Interview 2

FiringSquad:There are a ton of other game engines that are available (Unreal, Source, Gamebryo, etc). What makes the Vicious Engine stand out from the crowd?

Eric Peterson:For starters we are almost completely cross platform with the exception of the DS and we are one of the only fully featured PSP engines available. In addition to that, our engine delivers the ability to implement and manage everything from GUIs to networking, physics to in-game cinematics, special effects to sound implementation, terrain creation to memory management, etc. It even comes with its own version control. The Vicious Engine is a one stop solution and developers don’t need to look any further than our toolset to get the job done. When a licensee purchases the Vicious Engine they can start working immediately and can have a fully playable demo up and running in an extremely short amount of time on any of the hardware that we support. Our engine is a fully data driven approach to gameplay and content creation. The more control that can be put into the hands of the creative people on a development team, the more innovative the title will be. It is also advantageous to free up the programmers on the team to work on important technology features that enhance the technical presentation of the title. We also take great pride in telling potential customers that we don’t just make an engine, we make games as well. Our technology has been used to create all of our own titles and has gone through all of the console manufacturers’ standardization processes and procedures. It is a robust, well tested toolset and engine and it isn’t tied to any particular game type or genre.

FiringSquad:What can you tell us about the more important features of Vicious Engine?

Eric Peterson:A few of our most important features are its data driven design, point and click scripting system and in-game debugger. When using the Vicious Engine, absolutely 100% of the game (gameplay, GUI, AI, and anything to do with game specific content) is implemented in the Vicious Editor. There is no source code that controls the specifics of the game; games are developed through the use of our proprietary scripting systems. There are a couple of features that set this system apart from the others. First, the level designer that is implementing a particular game system does not type in the script; it is implemented entirely through our point and click interface. This allows new level designers, artists and/or programmers to get into the pipeline very quickly and begin implementing game assets. It also creates an exceptional boundary against errors and typos. And if you have more than one project going while using the Vicious Engine, the developer has the ability to move script and assets between projects in order to streamline the development of similar game mechanics.

The second big, distinguishing feature of this scripting engine is the built in debugger. Anyone may place breakpoints anywhere in the game script. Once that script is executed on the user’s development PC, a window will open at the line of script that was marked with a breakpoint. The user can then step through the script, watch variables and constants, or check on a particular entity’s current AI state. Another important feature that allows for uninterrupted immersion in a game is our ability to stream data. Maps can be loaded into the background and streamed as the player moves through the world. Geometry, entities and other dynamics can be streamed as well. Asset manager is very important to every project, so we have included a built in asset management for version control of binary assets. Team members must ‘check out’ any game asset before they can modify it in game. Once it is checked back in, the new and improved asset is available to others on the team. Some of the other features that are worth mentioning are: PSP support, competitive graphics and rendering, built in localization, multiplayer, HDTV/widescreen, radiosity lighting, cartoon renderer, PIP, split screen, LODs, weather, lip-syncing, animation blending, background loaded VO and cinematics, streaming background music, framebuffer effects, projected shadows, light and shadow volumes, particle systems, NTSC and PAL capability, multiple sets of assets can be maintained for different skus (i.e. higher level models and textures), etc.