Is That A Bullet In Your Pocket? Shadow Ops: Red Mercury by Zombie Creations Inc.

Regardless of the game genre, the developer or the storyline, one thing remains true in game creation — it has to look real — even if the land it takes place in is nothing more than a fantasy.

For Zombie Creations Inc., photorealism is not good enough for the developing Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, which is slated for a summer 2004 release by Atari Inc.

In order to make this first-person military shooter’s environments realistic, the development team sent teams to the games actual locations in Morocco, Moscow, Croatia, Bosnia, Paris and the Hawaiian island Kauai, which is stepping in for the war torn African Congo, using high resolution, high-end Nikon cameras capturing material at the highest resolution/mega pixel count possible.

Early Shadow Ops photos show a detailed world with fantastic definitions and characters that will pass the visual muster of the most dedicated special forces game player.

“What is still limiting us is processing technology so we can’t really make worlds look exactly like what we went to, but we were able to capture the essence of the place and there are certain things about an environment that tell the players’ eye that it looks real,” said Mark Long, ceo, Zombie. “And it is not just surface things, it is the color of the air, particularly at the magic hour, and while you can capture the feel or the essence of an environment, you need to know that environment for it be realistic.”

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. In search of authenticity, Mark Long of Zombie and his Shadow Ops team held a dress-up day where they were cyber-scanned for the game wearing military clothing and gear.

Zombie’s development team went much further than just taking a photo safari to some exotic locations. Long wanted to ensure that everything about their new Delta Force, first person military shooters, was as true-to-the-eye as possible.

This included finding one of the foremost collectors of special forces military gear in the world and visiting him in order to look over, cyber-scan and detail the equipment he had gathered.

This process resulted in a fun day of dress-up for the collector and Zombie folks, including Long, who donned all manners of gear for a bit of cyber-scanning — a process that included loading a cyber-scanner into an 18-wheel truck and driving it to the collector’s Los Angeles home, an effort not previously expanded for this genre of game.

“We scanned our collector wearing his gear going to the detail of loading the ammo shells with powder because it weighs differently in the pocket,” Long added. “We also used a retired special forces member for the process of motion-capture so that we could get the size, the movements true-to-life.

“This genre of gaming is one of the few spaces where the world needs to look real to meet the players expectations as they can be almost fetishistic about the equipment, weapons, uniforms… face it the special forces guys are real superheroes with cool gear, fantastic weapons and very special powers.”

Creating Shadow Ops Zombie relied on the Unreal middleware engine, 3ds max for modeling, the Karma Motion Builder for character animations and Lip Synch for facial animation.

The group additionally used a MathLab physics package to be able to realistically portray movement like things bouncing, sliding or falling that also allowed the developers to use a device termed “Rag Doll.” The rag doll effect is exactly as one would imagine — a character gets shot and falls not unlike a rag doll suddenly let go.

In the gaming world, this equates to that when a character is shot and the AI turns on the “rag doll physics” the game responds differently because the physics element offers a variety of responses versus only the one or two animated sequences that may otherwise be available.

For Long, whose past work includes working with NASA, Stanford Research Institute, the U.S. Army and the Institute for Advanced Technology at the University of Texas where he has dedicated his research and expertise to the field of developing virtual reality, the most exciting aspect of gaming is not what he is working on now, but what the promise of the next generation of consoles promises.

“The new consoles and the state of the art PCs have driven the players’ expectations higher and we are going to make a leap forward with the next generation of consoles that will begin to meet those desires, and more,” Long said. “Tomorrow’s graphics are going to be an order of magnitude times 10 that we have today. This means we will be able to physically model how light is reflected or absorbed by materials — giving them visual life, not just creating a picture of an object.”

And for those who are curious, that collector, both face and body, appear in the game — which has to be the ultimate in cool.

Jacquie Kubin, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist, enjoys writing about animation, pop culture, electronic and edutainment mediums as well as music, travel and culinary features. She is a frequent contributor to the Washington Times and winner of the 1998 Certificate of Award granted by the Metropolitan Area Mass Media Committee of the American Assn. of University Women and 2002 HSMAI Golden Bell Award.