Jurassic Park: Trespasser
Encyclopedia
Jurassic Park: Trespasser (also known as Trespasser) is a video game released in 1998 for Microsoft Windows
after much hype and anticipation. The player assumes the role of Anne, the sole survivor of a plane crash 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 solving puzzles and evading dangerous dinosaur
s.
The game is noted for the involvement of producer Steven Spielberg
and actress Minnie Driver
. Trespassers game engine
was advanced for its time and required a fast computer to adequately display the game's detailed graphics without pixelation
artifacts. The ambitious game disappointed many reviewers and is often mocked, but has a cult following and strong modification community to this day.
, where the general public has learned about the existence of Jurassic Park.
The game begins in a dark apartment, where mail is piling up and a phone rings. When it goes to voice-mail, a woman named Jill leaves a message, expressing amazement that Anne (the apartment's resident) had actually gone ahead on a trip to the tropics. The message closes with Jill's comment, "I thought you HATED flying." The scene changes to an unseen person closing and bolting an airplane bathroom door and then the sounds of retching can be heard. The plane suddenly bucks and an apparent malfunction occurs and the plane crashes.
Anne awakens on the shores of an island (apparently the sole survivor of the crash), and proceeds to explore. Anne learns she is on Site B, InGen's dinosaur breeding facility. Pursued by dinosaurs, Anne makes use of weapons left behind to defend herself as she explores. Following a monorail track into the island interior, Anne encounters dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus
, Velociraptor
, Stegosaurus
, Triceratops
, Tyrannosaurus
, Parasaurolophus
, and Albertosaurus
. After recovering security cards from an InGen town, Anne proceeds past a dam and to a large mountain. At the summit, Anne is able to call for help. After defeating the Alpha Velociraptor and its tribe that lives atop the mountain, she is rescued by helicopter. The game closes as Anne returns to her apartment. Jill calls and the message goes to the answering machine, saying she "better have a good damn reason for not calling," Anne wordlessly responds by tossing a raptor claw on her desk.
. 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 (and downfall) of Jurassic Park. There are no time limits or difficulty settings to adjust and only the first level has text prompts to aid players that are new to the game.
This game features no HUD
. Anne's health is represented by a heart-shaped tattoo that the player can look down at. The ink of the tattoo is filled in depending on the amount of damage she has taken; when it is completely full, and a chain appears around it, Anne is dead. Anne's health regenerates quickly 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 picking up and then weighing the weapon and specifically saying things such as, "About eight shots," "Feels full," and "Hasn't been used." The actual level of realism has been debated because a number of Anne's characteristics, such as her ease at dropping items from her hand, is not very realistic. This example of not holding items is something that in real life
is easy, yet difficult in the game.
By pressing a key, Anne will extend her arm out in to the game world, allowing the player to pick up, swing, push and throw objects. This allows the player to create improvised weaponry, for instance: grabbing a large rock off the ground and bashing a raptor with it. Anne can move her arm in any direction, allowing the player to get a different feel of use for each weapon. 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 frustrating. Anne can only carry two items at once and when bumping into things will often drop items. 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 (0.9144 m) high embankment. The wrist is able to rotate 360 degrees several times over and the lack of an elbow often results in erratic and impossible movement.
In addition to picking up objects off the ground to use as weapons, Anne can find and use various other armaments including key cards and diskettes. In situations requiring button input (such as keypads), Anne will extend out one of her fingers. In keeping with the "hyper realistic" vision of the game, firearms have no cross-hairs, causing the player to first align the gun by adjusting Anne's wrist and then manually move her arm to aim at dinosaurs. Due to the non-traditional nature of the controls, inexperienced players may find it difficult to fire their weapons. Anne can carry up to two weapons at a time. Weapons have been made to incorporate realistic recoil, as if being held with two hands. Once each firearm is empty, it serves little use except as a club when swung. Empty weapons cannot be reloaded, and so must be discarded and another one found.
, Seamus Blackley
and Austin Grossman
. With the film The Lost World: Jurassic Park expected to be a success and after securing the movie license, the pair approached several movie animation groups before signing with DreamWorks Interactive. Adobe Photoshop
5 and 3D Studio Max
were used to produce the game. A 3D model of the island was also built and digitally scanned.
