June 25, 1998, Thursday
Section: Circuits
GAME THEORY; Holding the Reins of Reality
BY J. C. Herz
IF Myst was a reason to buy a multimedia PC, Unreal is the killer application for 3-D accelerator
cards. The game (published by GT Interactive, $49.95) will run on a Pentium 166, and with no
hardware frills, it is an engaging first-person shooter comparable to Quake. But on a 200-megahertz
machine with a 3Dfx Voodoo 2 board? Cue the choir. The tornado has plucked you out of Kansas and
you have crash-landed in Oz.
Actually, according to Unreal's back story, you are a prisoner whose spaceship has crashed on a
mysterious planet en route to a penal colony. After exiting the wreckage, you emerge into a world filled
with rippling waters, breathtaking architecture, cavernous mines and a menagerie of gothic beasts.
Ninety percent of the fauna are trying to kill you. But that seems a small price to pay for such
breathtaking beauty. Overhead, cirrus clouds race across the sky, casting shadows on the ground. A
bird of prey circles in the distance. An alien rabbit (one of the few nonhomicidal creatures on this
planet) scampers on the grass.
It's a huge world. If you fire your gun across a chasm, the bullet takes a long time to hit the other side.
If you drop something off a cliff, it takes a long time to smash on the ground. And you hear it a split
second after you see it -- light travels faster than sound. Sound acts the way it should in this world. It
bounces differently indoors and outdoors, in tunnels, over water and off stone walls, taking into account
the number of obstructions in a room.
Despite what it says on the box, this world isn't unreal. It's hyperreal. Everything you see and hear has
been sharpened. Crystallized. Heightened. Torch flickers seem more flamelike than real fire. Water is
more watery. Footsteps are crisper. Large exhaust fans are backlighted with just the right amount of
dust in the room so the blades cast perfect cinematic shadows.
And every so often, even though this is supposed to be virtual reality, you'll see an artifact of film. A
lens flare. Coronas around the lamps. The ghosts of another medium. When the action changes, the
lighting changes the way it would in a film, and the soundtrack changes. If you're walking down a
corridor and the music suddenly stops, you know something really bad is about to happen. That's the
difference between real and Unreal: great postproduction. If you could hire Industrial Light and Magic
to render your perceptions, that is how you would see the world.
If you want to play with reality in film, you have to be a director. If you want to tinker with it in Unreal,
all you have to do is hit the Options menu. You control the horizontal. You control the vertical. You
control most aspects of the space-time continuum, as well as the number and relative intelligence of
your enemies. The most interesting thing to toggle is game speed, which you can set anywhere from
turbo (for die-hard twitch fiends) to slow motion (for people whose reflexes are less than razor sharp).
If you slow down the action, the software adds frames to smooth the animation. If you play in
extremely slow motion with tons of monsters, the whole game plays out like a John Woo movie.
When you are through playing in this world, you can build your own. The people who programmed this
game left all their construction tools on the disk in a kit called Unreal Ed, the Unreal level editor. It
used to be that if you wanted to build your own levels of a PC game, you had to be a programmer.
Now all you have to do is point and click.
It's the holodeck, more or less. You start with a three-dimensional grid. You import geometric shapes
and give them properties -- height, radius, translucency and reflectiveness -- then make them solid or
not, visible or not. You have more than 3,000 textures to choose from as you cast texture onto the
surfaces, or you can use your own. Stone. Water. Lava. Sky. Add light, in any permutation of color,
saturation and brightness. All of it is rendered on the fly. If you move a torch around in a room, you will
see the light on the walls change in real time.
There is a lot of heart-pounding action in Unreal. But making the sky is what really leaves you
breathless. You turn on the stars, put the planets in place, set the clouds in motion. You hang the moon
(A little to the right. . . . No, that's too far. . . . Just a bit higher. . . . There. . . . Perfect).
Cue the sun.
At that point, you have two options. You can populate your planet with artificially intelligent monsters.
Or you can invite your friends and associates over for a multiplayer on-line death match. Judging from
the proliferating number of Unreal Web sites, the latter appears to be a more popular option. Because
the only thing more fun than wreaking havoc on a gorgeous alien planet is wreaking havoc on your
friends on a planet that you have personally built.
At unreal.org, unrealnation.com or any of the big on-line game servers, new pieces of this world are
being uploaded, downloaded and swapped daily. Players are pulling together Unreal instant messaging
lists. New monsters are being born (in one home-brewed version of the game, the alien bunnies have
become deadly attackers, a la Monty Python).
People are giving one another construction tips and suggestions about the feng shui of virtual buildings.
It's like a cyberpunk version of ''This Old House.'' You can pick up new objects for your game space
or see how other people are using texture and lighting effects. In 10 years, Martha Stewart will be
selling wallpaper this way. We will all be able to fly through her well-pruned gardens. With automatic
weapons. Death match at the Stewart manse.
We have the technology. Dare to dream.
Organizations mentioned in this article:
Gt Interactive Software Corp |
