Q: Hi Wael, can you tell us about the new features inside Sherlock Holmes IV?
A: Differences between this version and previous versions.
Hi Johnny, Sherlock Holmes versus Arsène Lupin is the second Sherlock Holmes game we made in real time 3D, so there are two types of differences in the game with the previous one:
- in terms of techniques and technology the game supports more video cards, the loading time is greatly reduced, the lighting system has been reworked completely, now including HD render features, the normal map integrations as well, and as we can see on your 3D screenshots directly taken from the game you can say that the overall graphic quality is very good, even compared to other genres.
Animations and skinning have been reworked so we could increase their quality, the dialog system is now interactive so we could do puzzles enigmas.
- in terms of gameplay, we created a lot of enigmas, more than ever before so the game is a permanent brain challenge.
Q: For the storytelling for SH4 are you inspired by the Conan Doyle novels? Are some quests based and taken directly from some novels?
A: As Sherlock Holmes worshippers we are not messing with the canonical writings
, at least directly. So there are many many many many references to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, for example 221b
Baker street in the game is quite a museum with many items from the Sherlock Holmes stories, these are more for specialists or fans, but overall our adventures lies “around” the canonical writings, we pay attention when they take place, how they take place and why they were not told to the public earlier
.
Q: By recreating the National Gallery of London, did you get some authorities permissions? Even for the paintings, was it hard to get all the rights to have them inside the game?
A: Actually not, author rights are limited to 70 years, but we had to redraw a good deal of them. Games like Hellgate London should have more problem as they use the current architecture (British Museum) and the IP owner of their architectural creations might not enjoy the smashing and the invasion by aliens of their creation.
All in all it is a very long process to work with existing art, but it is also fascinating and you learn a lot, both artistically and historically, I hope players feel the same when they play.
Q: We saw with pleasure a pedagogical part of the game, for example while viewing paintings players get information about them with a spoken text. Which is your position about having cultural aspects inside videogames?
A: I think it is one of the missions of video games. To learn and play at the same time is the base of education and learning. So when you can afford to have both of these great aspects of life together you should go to the very end of them. It is even better in Sherlock as you don’t HAVE TO learn, but you just can, and eventually you do it even without noticing it.
In the game everything you deal with is real, and the story is built around well known and existing elements: paintings, sculptures of course but also history, people and even animals (the people who played the game know what I speak about). Integration and immersion are key words for us and not only at the technological level. The amazing thing in the game is that you can go tomorrow morning at the British Museum or any other places you can find in the game and find exactly the same art you have in the game, except that in the game they have their own history. This mix of fiction and reality is working wonderfully.
Q: Which gamers profile do you want to reach with Sherlock Holmes 4?
A: Interesting question… Usually when I think about Frogwares players I say 70% of women and most of them over 35 year-old.
But I must admit that since we decided to move to real-time 3D and since we were heavily supported by major web sites as Gamespot or IGN on “Sherlock Holmes - The Awakened” and since we achieved to do great sales on “Steam”, our “target” has extended.
In the end I’m glad of this, we made a bet to produce the most ambitious adventure game you could find at the moment: huge locations, real-time 3D, many characters, very long lifetime and we were discouraged all along the way by many publishers saying that 3D can’t work and that we should keep games as they were 10 years ago as the audience is very conservative. Fact is that players are simply looking for good games, and games are before all technological, so you need to be up to date to convince players that the game is worthy to be played, and then you can keep the specificity of your own genre.
On the other hand we are now working on a new camera system for our engine and we began to redo Sherlock Holmes - The Awakened with 3rd person perspective, so the traditional players used to point and click interface system can play it too. The player will be able to switch from first person to third person as in Sherlock Holmes - The Silver Earring anytime. This system will be shown at the Lyon Game Connection in December. After this we’ll have a technology able to cover any possible adventure you can do.
Q: Is your RT engine proprietary?
A: Absolutely, it is a permanent evolution from 2002 and our first game engine.
Q: Can you tell us about some of the great features of that engine?
A: First it can play from Geforce 2 to the latest card, in the adventure genre, not all the players have the latest cards, and you need to give to all of the players good results.
Render in the engine is not all but at least it is what you see, so it is a difficult balance to find between all parameters that all PCs propose yesterday,
today, and tomorrow (processor, ram, video card, driver, screen resolution etc…).
To understand the result better I think the 3D screens you made are fully representative of the game
The animations, facial animations, lip-synch engines are very elaborate as well.
The scripting system has been simplified until it is now an excel sheet with instruction, so any newbie with inspiration could script an adventure based on our engine (imagine we could have Sherlock modders
!!).
Q: We saw an extensive usage of occlusion mapping techniques. Is that correct, or are you using other techniques to bake lights effects into textures?
A: Occlusion maps are used but also some HD effects as bloom, baked lightmaps integrated to diffuse, designers are quite free to use the technique they want, unless they are not supported.
Specific shaders have been created for characters or for specific elements as glass or water, but all in all we can’t push the technological envelope as far as FPS as the adventures players don’t have generally as powerful machines as action gamers.
Q: Is Baker Street a reproduction based on real documentation? How many polygons is for example that scene, and how many referral images did you shoot to create those great textures?
A: Yes and no, 221B didn’t exist at Sherlock Holmes time, while it exists now.
Baker street is not a small street and we couldn’t do it as big as it is, spite my dream would be a virtual Victorian London in 3D.
Baker Street level is a medium level with 200 000 polygons, and more than 140 MB of textures, which is simply too much for any action game you could think of. And remember you have to play the game on 64 MB cards.
For London we go every year to the capital to shoot streets, houses, interiors and every time we bring 2-3000 photos,
Q: How many months did it take to produce the game?
A: From the very start to the end I would say 2 years, story, concept art, 3D modeling, characters, animations, scripting, and finally testing and corrections.
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