Interview with the lead programmer of The Last Express
by Jordi "El Bárbaro"
4) Let's talk about the game. It seems it's quite a deep game, with many
things you can do, many things you may do, a whole world [er.. train] to
explore, characters with background, personality... boy... this was
supposed to be a game!!! ;)
"The Last Express" was a labor of love that required years of work and
preparation. This included researching our story in as much detail as
possible. We went to original sources (CIWL records, etc.) to find out
everything we could about departure times, the weather those days, the
numbers of the train cars, and so on. CIWL - Compagnie Internationale des
Wagons-Lits (international company of sleeping-cars) is the company that has
always run the Orient Express. However, we were unable to find out anything
about the identity of the actual passengers on board that trip, so we had to
make those up (based on what we knew of the historical period, of course).
So, although the characters are fictitious, the stereotypes and dialogue are
quite authentic from everything we can tell.
5) Could you tell us something about the graphics engine? It is quite
interesting to note that it seems to work according to the horsepower of
the CPU the game is using in every computer. It looks like it outputs
better smoothness with faster CPUs but never gets the CPU stalled, stopped
or too busy to freeze the game. Is that right or I'm dreaming?
Since the primary bottle-neck in a CD-ROM game (especially a few years ago)
is the slow file loading, the game attempts to load everything between nodes
(train backgrounds). On slower systems, it might take two seconds between
every render, whereas on faster systems it can be as short as half a second.
This does not seem so annoying though, since it allows the characters to
animate smoothly even on slow systems. The character frames update between
0.5fps to 15fps depending on the style of what they are doing (e.g. walking
is full-motion, eating is more comic book dissolves).
I mention this because it's so 'out' of the main trend of prerendered faces which
look like ivory statues, and it's so obvious the TLE approach is much much better,
I'd like to know if we can expect more games with such a feature from the Smoking
Car team, if it did need lots of programmers' work to do it and whose was the idea
of such a positive key factor in TLE success.
The characters in Express are all filmed actors, which is what makes them so
expressive and "human". One of the most innovative and time consuming
aspects of the four year project was developing the patent-pending image
processing system. We developed software that would process thousands of
frames of filmed live-action and turn each character into a flat cartoon.
The software also allowed artists and animators to hand paint, tweak, and
animate the frames into sequences that can be seen from multiple angles.
Nicole Tostevin, the art director, developed the art nouveau look of the
characters and was instrumental both in developing the technology as well as
leading a team of almost twenty artists and animators in processing,
painting, and cleaning-up the 40,000+ frames.
All this 'deepness' may have required lots of investigation work. Details
of the train, historical persons that pop up in some way or another, the
multilingual feature, and so and so. Would you tell us just how much effort
did the team put on those things? How did you get to such detail? We're not
used to that, us, poor gamers 8)
6) Another issue that's eye-catching in TLE is the way faces are drawn.
They're nice, they're pretty, but the most important is that they're
expressive. We can look at those faces and get a hint about what the
character is thinking, if we can trust him or not, etc.
