Brink Developer Diary #4

There is a new Brink developer diary on the official site in which Technical Designer Aubrey Hesselgren discusses the games' SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) system.

"Unfortunately, when we step into an FPS game, our avatars are effectively refrigerators on rollerskates, wearing a cone of shame: although we hear footsteps and see arms and a weapon before us, we're just a big box sliding over geometry with a limited field of vision. As players, we develop complex, well-honed skills to compensate for our chunky virtual presence and limited artificial senses.

As worlds get more intricate, there's more and more to trip up over, spoiling our sense of flowing movement. One solution is to let our refrigerator jump 6 feet in the air, avoiding the need to deal with insignificant geometry which we'd easily navigate in real life. This can certainly result in smooth, elegant movement (take a look at the trick jumps you can pull off in QUAKE II or III), but isn't too believable.

Our challenge, therefore, was to create a system of movement which dealt elegantly with our detailed environments, whilst maintaining the player's sense of control and creativity."