It's great to finally know what Irrational have been working on. Tribes at that! How unbelievably awesome @:-D All those stupid CS terds missing out on the greatness that is Tribes...
Screenies are shaping up nicely too. Should be some really nice artwork pumped out in this one. If not, we can all blame the junior artist... *evil grin at Dean*
I've always wondered what role the Australian studio had with the whole of Irrational Games.. When Irrational does a title, do they split certain areas of work to each studio, or is it all entirely collaborated with all three studios? What kind of stuff did the Canberra studio do for Freedom Force, and The Lost? ** (Actually, don't answer this. I was gonna let Jonathon Chey answer it in my interview questions (which I should have sent him months ago but was too darn lazy to finish it))
Annnnyways, looking forward to seeing Tribes: Vengeance, although the FPS genre at the moment sure is experiencing somewhat of a boost in quality/expectations now! Tribes is going the single player route this time, isn't it?
So that's why you were studying physics for a while ago [;)].. Deus Ex 2, and Half Life 2 are using Havoc for their physics (which is having a big role in some of their ingame puzzles).. What do you think of Havok? Gonna try and match it? [:)]
We're actually using two physics systems, one a custom one developed by me for character movement, and mathengine karma to do the vehicles, ragdolls, objects with joints and hinges etc.
about the two offices, freedom force art and code was done by australian team, sound by eric brosius in boston, story done by ken levine in boston.
the lost is done primarily by the boston team, with some little bits of help from au afaik (some art assets i think?), but pretty much boston's game
tribes is being done by the australian team, with sound by eric brosius and story by ken - ie. same deal as FF, we'll do the art, design and code
note that we also collaborate and help each other out quite a lot, and we use perforce (www.perforce.com) so that people at each office have access to all art, design and code assets
TV is going well, we've actually been in development for quite some time now, and we are way past the concept art stage :)
my job then is to basically do the movement system (run, jetpack, ski etc.), to develop the movement animation system to go along with this and code the vehicles, ragdoll physics etc, handle physics for objects blowing up going into fragments (like they did in FF, just better ;))
so far, i've completely rewritten the movement physics system in unreal, all collision response, detection and dynamics code for characters is CUSTOM DESIGNED for tribes and is first pass complete
i'm also doing some R&D on a new outdoor terrain occlusion algorithm for tribes, which should speed up outdoor terrain rendering considerably
cheers!
Glenn "Gaffer" Fiedler
Senior Programmer, Irrational Games.