DF Retro – How Turok: The N64 Dinosaur Hunter was ahead of its time • Eurogamer.net

Bungie's Halo or Rare GoldenEye are often considered the first games to truly offer a first-class FPS shooter at the cutting edge of console technology – but, from my perspective, Turok: The N64 dinosaur hunter from Iguana Entertainment might well have done it before. It was a release that was well received at the time, but over the years, its reputation has slowly lost its luster. Many have suggested that Turok may never have been as impressive or so important.

It is hard to exaggerate the hype surrounding the Nintendo 64 when it was launched in 1996. Boasting unparalleled power and 64-bit hardware capabilities, it was an instant hit. This success is due in large part to the incomparable quality of Super Mario 64, a release that redefined the expectations for what could be a video game. The problem was that very few titles were launched on the system in its first year, resulting in a cycle of recurring hype, even around the poorer versions.

Turok was far from mediocre and the hype curled the edge of the foolish, and it's easy to see why. First-person shooter games exploded in popularity on PCs but remained relatively rare on consoles. Then there is violence – Turok delivers a level of carnage and violence in contradiction to the family reputation that Nintendo has built over the years. The large selection of weapons and flying blood particles certainly helped to raise the profile of the game. And then, there is technology: Turok was a true centerpiece focused on pyrotechnics and fluid animation which did not look like anything else on the market, even on PC.

An example is the construction of the world: Turok has a persistent world that allows you to double and visit older areas, and even the very first level offers multiple routes – a radical break with Quake's individual level design, and This is where our first point about technology comes in. Turok was developed from scratch by Iguana. It's a totally original project with its own approach to visual design.

The main objective was to provide a game of shooting operating at a relatively stable pace while offering huge maps to explore in a non-linear way. Snipers like Quake supported binary space partitioning or BSP, while Turok took a completely different approach, relying entirely on static meshes. In a way, it seems almost turned towards the future!

So what's the difference? With Quake, BSP brushes become the base of your level – you define shapes and structures via an editor to create your map. With Turok, however, the levels are entirely built from static meshes. This means that the floors, walls, ceiling, and other objects are all polygon meshes built into another program, such as 3D Studio Max. These modeled objects are used to build maps like Lego pieces, but it also means that you can not define shapes in real time with the help of the editor, as with Quake. If you want a large wall, you will build it by repeating a wall grid or by combining several types of walls.

This approach is well suited to the creation of the massive maps presented in Turok. Basically, you put stitches to build your map. You can copy and paste mesh groups to quickly assemble something while freely adjusting the scale and position. Artists essentially create the elements of the map that designers use to build them. Sometimes these elements can be huge – an entire boss room, for example, can consist of a single static mesh.

Then, the level designer defines an element called a navigation mesh or a navigation mesh: it is actually a collection of convex polygons used to define the location where players and other moving characters can move. This is the playground. After that, the designer poses decoration objects, bonuses, enemies and more to build the level flow. In the N64 itself, all this is loaded and unloaded at the time of execution. As you navigate the map, the game constantly loads level pieces into and out of memory, depending on the proximity around the player. Shooting distance is historically a problem with this, resulting in Turok's characteristic fog – but the fact is that the levels can be absolutely huge, with smooth transitions between all areas of the game and no visible loading time. Disadvantages? Since the memory is limited, only a definite quantity of static meshes can be stored in the RAM, which means a lot of repetition in the constitution of the level.

Turok has also pushed hard in other technological directions, and water treatment is an excellent example. Developers associate a smooth animated surface texture with transparency and, in some cases, a wavy surface mesh. As you swim, soft waves are visible all over the surface, which is a clear improvement over what Quake was proposing at the time. The rendering of the sky was another remarkable feature, with clouds that use multiple transparent layers scrolling. And what about the stray light? This is also in Turok. The sun is driven into the Z buffer and the data is extracted from the GPU, where the system can test the degree of occlusion of the sun. This data is then used to determine the transparency value of the lens reflections.

Turok is also a feast of particles. The particle collision is plotted in two dimensions to ensure a somewhat natural behavior, while many alpha textures are combined to create beautiful plumes of smoke, explosions and blood particles. The larger weapons are rather famous for this and this is another example of a clear improvement over the particle system presented in Quake. The N64 hardware itself solved other problems, such as the warping of the affine textures observed on PS1 games. Everything seemed ok in perspective, and there was also texture filtering.

