Questions for the devs :D

[dragonmaster]

Hi frictional!
Just got a few things i was wondering about:

How "hard" would you say it was to make penumbra black plague?

How difficult was newton to integrate? Is it stable in your opinion? What did you have to engine code in (add) and what were you able to script?

What programming languages did u use?

Any plans for licensing HPL2? its very cool looking!

How is CG working? How hard was it to integrate? How do you like it?

How did you do the lighting? Did you use a middleware? (just noticed the lighting looks EXACTLY the same as engines like Doom3 and a few others)

How did you do the GUI system? (the shelter computers) Really like it!

If you could make a full penumbra 3, what would that part of the story be?

Hope these questions are answerable

-DM

[WindexGlow]

Any plans for licensing HPL2? its very cool looking!

To my knowedge, they haven't released any information about HPL2 besides tidbits. Hard to see it as "Cool Looking" when we have no idea what it will look like!

And they are considering licensing HPL2 out, but no official word on it.

How did you do the lighting? Did you use a middleware? (just noticed the lighting looks EXACTLY the same as engines like Doom3 and a few others)

I don't speak for the devs, nor do I have concrete proof but I believe the entire engine besides physics is inhouse developed.
So changes are the lighting is made directly for HPL.

[eliasfrost]

How did you do the lighting? Did you use a middleware? (just noticed the lighting looks EXACTLY the same as engines like Doom3 and a few others)

Maybe it is the stencil shadows you refer to? Well, Doom 3 was the first game to introduce stencil shadows. And both games is using OpenGL, so they are quite identical.

[Thomas]

Some quick answers:

How "hard" would you say it was to make penumbra black plague?

Well techinically it was not that hard since most of the hard stuff had been dealt with in Overture. But has in getting it all done it time and getting the quality level we wanted was a quite an effort.

How difficult was newton to integrate? Is it stable in your opinion?

Very simple.

What did you have to engine code in (add) and what were you able to script?

We tried to put as much reuasable stuff into the game code as possible. But we still ended up with tons of script code. Some more stuff should have been in code though. For example the worm fight was a bitt messy to script.

What programming languages did u use?

C++ for all code and AngelCode for script.

Any plans for licensing HPL2? its very cool looking!

We are hoping to release lience it somehow. Have not got any specifics at all now though.

How is CG working? How hard was it to integrate? How do you like it?

Cg was a nice to get working. No problems.

How did you do the lighting? Did you use a middleware? (just noticed the lighting looks EXACTLY the same as engines like Doom3 and a few others)

Lighting is done 100% in engine code, no middleware. And the reason it is similar to Doom3, Fear etc is because it uses multiple pass lightning with shadow (stencil) volumes. The reason for this is because it can support pretty old hardware and is the only way of getting a unified lightmodel (ie every object is lit in exactly the same way) the time of engine creation.

How did you do the GUI system? (the shelter computers) Really like it!

It is coded in engine and uses a design similar to the windows gui in .Net.

As for "Penumbra 3". I think we need to make a "Penumbra 2" first

[Yuhaney]

As for "Penumbra 3". I think we need to make a "Penumbra 2" first

Ha ha! Thas was good one!