The game had a development period of more than three years. Money was the biggest hurdle in the development of Trespasser and the game went severely 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; originally, the game was to be released in the fall of 1997. However, due to a number of problems the project was delayed by a year. The rush to release the game caused many features to be either cut, or left unfinished and unpolished. For instance, due to difficulties coding the behaviour of both arms together developers had to ditch the left arm entirely. A late shift in development effectively changed the game from survival horror to action shooter, and contributed to the many complaints the game received. Lack of experienced management and the use of artists who were unfamiliar with basic game development processes and 3D modeling
has also been identified as a cause of problems. Developers struggled for more than two years on some problems and in the end released a game that is set within a very large and open outdoor environment. The main problem was that development started before the 3dfx Voodoo 1 started the move towards 3D hardware. Because of this, some techniques, like the bump mapping
and image caching were incompatible with graphics processing unit
s. Near the end of development the programmers developed a renderer that drew bump mapped objects in software and the terrain in hardware, but most objects were bump mapped so the speed advantages of hardware acceleration were negated. Trespasser used many textures for its mip levels and image cache, more than even the most advanced card of the time, the Voodoo2
, could handle, and the game used the lower resolution textures in hardware mode instead of the high resolution ones available in software mode. This led to the strange situation that the game ran faster and looked better in software mode, while running in hardware mode meant the game ran slower and looked worse.
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. The result was the worst clipping
one reviewer had ever seen with another finding the game experienced a slowdown and frame rate drops. In addition, the Trespasser engine featured the first game world to be completely influenced by classical mechanics
and was also the first game to use ragdoll physics
. 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. Elements using this technique are known as "impostors". 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 was 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. Trespasser was one of the first games to feature bump mapping and specular highlight
ing, however the effects are not overly apparent due to the lack of dynamic lighting and the fact that many of the models used grayscale
versions of the regular textures instead of the displacement maps necessary to take advantage of bump mapping. Additionally, an effect was used to dynamically draw an animated texture to simulate the ripples in pools of water. Trespasser also 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. 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 a great deal to a problem called interpenetration
; where two objects will collide and then become stuck inside one another, unable to separate. In the final release the dinosaurs were disallowed from making jump attacks and entering buildings to avoid interpenetration from occurring. 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. As of 2009, the only other significant game to feature this is Penumbra
.
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
. No animation in the game is pre-animated; every movement of every dinosaur is generated automatically through their artificial intelligence
. Due to the rushed nature of development, this feature ultimately resulted primarily in awkward movement as the dinosaurs performed unnaturally. Andrew Grant was Trespasser's chief artificial intelligence programmer.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 will fight together, enemy to enemy. 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.
A Computer and Video Games
review thought the game was a "dog" and gave it a score of 1 out of 10. A Gamespot
review by Elliot Chin described it as the most frustrating game he had ever played with "boring gameplay and annoying bugs". Some of the complaints included the physics engine is needlessly complicating, levels were over-filled with box-stacking puzzles, exploration is tiresome because movement speed is far too slow, landscapes were barren with few dinosaurs, too many collision detection bugs, poor voice acting and a clumsy arm interface. An IGN
review was more favourable, describing the plot as "super-intriguing" with high praise for the realism of the game's physics engine. Despite featuring a blocky and heavily pixelated environment that offered limited interaction, the dinosaurs were convincing and "looked and moved really well" and the reviewer felt the game was badly implemented but still ground-breaking. One Game Revolution
review described the game's graphical engine as gorgeous with impressive real-time shadows and good water and particle physics. On the downside, the gameplay was very basic with the usual "key-finding, enemy-killing, button-pushing" of the FPS genre and when there was more than one dinosaur on-screen the game slowed considerably. An Allgame
reviewer didn't like the bugs and graphical glitches or the slow frame rate
but concluded the game was a "ground breaking title that offers some great thrills, challenges, puzzles, and rewarding gameplay". PCGamer thought the game got the atmospherics right. PCZone felt the game could be quite frightening but that there were too many guns scattered around the island. An Adrenaline Vault
review liked the game's originality and some tense moments, but disliked the critically bad flaws such as the slow treks, the lack of a real inventory system, the frustrating interface and there being too many guns lying around.
Computer Gaming World
awarded the game "Coaster of the Year". GameSpot included Tresspasser as one of nominees for the title of the Most Disappointing Game of the Year ("losing" to Star Wars Rebellion) and gave it the dubious award of the Worst Game of the Year (PC), commenting: "Of all the games released this year, none was as ill-received and terrible as Trespasser. No game was implemented as poorly, and no game squandered its potential as much. No game played as awfully. (...) There's one thing we won't forget: Trespasser was undoubtedly the worst game of 1998."
