Ouch! Bullets Hurt! kill.switch by Namco Hometek Inc.
Walls also provided a challenge for the Namco Hometek Inc. development team in the creation of the military third-person shooter kill.switch.

kill.switch lets the player use realistic cover tactics such as hiding behind environmental set pieces during gameplay.

kill.switch hopes to distinguish itself in the military shooting genre by demanding that players employ traditional warfare tactics. The game employs two unique elements: Blindfire that allows the player to shoot at the enemy without being exposed to counter-fire, and a proprietary bit of programming termed an Offensive Cover System (OCS).

The OCS allows the use of realistic cover tactics, requiring players to take advantage of the surrounding environment as they assault the enemy.

“The problem was not so much how to do it, but why it has not been done before,” said Scott Crisostomo, assoc producer, Namco Hometek of San Jose, California. “Once we figured out that this would be a fun thing to do, to use the environment in this way, it was fairly easy to implement, but it was on of those things that no one every thought of doing.

“I think it was more of a creative, then technology, block.”

The game provides an intensive experience as players take on six war-themed missions in locations such as the Middle East to underground submarine bases, laid out over 18 different levels. As players progress they must constantly assess their situation, reacting to the environment and the characters, which could be as many as either enemies and the player within any one scene, while keeping the game running at least 30 to 60 frames, with the goal being as high and as consistent as possible to provide a solid game play experience

Players are not meandering within a static world where it doesn’t matter when and if they do a jig. In kill.switch bullets hurt.

Zombie’s Shadow Ops: Red Mercury team tracked down an elite collection of special forces military gear and cyber-scanned the details for the game. Courtesy of Atari.

“If you look at games like Counter Strike or Quake, you are strafing to avoid cover or sidestepping from behind your cover in order to shoot,” Crisostomo said. “But in real life you don’t do that and live. Our goal with kill.switch was to create a game that realistically portrayed a combat situation.”

In order to create this heightened sense of environmental realism and warfare, the Namco Hometek team began looking at a collision system that tells characters that they are approaching a solid object — such as a wall or tree. The collision system is important as it allows the “environment” to take up fewer polygons as it sees the “wall” as one artistic element.

It also allows a player to be able to use that wall as a solid defensive element as the games artificial intelligence (AI) sees it as a solid wall and cannot see the character behind it. In short, the games difference comes in the way the player takes, or uses, cover to avoid damage.

For example, instead of stepping all the way out from behind the wall, the player is able to first just peek out from behind his or her cover, not exposing the whole body, without the enemy seeing them. Once they determine their shot, the character then steps out a bit farther in order to actually shoot and is able to return to cover quickly.

Ariella Lehrer of Legacy Interactive feels that Final Fantasy was the first step toward making general audiences comfortable with photorealistic actors. © 2001 FFFP. All rights reserved. Square Pictures Inc.

The challenge for the developers became how to create realistic behaviors for the characters by fine-tuning the game’s AI element.

The problem is that while a player will normally accept the AI, with kill.switch, the player needs to be able to peek out without the AI seeing him. An AI element that is too smart would see the player’s character with the first “peek” eliminating the player’s ability to take the second step, emerging slightly from cover to shoot.

However, the AI can’t be so dumb that having an opponent too easy to beat frustrates the player.

“The player’s character literally had to have super-human reflexes in order to avoid enemy fire,” Cristomomo said. “The solution was to code the AI [so] that two characters could only communicate within 20 meters of each other, and the AI- or enemy-driven characters would only react to the player if he saw the characters in two repetitive frames of play, allowing for a more realistic use of cover by the player that can now move about the environment.”

To develop kill.switch the Namco Hometek team consisted of four managers, four designers, eight artists and eight programmers. The group used the Criterion Renderware engine and Maya software.