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QUAKE WARS

The Game

Enemy Territory: QUAKE WARS is thae spiritual successor to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

It has two factions, the GDF who are the human forces fighting against the invading alien enemy known as the Strogg.

The game play is team based, with classes, deployable's and drivable vehicles, where the defending team needs to stop the attackers from completing objectives in order to win the match.

The main highlight of the game is the team based objectives and unique classes on each side. The GDF have five classes which are a bit different to the Strogg's five classes, but in general each side has a heavy weapons specialist who can plant explosives on objectives. There is an engineer class which can build objectives, call in deployable's and place mines. Each side has a medic with the ability to revive team mates and provide health to injured team mates. The forth class for each side is the fieldops who can deploy artillery and call in air strikes. The fifth class is the covertops style class who can snipe enemies from afar and disguise himself to look like the other team, and also use a device to hack computer based objectives.

Maps are designed to be 30 minutes per round, and usually have three objectives, which have been balanced to be about 10 minutes per objective with balanced teams.

The main technology focus for QUAKE WARS was the megatexture technology which allowed us to create unique non-tilable terrain from one corner of the terrain to the other, all while rendering quickly and looking good.

When I joined Splashdamage in 2005 most of the design had already been established, all the classes had most of their features/abilities, most levels had their objectives setup and levels were well underway.

The Ark which is set in Norway in a snowy themed environment was one my main source of work on QUAKE WARS. It has a unique bio-dome with a small foresty type area inside, a small town and a DNA examination facility deeper inside the bio-dome. Most of the layout was more or less designed, I worked on refining the game play based on feedback and any obvious changes that needed to be made.

The scenario here is that the Strogg need to infiltrate the DNA facility and destroy the Strogg specimens in the test tubes, so the GDF can't get their hands on Strogg technology. In order to do so the Strogg need to take down the Radar Jamming Tower in the town, which will allow them to deploy a mining laser on the surface which will be used to drill a hole in the Bio-dome. Upon deploying the mining laser it is damaged, so the Strogg need to repair it in order to blow open the Bio-dome, once they are inside it is up to the Strogg to place explosives on the test tubes and blow it up.

Here the goal is for the Strogg Aggressor to place a plasma charge on the generator which powers the jamming tower, destroying it and allow the Strogg to deploy a mining laser further on in to the match. In the first screen shot we can see a good overview of the general routes the two teams will take to the objective. Red indicates the Strogg approach, green is the GDF and the blue box indicates the objective.

The town has a lot of interior sections where the Strogg can use to advance the objective through the houses unseen by the GDF defenders, small windows to use to attack from and provide covering fire while the Aggressor planting the charge. Lots of small iterations were made to the town area to make sure the game play was as tight as possible.

The GDF spawn behind an old church, which is roughly the same amount of distance to the objective as the Strogg have, but they have much less cover to use on the way to the objective and must work together to take down the Strogg and disarm any explosives set on the generator.

At first this area was quite heavy on the performance, when you stood from a distance all the minor details were being rendered providing poor frame rates. What I did was grouped all the houses together in to a single group and create a very low poly version of all the houses. So now when you stand at a distance the low poly version of the town is drawn with all the details hidden, boosting the frame rate quite a lot.

The second objective here is for the Strogg Constructor to repair the mining laser so the Strogg can drill a hole through the Bio-dome doors, to gain access to the facility inside.

In the first screen shot we can see the general routes each team can take to get to the objective on the island. The most obvious routes are the three bridges, which are mostly there for vehicle access. The best way to get to the island on foot is to drop down in to the water and take the stairs on the sides of the retaining walls, which provides the best cover and very limited view for the opposite team to see the enemy players coming.

Originally all the research trailers on the island had interiors, but they were removed later on for a few reasons, they just became a grenade spam fest and people could get a bit too well nested inside detracting from the objective at hand.

To help the performance on this map, due to it being so open all of the trailers and research huts here all had to have very low poly versions made so we could lod them at a distance and turn the shadows off, once this was down the performance had a good speed up.

The third objective here is for the Strogg Aggressor to place a plasma charge on the test tubes and destroy them, so the GDF can't get access to any technology the Strogg might have provided them with.

As you enter the Bio-dome you will come in to a forest area inside which is a good place for the GDF to hide in and defend the entrance, lots of small bushes, and objects to hide behind. There is a capturable forward spawn just inside the entrance to the facility for the Strogg to capture. If the Strogg capture this forward spawn it puts a lot of pressure on the GDF to defend the final objective as the Strogg spawn a lot closer. Inside the facility there are lots of rooms and corridors allowing for good offense and defense.

Inside the facility I added few ventilation shafts in two rooms that flowed in to the final objective room, this allowed the Strogg Infiltrator to use his remote flyer to fly through the vents and either spy on the GDF and see what their defenses are like, or detonate on unsuspecting GDF players.

When initially working on the Bio-dome are it wasn't sealed off from the rest of the BSP so it shared the same environment as the outside area and looked fairly poor as you couldn't adjust the lighting to make it look like an interior. With the help from some programmers at id and the programmers at Splashdamage they were able to make it so you can use a model as a solid hull, so it was able to be portaled correctly. My task was to create a very basic hull that represented the shape of the Bio-dome, with a lot of compile issues and tweaking later I had a sealed hud that had the interior section of the Bio-dome separate from the outside area with portals, it was great, now we can have a unique atmosphere inside the Bio-dome and lot more vegetation than before.

The only minor problem we had with the Bio-dome afterwards was that when you were standing outside it would still render all the vegetation inside. The problem was because the vegetation was grouped in one group and it's bounding box exceeded the bounds of the Bio-dome. So one of the programmers devised a solution that allowed us push the bounding box inside the area it was in, so it wouldn't exceed and be able to be rendered outside it's area, this helped a lot and improved performance.

When I originally started working on the existing layout of the facility the first major task was to increase the size by around 50% as it originally felt too short. The GDF spawn room was pushed further deeper in to the facility as the originally spawned too close to the objective making it difficult for the Strogg to win. Because the GDF spawn area was quite twisty and turny, I added in yellow strips along the floor that would guide players to the objective room, this worked out really well and people never got lost again.

One of the other minor problems with the final objective room was that it was quite easily a grenade spam fest, the GDF could easily throw grenades over the original test tube model preventing the Strogg from successfully planting a plasma charge. I devised a quick and elegant fix, I created a box over head that looked like it function with the test tubes, having the wires coming down. This worked well and the spamming was reduced.