/ Previews / Shooters / Requiem: Wrath of the Fallen / Page 6
	Great, a game that yells at me, just like my girlfriend. But does it look as good as my girlfriend?

Well now, the moment you have all been waiting for... the graphics! Well, I don't know if you were really itching to read about the graphics, however techies and graphic people who like big words prepare, as this game has many words with more syllables than Bill Clinton has sex offenders. For all of the idiots like me, yes, the game will be supporting 3dfx. Not only that, but it will also support Software modes and Voodoo 2 technology as well along with that neat little SLI stuff it's got going too. However, it doesn't stop there, because now you get to experience "Rigid-Soft Hybrid Models" and "Emotive Animation Technology", but let's not forget the quaternions and polynomials used to get ultra-smooth framrates!

Now, if you're a person like me, you are probably wondering what the hell I just said. Well, I was wondering what the hell all that technical mumbo-jumbo meant as well, so I decided to ask Mr. Co, and he replied "This is a rather technical question, but allow me to try and simplify it as best I can. We combine the smooth animations of Rigid-Body Models (used in games like 'Virtua Fighter') using their Skeletal Nodes to animate with the clean joints of Soft-Body Models (Used in 'Quake'), where the vertices of the skin can be manipulated. So, our models and their animations have the best of both worlds. Maybe that's just as confusing as before." Your right about one thing, it is pretty confusing! But he goes on to say "As for the Emotive Animation Technology, the animations transition smoothly from one to another through interpolating between keyframes. This way, we can store many animations, one for each expression of a character talking to you, for example, and call them at different points of the conversation."

Even though I didn't understand most of that stuff, a lot of you probably did. But from what I make of it, the graphics look pretty damn cool, since all that cool tech seems to eliminate clipping problems found in Jedi Knight, and change people expressions from one to the other seamlessly. Hey, maybe we will even get to see some mouth movement this time around!

I also figured that since they are using all those big words in the graphics, the outdoor environments would look a little better too. "The outdoor scenes exist in the city streets and are very realistic looking - we paid a lot of attention to the little details. We tried to imagine what an eastern city like Hong Kong may look like in the far future." Now that, in itself, seems pretty cool as well. Along with using the portal technology, it looks like we are in for a treat when it comes to eye candy and the levels in Requiem.