As time went on, fans got involved into making their own new levels using TresEd, fan-made software that allows the user to edit Trespasser.
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
after much hype and anticipation. The player assumes the role of Anne, the sole survivor of a plane crash on InGen's "Site B" one year after the events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a 1997 science fiction thriller film, directed by Steven Spielberg. The film was produced by Bonnie Curtis, Kathleen Kennedy, Gerald R. Molen and Colin Wilson...
. With a fractured arm and only her wits, Anne must escape the remote island by solving puzzles and evading dangerous dinosaur
Dinosaur
Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade and superorder Dinosauria. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic period until the end of the Cretaceous , when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of...
s.
The game is noted for the involvement of producer Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
and actress Minnie Driver
Minnie Driver
Minnie Driver is an English actress and singer-songwriter. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting, as well as for an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe for her work in the television series The Riches.- Early life...
. Trespassers game engine
Game engine
A game engine is a system designed for the creation and development of video games. There are many game engines that are designed to work on video game consoles and personal computers...
was advanced for its time and required a fast computer to adequately display the game's detailed graphics without pixelation
Pixelation
In computer graphics, pixelation is an effect caused by displaying a bitmap or a section of a bitmap at such a large size that individual pixels, small single-colored square display elements that comprise the bitmap, are visible to the eye...
artifacts. The ambitious game disappointed many reviewers and is often mocked, but has a cult following and strong modification community to this day.
Plot
The game opens with John Hammond reading an excerpt from his memoirs. Hammond is a rich industrialist who used his wealth to assemble a scientific team which cloned dinosaurs. Intent on creating an amusement park showcasing his biological attractions, Hammond's park ultimately fails when the dinosaurs escape. While Jurassic Park was built on Isla Nublar, off the coast of Costa Rica, the animals were raised at an alternate location, Isla Sorna also named "Site B". Trespasser takes place a year after the events of The Lost World: Jurassic ParkThe Lost World: Jurassic Park
The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a 1997 science fiction thriller film, directed by Steven Spielberg. The film was produced by Bonnie Curtis, Kathleen Kennedy, Gerald R. Molen and Colin Wilson...
, where the general public has learned about the existence of Jurassic Park.
The game begins in a dark apartment, where mail is piling up and a phone rings. When it goes to voice-mail, a woman named Jill leaves a message, expressing amazement that Anne (the apartment's resident) had actually gone ahead on a trip to the tropics. The message closes with Jill's comment, "I thought you HATED flying." The scene changes to an unseen person closing and bolting an airplane bathroom door and then the sounds of retching can be heard. The plane suddenly bucks and an apparent malfunction occurs and the plane crashes.
Anne awakens on the shores of an island (apparently the sole survivor of the crash), and proceeds to explore. Anne learns she is on Site B, InGen's dinosaur breeding facility. Pursued by dinosaurs, Anne makes use of weapons left behind to defend herself as she explores. Following a monorail track into the island interior, Anne encounters dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus
Brachiosaurus
Brachiosaurus is a genus of sauropod dinosaur from the Jurassic Morrison Formation of North America. It was first described by Elmer S. Riggs in 1903 from fossils found in the Grand River Canyon of western Colorado, in the United States. Riggs named the dinosaur Brachiosaurus altithorax,...
, Velociraptor
Velociraptor
Velociraptor is a genus of dromaeosaurid theropod dinosaur that existed approximately 75 to 71 million years ago during the later part of the Cretaceous Period. Two species are currently recognized, although others have been assigned in the past. The type species is V. mongoliensis; fossils...
, Stegosaurus
Stegosaurus
Stegosaurus is a genus of armored stegosaurid dinosaur. They lived during the Late Jurassic period , some 155 to 150 million years ago in what is now western North America. In 2006, a specimen of Stegosaurus was announced from Portugal, showing that they were present in Europe as well...
, Triceratops
Triceratops
Triceratops is a genus of herbivorous ceratopsid dinosaur which lived during the late Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous Period, around 68 to 65 million years ago in what is now North America. It was one of the last dinosaur genera to appear before the great Cretaceous–Paleogene...
