Jurassic Park: Trespasser
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| Jurassic Park: Trespasser | |
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| Developer(s) | DreamWorks Interactive |
| Publisher(s) | Electronic Arts |
| Designer(s) | Seamus Blackley |
| Release date(s) | October 28, 1998 |
| Genre(s) | First-Person Shooter/Action |
| Mode(s) | Single Player |
| Rating(s) | ESRB: Teen |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows |
| Media | CD-ROM |
| System requirements | Win95, Pentium 166 MHz, 32 MB RAM, 120 MB free disk space, DirectX 6.0 (included), 4x CD-ROM, 1 MB Video Card and Sound Card, or higher. |
| Input | Mouse and Computer keyboard |
Jurassic Park: Trespasser (also known as Trespasser) is a computer game, which was released in 1998 for the PC after much hype and anticipation [1]. The player assumes the role of Anne, a young woman who is lost on InGen's "Site B" one year after the events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park. With a fractured arm and only her wits, Anne must escape the remote island by evading hordes of hungry and vicious dinosaurs, or face the gruesome alternative.
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[edit] Gameplay
The entire game is played through the eyes of Anne (voiced by Minnie Driver). There are almost no cutscenes. As she traverses the island, Anne will often talk to herself or remember clips of John Hammond's memoirs (voiced by Richard Attenborough) describing the creation of Jurassic Park.
The game was generally poorly received by critics [2], disregarded by a vast majority of Jurassic Park fans, and financially generated, at best, disappointing profit. Much of the gameplay in it was revolutionary for its time, but improperly utilized, making the game a rather interesting failure. Despite these shortcomings, the game still retains a loyal fanbase to this day, known as the Trespasser Community (TresCom).
[edit] Realism
This game features no HUD whatsoever. Anne's health is represented by a tattoo on her chest that is filled in more and more depending on how much damage she has taken (instead of picking up health packs, Anne's health regenerates over time as long as she does not take further damage). The only way for the player to know how much ammunition is left in a particular weapon is by Anne specifically saying things such as, "About 8 shots." "Feels full." "Hasn't been used." The no-HUD system where the character will state how much ammunition they have left has recently been implemented in the King Kong video game based on the 2005 film, and in Sega's Condemned: Criminal Origins for the Xbox 360 and PC.
[edit] The arm
By pressing a key, Anne will extend her arm out in to the game world, allowing the player to pick up, swing, and throw objects. This allows the player to create improvised weaponry, for instance: grabbing a large rock off the ground and bashing a Velociraptor over the head with it. However, this feature is extremely cumbersome, as it requires up to five buttons (maximum) to be pressed to fully manipulate the arm (picking up, dropping, moving, swinging, and rotating). This makes utilizing the arm in the heat of battle somewhat difficult. Further problems with the arm included a contribution to logical flaws in the promoted realistic portions of the game. For example, Anne could pick up steel girders that theoretically weighed a ton or more, and swing them around or toss them several feet with ease, but could not use this same arm to pull herself over a 3 foot high enbankment. The wrist mechanics had the capabilities of a contortionist, able to rotate 360 degrees several times over, yet Anne had no elbow, prompting one magazine reviewer to jokingly inquire as to how she can eat with only one arm that could not be brought to her mouth.
[edit] Weaponry
In addition to picking up objects off the ground to use as weapons, Anne can find and use various other armaments. In keeping with the "hyper realistic" vision of the game, firearms have no crosshairs causing the player to align the gun by adjusting Anne's wrist, and Anne must manually move her arm to aim at dinosaurs. This can make firing weapons especially difficult for inexperienced players. Anne can carry up to two weapons at a time.
Once each firearm is empty, it serves little else except as a club when swung. Weapons cannot be reloaded, and so are discarded and another one must be found.
[edit] Dinosaurs
Trespasser features a total of seven dinosaur species: Albertosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Stegosaurus. Dinosaurs come in two forms: herbivores and carnivores. Although carnivores are more dangerous and are the player's primary target for combat, some herbivores are extremely defensive of their territory and will injure Anne just as badly as a carnivore would.
[edit] The engine
The Trespasser engine was, and in many ways still is, unique. In 1998, it was one of the first engines to successfully portray outdoor environments full of hundreds of trees. Unfortunately, not many computers in 1998 could render the complex environments it generated. In addition, the Trespasser engine featured the first game world to be completely influenced by physics.
[edit] Object rendering
Perhaps the most advanced feature of the rendering engine was the ability to render objects like trees and rocks as 2D sprites, which, when close enough to Anne, would be replaced by their 3D counterpart. This is known as Image Caching. Unfortunately, this often led to an ugly "popping", where a low-resolution object suddenly "pops" into 3D immediately in front of the player. This is especially noticeable when playing the game at higher resolutions. The same kind of rendering technique is also being used in Shadow of the Colossus and Far Cry although the latter uses higher resolution sprites and the total draw distance of 3D trees is set further away which has essentially eliminated the "popping" problem.
