Interview and shots from Sept 22

9/22/99

Sorry - this weekly feature kinda turned into a semi monthly feature. This last set of high res shots and interview questions Jason Hough will likely conclude this feature until the release date of the game. Enjoy!

Firingsquad: Can you tell us more about the regular, "non-combot" vehicles? How many different kinds of tanks. planes are there and what sorts of weapons do they use?

Jason Hough: Sure thing. I'll run through each one

• Tank - nothing to fancy here.
• MobileArtillery - slow, weak, but long range and delivers a good amount of damage
• MissileJeep - Good scout unit, provides anti-air support as well.
• DrillTruck - Used for tunneling underground, and a few other duties.
• HoverTruck - builds your structures, mines resources, repairs things, etc.
• Nemesis - this is a nasty one. Expensive, very weak, but if you can get it close enough to an enemy robot it will create an energy explosion that attacks the Combots motor systems, causing it to shut down temporarily. Obviously the Combot is really vulnerable during this period. The AI is especially clever at using these.
• HoverJet - Standard fighter craft. the fastest unit in the game, great for defense in orbit as well.
• HoverBomber - slow, long range bomber. Good for cleaning off an enemy asteroid in orbit.

Each side has the same non-Combot vehicles, though they are modified in different ways (for example the Neuropa Tanks are faster, but also weaker). It is with the Combot parts that we make each side unique.

Firingsquad: What do you think of the new video cards coming out (NVIDIA GeForce 256, S3 Savage 2000, 3dfx ?)? Is it too late in the development cycle for Metal Fatigue to take advantage of the special features that these cards offer, like on-board T&L or texture compression?

Jason Hough: Unfortunately we don't have access to any of these boards yet (and I doubt we will before they ship), so I cant say anything about them with 100% confidence.

Metal Fatigue will benefit, of course, from the increased fill rates, texture throughput, and clock speed. From what I understand we'll get some "free" visual improvement from 3dfx's T-Buffer thanks to the full screen anti-aliasing, because that is a post effect and should work regardless of what the game engine does.

As for the other special features you mentioned, tempting as they may be, we're really focused now on getting the game out the door.

Thanks to Jason for that - Here are the high res shots. These run 100K and over so if you don't have a fat pipe you might wanna skip to the 640 shots

High Res

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Low Res

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