, Tyrannosaurus
Tyrannosaurus
Tyrannosaurus meaning "tyrant," and sauros meaning "lizard") is a genus of coelurosaurian theropod dinosaur. The species Tyrannosaurus rex , commonly abbreviated to T. rex, is a fixture in popular culture. It lived throughout what is now western North America, with a much wider range than other...
, Parasaurolophus
Parasaurolophus
Parasaurolophus is a genus of ornithopod dinosaur that lived in what is now North America during the Late Cretaceous Period, about 76.5–73 million years ago. It was an herbivore that walked both as a biped and a quadruped. Three species are recognized: P. walkeri , P. tubicen, and the...
, and Albertosaurus
Albertosaurus
Albertosaurus is a genus of tyrannosaurid theropod dinosaur that lived in western North America during the Late Cretaceous Period, more than 70 million years ago. The type species, A. sarcophagus, was apparently restricted in range to the modern-day Canadian province of Alberta, after which...
. After recovering security cards from an InGen town, Anne proceeds past a dam and to a large mountain. At the summit, Anne is able to call for help. After defeating the Alpha Velociraptor and its tribe that lives atop the mountain, she is rescued by helicopter. The game closes as Anne returns to her apartment. Jill calls and the message goes to the answering machine, saying she "better have a good damn reason for not calling," Anne wordlessly responds by tossing a raptor claw on her desk.
Gameplay
The entire game is played through the eyes of Anne (voiced by Driver). There are only two cut scenes, one that begins the game and one that concludes the game, and an introductory video. There is occasional orchestral music, scored by Bill BrownBill Brown (composer)
Bill Brown IV is an American composer.-Video games:*Jurassic Park: Trespasser *Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six *Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear *Michael Crichton's Timeline...
. As she traverses the island, Anne will often talk to herself or remember clips of John Hammond's memoirs (voiced by Richard Attenborough
Richard Attenborough
Richard Samuel Attenborough, Baron Attenborough , CBE is a British actor, director, producer and entrepreneur. As director and producer he won two Academy Awards for the 1982 film Gandhi...
) describing the creation (and downfall) of Jurassic Park. There are no time limits or difficulty settings to adjust and only the first level has text prompts to aid players that are new to the game.
This game features no HUD
HUD (computer gaming)
In video gaming, the HUD is the method by which information is visually relayed to the player as part of a game's user interface...
. Anne's health is represented by a heart-shaped tattoo that the player can look down at. The ink of the tattoo is filled in depending on the amount of damage she has taken; when it is completely full, and a chain appears around it, Anne is dead. Anne's health regenerates quickly 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 picking up and then weighing the weapon and specifically saying things such as, "About eight shots," "Feels full," and "Hasn't been used." The actual level of realism has been debated because a number of Anne's characteristics, such as her ease at dropping items from her hand, is not very realistic. This example of not holding items is something that in real life
Real life
Real life is a term usually used to denote actual human life lived by real people in contrast with the lives of fictional or fantasy characters.-Usage online and in fiction:On the Internet, "real life" refers to life in the real world...
is easy, yet difficult in the game.
By pressing a key, Anne will extend her arm out in to the game world, allowing the player to pick up, swing, push and throw objects. This allows the player to create improvised weaponry, for instance: grabbing a large rock off the ground and bashing a raptor with it. Anne can move her arm in any direction, allowing the player to get a different feel of use for each weapon. 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 frustrating. Anne can only carry two items at once and when bumping into things will often drop items. 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 (0.9144 m) high embankment. The wrist is able to rotate 360 degrees several times over and the lack of an elbow often results in erratic and impossible movement.
In addition to picking up objects off the ground to use as weapons, Anne can find and use various other armaments including key cards and diskettes. In situations requiring button input (such as keypads), Anne will extend out one of her fingers. In keeping with the "hyper realistic" vision of the game, firearms have no cross-hairs, causing the player to first align the gun by adjusting Anne's wrist and then manually move her arm to aim at dinosaurs. Due to the non-traditional nature of the controls, inexperienced players may find it difficult to fire their weapons. Anne can carry up to two weapons at a time. Weapons have been made to incorporate realistic recoil, as if being held with two hands. Once each firearm is empty, it serves little use except as a club when swung. Empty weapons cannot be reloaded, and so must be discarded and another one found.
