Some questions/curiosities about Full Ace development

[tomasorti]

Hi.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm a developer, and have a lot of curiosity about how this game was made.
I don't work in the graphics/game industry, but I've always like it a lot.
I have the following questions/curiosities if the developers kindly want to shed light on them:

- How many people was involved in developing the main part of it (programers/artists)?

- How long did it take to build the game?

- How do you model the ball physics? I found this article related:
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~cross/TRAJECTORIES/42.%20Ball%20Trajectories.pdf
I guess you will be using something similar adding a term for court type bounce behaviour.

- I read in this forum that the players animations were hand made, i.e.: no motion capture.
Did you use a 3D package like Max/Maya/Blender? Did you use a background video or other reference to animate shot movements?

- Are you using any skeletal animation format to export the animations? I'm playing around with MD5 and Cal3D.
I can see that there are some .mdl and .skm files under Models. Are there Half Life/Quake or other popular format?

- Are you using many shaders in the game? I suppose you're using GLSL.
I learned OpenGL some years ago, but not the modern shader part. Things seems that have changed quite a lot.

I think I could ask you much more stuff, AI players, illumination, shadows... but I will let it there.

Again, congratulations to the dev team!
(I just checked credits and it seems you are two guys)

See you in the court!
BTW: Shall we play Wimbledon this week?

[tomasorti]

kschoice, do you know some of these questions?
I would be pleased if you give your opinion.

[kschoice]

Most of your questions I'm not comfortable answering because they involve things we'd like to keep to ourselves.

I can tell you that skm and mdl are proprietary file formats. The only files you may modify yourself are the png and jpg files. Maybe we will eventually provide a system to convert a popular model/anim format like fbx to Full Ace proprietary formats.

[Jay]

are the anm files your own extension?

[kschoice]

are the anm files your own extension?

Yes they are too.