[edit] Texture rendering
Trespasser was one of the first games to feature bump mapping and specular highlighting. Regrettably, due to how rendering was handled by the game’s creators, very few objects actually employed either effect. Additionally, an effect was used to dynamically draw an animated texture to simulate the ripples in pools of water.
[edit] Terrain rendering
Trespasser used height mapping to render a full-sized island (split into chunks due to memory limitations). Level designers would simply provide the Trespasser engine with a black-and-white image that detailed the height of the ground - the closer to white the shade of gray was, the higher the section of land would be elevated. Once a height map was created, objects such as buildings, weapons, dinosaurs and more would be hand-placed in a level.
[edit] Physics
Like 2004's Half-Life 2, Trespasser features a robust physics system. But instead of accurate, per-polygon collisions, Trespasser uses a "Box System", where every object in the game acts as if it is encased in an invisible box. Additionally, Trespasser's Physics are based on the Penalty Force Method, in which, when two objects collide - rather than stopping movement, the two objects push away from one another until they are no longer colliding. This makes stacking objects difficult, and standing on top of objects even harder. It also led to a great deal of a problem called interpenetration; where two objects will collide and then become stuck inside one another, unable to separate.
[edit] Sound
By far one of the most impressive features of Trespasser is a system dubbed by the creators as "Real-Time Foley". Theoretically, the Trespasser engine could produce the sound of any two objects colliding with one another at any speed or distance by dynamically mixing several sounds together on-the-fly. To date, no other game is known to have a similar feature.
[edit] Artificial intelligence
Trespasser was designed to have a complex artificial intelligence routine, giving each creature on the island its own set of emotions; fear, happiness, hunger, among many others. Dinosaurs would react to the player differently depending on what mood they were in. Unfortunately, system bugs in the artificial intelligence routines made it so that dinosaurs would have drastic mood swings and would switch between mood-based actions so quickly, they would actually stop moving, unable to do anything at all. A quick fix was hard-coded in to the game that locked all dinosaurs’ anger at maximum, leaving all other emotions at zero. This fixed the bug, but also negated all the work the team had done on programming the AI, leaving the dinosaurs ultimately simplistic in their goals.
[edit] Animations
In most PC games, characters have "animations" in the traditional sense: an animator scripts a sequence of movements for the 3D model to do, which are played at specified times. Every animation in Trespasser is done using inverse kinematics. Nothing in the game is pre-animated; every movement of every dinosaur is done through the dinosaur "thinking" to do it. Unfortunately, this ultimately looks awkward as dinosaurs often stumble around and contort to wild, impossible positions.
[edit] 3D card support
The game was developed at a time when the first generation of dedicated PC 3D rendering cards were taking off in the consumer marketplace. The designers had not anticipated adding support for 3D hardware, although it was successfully coded at a late stage in development. Nonetheless the engine did not make effective use of 3D acceleration; the mass of 2D sprites overtaxed the texture memory of contemporary cards, and as a consequence hardware mode uses low-resolution textures. It also disables bump mapping. With early 3D cards Trespasser's hardware mode ran slower, and was of lower quality, than software mode. Trespasser used a mixed-mode rendering technique that allowed some 3D rendering on hardware, and some on software.
[edit] Shortcomings
Money was the biggest hurdle in the development of Trespasser. The game severely went over-budget several times throughout its development. Second only to money was time, as the game had to be ready to meet the release of the The Lost World: Jurassic Park film. This caused many features to be either cut, or left unfinished and unpolished. A late shift in development effectively changed the game from survival horror to action shooter, and contributed to the many complaints the game received.
[edit] Life after death
Despite its shortcomings, the game continues to have a devoted fanbase. In 2002, Trescom was established, providing Trespasser fans with tools and level editors to enhance the game beyond the original retail release. A number of projects have also been proposed to remake the game using newer and more capable game engines such as the Crytek engine used in Far Cry.
Astonishingly, several advances have been made using the old engine. One notable example include: TresCom's TC_Isle level, the first stand-alone mod which features new never-before-seen dinosaurs such as the procompsognathus, new puzzles, new effects, and true non-linear gameplay. The second project is the ATX patch, which improves the graphics, allows for greater screen sizes, implements a video recording function, introduced jumping velociraptors, a HUD system, and a horde of new and special features.
[edit] Notes
- Dreamworks Interactive's license to develop Trespasser included the rights to the characters and the setting of the Jurassic Park movies, but not to the music. Instead, an original soundtrack was written by composer Bill Brown. Dreamworks would later re-use many of Brown's Trespasser music tracks in their entirety for the soundtrack of the company's next First Person Shooter game, Clive Barker's Undying.
- At least one near-completed level was cut prior to the game's release. This level was called Pine Valley, and preceded the Lab level. The main objective of the level was having the player restart the island's Geothermal Plant, which was modelled and built along the lines of an actual plant. However, the level proved too buggy, was cut and stripped down to form the demo.