Development
The game was initiated by two former employees of Looking Glass TechnologiesLooking Glass Studios
Looking Glass Studios was a computer game development company during the 1990s.The company originally formed as Looking Glass Technologies, when Blue Sky Productions and Lerner Research merged....
, Seamus Blackley
Seamus Blackley
Seamus Blackley is a former agent with Creative Artists Agency representing video game creators.After entering Tufts University to study jazz piano, Blackley switched to study physics and graduated Summa cum Honore en Tesis. As a sophomore, he published his first paper in the Journal of Magnetic...
and Austin Grossman
Austin Grossman
Austin Grossman [b. ] is a writer and game designer who has contributed to the New York Times and a number of video games.He is the author of the novel Soon I Will Be Invincible, which was published by Pantheon Books in 2007....
. With the film The Lost World: Jurassic Park expected to be a success and after securing the movie license, the pair approached several movie animation groups before signing with DreamWorks Interactive. Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems Incorporated.Adobe's 2003 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. Thus, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the 12th major release of Adobe Photoshop...
5 and 3D Studio Max
3D Studio Max
Autodesk 3ds Max, formerly 3D Studio MAX, is for making 3D animations. It was developed and produced by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. It has modeling capabilities, a flexible plugin architecture and can be used on the Microsoft Windows platform. It's frequently used by video game developers, TV...
were used to produce the game. A 3D model of the island was also built and digitally scanned.
The game had a development period of more than three years. Money was the biggest hurdle in the development of Trespasser and the game went severely 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; originally, the game was to be released in the fall of 1997. However, due to a number of problems the project was delayed by a year. The rush to release the game caused many features to be either cut, or left unfinished and unpolished. For instance, due to difficulties coding the behaviour of both arms together developers had to ditch the left arm entirely. A late shift in development effectively changed the game from survival horror to action shooter, and contributed to the many complaints the game received. Lack of experienced management and the use of artists who were unfamiliar with basic game development processes and 3D modeling
3D modeling
In 3D computer graphics, 3D modeling is the process of developing a mathematical representation of any three-dimensional surface of object via specialized software. The product is called a 3D model...
has also been identified as a cause of problems. Developers struggled for more than two years on some problems and in the end released a game that is set within a very large and open outdoor environment. The main problem was that development started before the 3dfx Voodoo 1 started the move towards 3D hardware. Because of this, some techniques, like the bump mapping
Bump mapping
Bump mapping is a technique in computer graphics for simulating bumps and wrinkles on the surface of an object. This is achieved by perturbing the surface normals of the object and using the perturbed normal during lighting calculations. The result is an apparently bumpy surface rather than a...
and image caching were incompatible with graphics processing unit
Graphics processing unit
A graphics processing unit or GPU is a specialized circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory in such a way so as to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display...
s. Near the end of development the programmers developed a renderer that drew bump mapped objects in software and the terrain in hardware, but most objects were bump mapped so the speed advantages of hardware acceleration were negated. Trespasser used many textures for its mip levels and image cache, more than even the most advanced card of the time, the Voodoo2
Voodoo2
The Voodoo2 was a set of three graphics processing units on a single chipset, made by 3dfx. It was released in February 1998 as a replacement for the original Voodoo Graphics chipset. The card ran at a chipset clock rate of 90 MHz and used 100 MHz EDO DRAM, and was available for the PCI interface...
, could handle, and the game used the lower resolution textures in hardware mode instead of the high resolution ones available in software mode. This led to the strange situation that the game ran faster and looked better in software mode, while running in hardware mode meant the game ran slower and looked worse.
The Trespasser engine
Game engine
A game engine is a system designed for the creation and development of video games. There are many game engines that are designed to work on video game consoles and personal computers...
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
Rendering (computer graphics)
Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model , by means of computer programs. A scene file contains objects in a strictly defined language or data structure; it would contain geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information as a description of the virtual scene...
the complex environments it generated. The result was the worst clipping
Clipping (computer graphics)
Any procedure which identifies that portion of a picture which is either inside or outside a picture is referred to as a clipping algorithm or clipping.The region against which an object is to be clipped is called clipping window.-Examples:...
one reviewer had ever seen with another finding the game experienced a slowdown and frame rate drops. In addition, the Trespasser engine featured the first game world to be completely influenced by classical mechanics
Classical mechanics
In physics, classical mechanics is one of the two major sub-fields of mechanics, which is concerned with the set of physical laws describing the motion of bodies under the action of a system of forces...
and was also the first game to use ragdoll physics
Ragdoll physics
In computer physics engines, ragdoll physics is a type of procedural animation that is often used as a replacement for traditional static death animations.-Introduction:Early video games used manually-created animations for characters' death sequences...
