to battle your opponent's menagerie of monsters. It sounds like a variant of The Island of Dr. Moreau, but Garden says the inspiration for Sigma really started with "observing the subtle differences between people. We wondered, if people were animals, what animals would they be, and what would happen if you could combine them together to get the best each had to offer?"
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There are 60 animals that can be used for gene combining. Some include wolves, tigers, rhinos, giraffes, and even massive ones, like whales. Then, using a technology code-named "Sigma," you use these animals' genetic material to cook up unique army units of beasts that exhibit the physical attributes and behaviors of the original animals. The genes of monkeys and wolves together can result in hybrids with the head of a wolf, as well as body of a monkey, which swing through trees and attacks in packs. Likewise, the DNA of whales serves as an ingredient to make massive land creatures or that of bats to make flying ones. The ratio of animal genes can be adjusted. For instance, the end product can have more cheetah DNA than vulture DNA rather than just being composed of an even 50-50 distribution between the two. Such a creature would have mostly the physical and behavioral attributes of a cheetah, with some of that of a vulture.
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In the game, the engine actually morphs together the two animals selected for gene combining for the player to see. While many ideas for the way animals could be physically merged onscreen were brainstormed, the designers and programmers ultimately decided that an engine that swapped limbs would meet the needs of their game design. "While it sounds easy to just swap the head of one creature for the head of another, it's far from simple," says Garden. "The engine needed to combine the 3D Bezier patch models, textures, and animations of two animals to create one creature. Once the final model was created, a progressive mesh was generated from it for rendering scalability. Furthermore, it needed to do this in as little time as possible."
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Accomplishing this feat works like this: the artists mark off patches of geometry that compose a creature's limbs. This gives the Sigma engine the information it needs to swap one limb for another. Each animal model that is created comes from a shared base model so that common features from animals are the same. "For example, each leg is connected to the torso of the animal with a ring of four patches. This ensures that when the engine attaches one leg to another torso, the geometry can be stitched together properly," explains Garden. "The limb must also be scaled and repositioned for the new torso. The engine uses four different metrics to figure out the appropriate scale factor to apply to a limb."
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The addition of new limbs to a torso--for example, attaching bat wings to the body of a nonflying animal, like a camel--was another factor. This was done by placing connection points on the torso model of every creature, where wings or another type of limb could go. The engine then uses this information to stitch the new limb into place.
When it comes to devising battle strategies in this RTS, we'll have to wait and see how well all of this gene mixing will work during actual gameplay. But the technology itself certainly looks like it will be fun to tinker with on its own, which is part of Garden's goal in making the game. "With Sigma, we're looking for an opportunity to create technology that gives players the freedom to create a game that is uniquely tailored to their style of play," he says.
