Interview with Bungie

Hamilton Chu, a producer at Bungie, was nice enough to take some time out for a couple interview questions about Oni. His answers are in bold, while Firingsquad's comments and questions are in normal text

Thresh's Firingsquad: Tell me more about the graphics engine. I assume it's OpenGL so it will work on both Mac/PC, but what other cool features are implemented?
Hamilton Chu: Well, of course the Mac supports Glide and Rave as well as OpenGL. We'll be supporting at least these three APIs on both platforms, and possibly more.

Another shot of TCTF HQ

Griffin

TFS: Can you describe what techniques you used to animate the characters, particularly in hand to hand combat?
HC: All the characters have been animated using key framing. It's a compliment to our animators that people have asked if we're using motion capture, but in fact we're simply using a lot of interpolation to give everything a smooth and fluid look. Interpolation blends multiple animations into one fluid movement, so that what you see is the result of combined animations. In fact, ideally, you don't "see" the individual animations at all. What you see is Konoko reacting to and interacting with her environment in a natural fashion.

TFS: How will the single player game work as far as mission structure goes? Is it more of an adventure feel with NPC interaction, or are you playing more as a lone wolf?
HC: Oni isn't an RPG, so you don't have complex interactions with NPCs. You will have some non-combat interaction with NPCs and in terms of storyline, the game follows the adventure game format. But the emphasis is on action. You'll have main objectives and smaller objectives and a lot of people standing in your way. There are occasional "friendlies" but Konoko is indeed something of a 'lone wolf'.

Ninja

Shinatama

TFS: Tell us about some of the unique challenges that you faced making this game for both Mac and PC. Do you find yourself omitting certain features that you wish you could put in (3D sound?) in order to make the game work on both platforms?
HC: Not at all - since we designed the engine from scratch to be cross platform we did not have many big challenges. To solve the byte swapping issue we built tools to automatically scan our data structures and build byte swapping functions. This means that we don't spend any time worring about byte swapping which traditionally has been one of the bigger chores in cross platform development.

We do not omit features that we can only implement on one platform. If the Mac OS does not support 3D sound we will still implement it on the ones that do.

Blue Striker

Striker Commander