. Perhaps the most advanced feature of the rendering engine was the ability to render objects like trees and rocks as 2D
2D computer graphics
2D computer graphics is the computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models and by techniques specific to them...
sprites
Sprite (computer graphics)
In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional image or animation that is integrated into a larger scene...
, which, when close enough to Anne, would be replaced by their 3D
3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...
counterpart. Elements using this technique are known as "impostors". 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
3D rendering
3D rendering is the 3D computer graphics process of automatically converting 3D wire frame models into 2D images with 3D photorealistic effects on a computer.-Rendering methods:...
technique was used in Shadow of the Colossus
Shadow of the Colossus
Shadow of the Colossus, released in Japan as , is an action-adventure game published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 2. The game was released in North America and Japan in October 2005 and PAL territories in February 2006...
and Far Cry
Far Cry
Far Cry is a first-person shooter video game developed by Crytek Studios from Germany and published by Ubisoft on March 23, 2004, for Microsoft Windows. Far Cry sold 730,000 units within four months of release. It received positive reviews upon release...
, 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. Trespasser was one of the first games to feature bump mapping and specular highlight
Specular highlight
A specular highlight is the bright spot of light that appears on shiny objects when illuminated . Specular highlights are important in 3D computer graphics, as they provide a strong visual cue for the shape of an object and its location with respect to light sources in the scene.-Microfacets:The...
ing, however the effects are not overly apparent due to the lack of dynamic lighting and the fact that many of the models used grayscale
Grayscale
In photography and computing, a grayscale or greyscale digital image is an image in which the value of each pixel is a single sample, that is, it carries only intensity information...
versions of the regular textures instead of the displacement maps necessary to take advantage of bump mapping. Additionally, an effect was used to dynamically draw an animated texture to simulate the ripples in pools of water. Trespasser also 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. Trespasser features a robust physics
Game physics
Computer animation physics or game physics involves the introduction of the laws of physics into a simulation or game engine, particularly in 3D computer graphics, for the purpose of making the effects appear more real to the observer...
system
Physics engine
A physics engine is computer software that provides an approximate simulation of certain physical systems, such as rigid body dynamics , soft body dynamics, and fluid dynamics, of use in the domains of computer graphics, video games and film. Their main uses are in video games , in which case the...
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 a great deal to a problem called interpenetration
Collision detection
Collision detection typically refers to the computational problem of detecting the intersection of two or more objects. While the topic is most often associated with its use in video games and other physical simulations, it also has applications in robotics...
; where two objects will collide and then become stuck inside one another, unable to separate. In the final release the dinosaurs were disallowed from making jump attacks and entering buildings to avoid interpenetration from occurring. One of the most impressive features of Trespasser is a system dubbed by the creators as "Real-Time Foley
Foley artist
Foley is the reproduction of everyday sounds for use in filmmaking. These reproduced sounds can be anything from the swishing of clothing and footsteps to squeaky doors and breaking glass. The best foley art is so well integrated into a film that it goes unnoticed by the audience. It helps to...
". 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. As of 2009, the only other significant game to feature this is Penumbra
Penumbra (video game series)
Penumbra is the name of an episodic video game series by developer Frictional Games, published by Lexicon Entertainment and Paradox Interactive. The games use the HPL Engine, initially developed as a tech demo...
.
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
Inverse kinematics
Inverse kinematics is a subdomain of kinematics, which is of particular interest in robotics and computer animation. In contrast to forward kinematics, which calculates the position of a body after a series of motions, inverse kinematics calculates the motions necessary to achieve a desired...
. No animation in the game is pre-animated; every movement of every dinosaur is generated automatically through their artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
. Due to the rushed nature of development, this feature ultimately resulted primarily in awkward movement as the dinosaurs performed unnaturally. Andrew Grant was Trespasser's chief artificial intelligence programmer.Trespasser was designed to have a complex artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
routine, giving each creature on the island its own set of emotions; fear, happiness, hunger, among many others. Dinosaurs will fight together, enemy to enemy. 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.
