Casting The Runes

Dave Halsted, one of the mappers at Human Head Studios who is working on their third person Viking action game, "Rune", at the moment, took time out from his polygon pushing to describe the use of scripting in the game's maps.

"Doing single-player maps, and having seen from Half-Life that that is the way things are going, we're using scripted events as much as time and our imminent deadline will allow. Our programmers have put in a very robust scripting system which goes far beyond what was in the original Unreal code. It's all primarily trigger-based (i.e. the player walks into a certain space, and a sequence is triggered), but once it's going we can do some surprisingly complicated things."

To find out more, read the interview with Dave Halsted over at In The Trenches, which covers the whole map design process from inspiration to implementation.