Keith Stuart finds out more from the team behind Wheelman…

Wheelman isn’t your typical movie tie-in. Benefiting from a growing sense of synergy between the film and videogame worlds, it’s a sort of cross-media joint project between Midway Newcastle and Tigon, the production company owned by Vin Diesel. The game’s not based on the movie, instead it’s a sort of prequel, following the adventures of undercover agent Milo Burik before his cinematic debut next year. It’s also an intense, intricately realised driving shooter, with gorgeously detailed renderings of key Barcelona locales.

To get the lowdown on this prescient movie/game endeavour, we spoke to executive producer, Shaun Himmerick, and lead mission designer, Mark Thompson, who gladly popped the hood and let us peer inside.

In the first section of our two-part interview we talk to Shaun about the ever-controversial Unreal Engine 3…

So all the current game projects throughout Midway’s six studios are using the same modified version of Unreal Engine 3. Has this worked out well for you?

SH: It’s been better for us in terms of our overall plan, to go in for one big engine that we all share, and to start with Unreal. While we all heard about the problems Epic had at launch – it didn’t work on PS3, etc - starting with one building block was easier than starting with our own engine. Just the sheer number of decisions you’d have to make, and with the number of studios Midway has, getting everyone to agree, with everyone slanting toward their style of game… we just wanted to begin with a base and then start adding tools.

In what ways has Midway Newcastle benefited from this group approach?

SH: One of the great ways was, we said ‘hey we need some help with our on-foot gameplay, we want some more mission designers!’, and we just grabbed three guys from the Stranglehold team when they finished. They’ve been on our game for six months and within two weeks they were able to add content because the tools are all the same. So while it was a bit of a headache to begin with, our teams are now adding to the tools and optimising rather than starting from scratch, which probably would have taken two years.

Can you explain some of the key additions you’ve made to Unreal Engine?

SH: We’ve implemented the Havok physics system, we’ve implemented a Kynapse system for all the world navigation. If you drive through one area you may go through 50 different streaming zones, we’re loading one area after the next – Unreal at its base can’t do that. We built that at Midway from the ground up, as a kind of joint venture between the Seattle studio and us, we both have the same need for that sort of speed. Scaleform for UIs is another one we pulled that out of a box and have now since modified it. There’s a ridiculous number of things we’ve added that the Unreal Engine can’t do!

Where are you making your most obvious use of the Havok engine?

SH: The driving’s probably the most obvious. When you’re driving around, even the body roll of the car uses physics, if you hit an object you get all the collision physics, when you take down scaffolding, they’re all individual pieces, the people go into Havok ragdoll physics when they’re hit.

How deep is the crash physics?

SH: The car is made up of many, many impact zones – every impact has a certain amount of damage it causes, and then we have a damage propagation system, so if you hit something hard enough on the front quarter panel, that’ll destroy the panel, and also ripple through the door. Earlier I got hit by a cop on the side and he hit me hard enough to shatter the back window, so the force propagates through the car, and it diminishes as it goes. If you hit a car hard enough head-on you could probably pop all the windows. This is definitely the first generation we’ve been able to do this, due to the rendering time of all the maths.

What’s new about the collision physics in Wheelman?

SH: One of the other big limitations with the last generation was the amount of detail you could put into the car, now we can put in so much in terms of the damage. I don’t want to put other games down, but Burnout’s damage is very scripted, so you can hit the same quarter panel every time and it’ll always bend in the exact same way, because that’s the best looking way and it looks awesome. But in Wheelman, you could hit it one way and it bends here, hit it more head-on and it bends another. Sometimes ours doesn’t look as immediately cool, but it’s more realistic and as you go along, parts fall off, windows smash… We’re doing a much more realistic deformation of everything!