Reception
Before the release of the game, it was announced that Jurassic Park: Trespasser would revolutionize PC gaming. Unfortunately, after the game's release, reviews noted that it "failed to impress". Trespasser was not only a critical but also a commercial failure with only (about) 50,000 copies sold. Reviews of the game were mostly negative, but some reviewers felt the game had positive elements and a few were impressed by the title's originality and scale. Many of the reviewers disliked the poor graphics performance on even the fastest, graphically accelerated PCs available upon the game's release. Despite the anticipation over the many "first attempts at" within the game's original development scope, the reality did not match the hype.A Computer and Video Games
Computer and video games
A video game is an electronic game that involves human interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device. The word video in video game traditionally referred to a raster display device, but following popularization of the term "video game", it now implies any type of...
review thought the game was a "dog" and gave it a score of 1 out of 10. A Gamespot
GameSpot
GameSpot is a video gaming website that provides news, reviews, previews, downloads, and other information. The site was launched in May 1, 1996 by Pete Deemer, Vince Broady and Jon Epstein. It was purchased by ZDNet, a brand which was later purchased by CNET Networks. CBS Interactive, which...
review by Elliot Chin described it as the most frustrating game he had ever played with "boring gameplay and annoying bugs". Some of the complaints included the physics engine is needlessly complicating, levels were over-filled with box-stacking puzzles, exploration is tiresome because movement speed is far too slow, landscapes were barren with few dinosaurs, too many collision detection bugs, poor voice acting and a clumsy arm interface. An IGN
IGN
IGN is an entertainment website that focuses on video games, films, music and other media. IGN's main website comprises several specialty sites or "channels", each occupying a subdomain and covering a specific area of entertainment...
review was more favourable, describing the plot as "super-intriguing" with high praise for the realism of the game's physics engine. Despite featuring a blocky and heavily pixelated environment that offered limited interaction, the dinosaurs were convincing and "looked and moved really well" and the reviewer felt the game was badly implemented but still ground-breaking. One Game Revolution
Game Revolution
Game Revolution or GR is a gaming website created in 1996. Based in Berkeley, California, the site includes reviews, previews, a gaming download area, cheats, and a merchandise store, as well as webcomics, screenshots, and videos...
review described the game's graphical engine as gorgeous with impressive real-time shadows and good water and particle physics. On the downside, the gameplay was very basic with the usual "key-finding, enemy-killing, button-pushing" of the FPS genre and when there was more than one dinosaur on-screen the game slowed considerably. An Allgame
Allgame
Allgame is a commercial database of information about arcade games, video games and console manufacturers.Allgame is owned by All Media Guide, along with Allmusic and Allmovie....
reviewer didn't like the bugs and graphical glitches or the slow frame rate
Frame rate
Frame rate is the frequency at which an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames. The term applies equally well to computer graphics, video cameras, film cameras, and motion capture systems...
but concluded the game was a "ground breaking title that offers some great thrills, challenges, puzzles, and rewarding gameplay". PCGamer thought the game got the atmospherics right. PCZone felt the game could be quite frightening but that there were too many guns scattered around the island. An Adrenaline Vault
Adrenaline Vault
The Adrenaline Vault was launched November 1, 1995 by gaming entrepreneur Angel Munoz. The site provides PC, console game and hardware news, previews and reviews. Once a large commercial website, Avault is now published primarily by a team of volunteers....
review liked the game's originality and some tense moments, but disliked the critically bad flaws such as the slow treks, the lack of a real inventory system, the frustrating interface and there being too many guns lying around.
Computer Gaming World
Computer Gaming World
Computer Gaming World was a computer game magazine founded in 1981 by Russell Sipe as a bimonthly publication. Early issues were typically 40-50 pages in length, written in a newsletter style, including submissions by game designers such as Joel Billings , Dan Bunten , and Chris Crawford...
awarded the game "Coaster of the Year". GameSpot included Tresspasser as one of nominees for the title of the Most Disappointing Game of the Year ("losing" to Star Wars Rebellion) and gave it the dubious award of the Worst Game of the Year (PC), commenting: "Of all the games released this year, none was as ill-received and terrible as Trespasser. No game was implemented as poorly, and no game squandered its potential as much. No game played as awfully. (...) There's one thing we won't forget: Trespasser was undoubtedly the worst game of 1998."
As time went on, fans got involved into making their own new levels using TresEd, fan-made software that allows the user to edit Trespasser.