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'Xenus' - Screens

by Rainier on July 7, 2003 @ 8:30 a.m. PDT

The game begins when Kevin Myers receives a call from magazine his sister works for. He is told that she didn't contact them more than 10 days and they are afraid she missed in Colombia during her journalist investigation. So, Kevin departures to this country in order to rescue her. Having arrived he finds himself in the world of violence where 70 out of 100 hundreds people are killed each year. There are many forces fight for the power in Colombia. They are officials, guerrilla, narco mafia, Indians, bandits, CIA. The player has to maneuver between them to reach the main goal to find lost sister. The scenery that looks banal in the beginning step-by-step gets mixed up and finally becomes semi-mystic.

All actions take place on a huge territory 25x25km. Due to such size of the territory we introduce different kind of vehicles such as helicopters, different types of cars, tanks and motorboats. All of them are drivable. In the world of Xenus everything costs money, so you have to buy a vehicle you are going to use or take it for a rent. You also need to purchase weapons, ammo, gasoline, etc. For each accomplished mission for a specified force player earns some money. Considering complex interrelation between forces it becomes possible to add a strong RPG element in the game. The player has got 20 different parameters that may be enhanced during gameplay. A lot of NPC and dialogs, nearly 20 types of weapons with wide possibility to upgrade each one and nonlinear plot can also be mentioned. As for the multiplayer mode, it includes cooperative, CTF, death-match and others. Cooperative mode is a variant to play through single-player missions. You may play over LAN and Internet. The game supports in-game GameSpy browser.

The engine:

  • Xenus is based on powerful in-house developed Vital Engine 2. The main features of the engine are:
  • Unique technology of rendering huge (but very detailed) territory 25x25km
  • Skeleton animation with blending between up to 3 bones
  • Facial animation
  • Multilayered textures 512x512
  • 5000 faces per character
  • Lightmaps
  • View-independent progressive mesh for models and view-dependent progressive mesh for level geometr
  • Rigid body physics comparable with Math Engine and Havok (a set of predefined models: car, helicopter, box, player)

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