In simple terms, beyond the oppressive fog effects, Turok is an extremely impressive example of 3D rendering on a relatively constrained system, but it also eliminates obstacles elsewhere, especially in control. Turok has solved one of the key issues regarding first-person shooter games on consoles up to this point: sighting. The dual analog scheme used on modern controllers did not exist yet. Iguana has therefore attributed a free appearance to the simple analog stick of the N64, while mapping the movement of the characters on the C keys. As a result, you can move freely while adjusting your view independently, which allows you, for example, to to organize circles. Returning to the game today is a treat, even on original material, because of this very prospective approach to control.

That said, when people think about Turok, it's usually about complaining about the mechanics of jumping obstacles – and that's a valid complaint, both now and today. The 3D platform was still relatively new at the time and doing it in the first person like this with a new control system was asking a lot of players in 1997. However, I think the problem here is that the platform requested from the player is too difficult from the point of view of the design: too many jumps are just too far away to succeed with much confidence.

Turok's new visit presents another key aspect in which she is in a class of her own. The animation system really pushes things to the next level, offering a fluid animation that we can see in any first-person shooter on a platform, even years later. his exit. Compared to his contemporaries, it was a monumental leap. First, the animation data itself is derived from both motion capture data for human enemies and a manual keyframe animation for everything else. Individual characters are built from a hierarchy of pieces or model pieces that function as a more modern skeleton system – another way in which the game was ahead of its time. The engine then interpolates the results by creating a seamless fusion between each image. Again, even titles like Quake do not have interpolation between animated images, while many games from that time were still based on 2D sprites.

The fluidity of Turok stems largely from the exceptional work of animation and artistic quality. From death animations to impressive animation running – rather than just going around in circles, for example, there is a defined animation to rotate properly. You see the enemies moving their weight and changing the planting of their feet when they turn around. It's impressive. In the same order of ideas, the "Quack" mode is another interesting bonus, a cheat code that blocks Quake by disabling animation tweening, particle rendering and texture filtering – Essential features that distinguish Turok from the powerful software management software id. It's a fun little bonus to showcase Turok's innovations, although, obviously, Quake has revolutionized FPS technology.

And unlike many console shooters in this difficult transition period from 2D to 3D, the performances were not bad either. N64 is not known for its high frame rates, but Turok comes out better than most of his contemporaries. With a target of 30 frames per second – which is specified even in the manual – Turok works pretty well. He reaches his target during a normal exploration and a light fight, but can dive in places. However, once you've got bigger guns and explosions start popping up everywhere, cadences can drop by as much as 10 frames per second. Yet, at least, the service life is short and, overall, the performance is good. Indeed, it is a pity that Turok 2 works so bad in comparison.

A PC version followed, with support for the new 3D Direct API and 3DFX Glide API, but if higher resolutions and sharper textures were in place, some features were either missing or poorly implemented. Many visual effects are not rendered correctly, especially anything that involves alpha effects. The fog plane is displayed differently, there is no stray light from the sun, the cloud layers are not restored correctly and the colors seem faded.

It's worth trying out the 2015 PC remaster of Nightdive Studios 2015. Programmed primarily by Samuel & # 39; Kaiser & # 39; Villareal, this enhanced version of the game is powered by the custom KEX engine and offers a host of new visual features, supporting high resolutions and variable format reports, as well as support features for graphics cards modern. 60 frames per second. The console versions tracked for Xbox One and Switch, both also targeting 60-fps performance while running in native 1080p. In the case of the switch, this applies to docked mode – the handheld mode runs at 720p instead.

The PC and Xbox versions support twilight rays, allowing sunlight to beautifully filter the landscape, and dramatically improve the effects of water with reflection and refraction. Adjusting the field of view and increasing the standby distance are also included. The end result is a level of fluidity, visibility and quality that far exceeds the initial possibilities. Combined with the improved controls, it's clearly the best way to enjoy Turok today.

There are however some compromises on the port of the switch. First, functions such as twilight are eliminated on Switch because of their high cost in GPU. And even deleted, there is a slowdown on this platform when you use extended scoping distance mode that does not occur on other platforms. This stems from the inherited nature of the motor and the hardware limitations of the low power switch. The main problem stems mainly from the design of the Turok maps: the level meshes were created keeping in mind the short viewing distance and the extension of the alluring distance greatly increases the call number of attraction because of their fragmentation. Basically, the engine is not designed to effectively handle an increased hold distance and the switch is not powerful enough to fix it.

Whatever it is, I think that Turok represents a curious gem of a game that combines two elements of his time: Quake and Nintendo. It has the fast and clever gameplay and interesting level design of a game id Software of that time, while offering a more exploratory, heavier platform, open-Nintendo style that you could find on Nintendo 64. This strange fusion of its flaws, but I would say it still holds – even today – and that remasters are a great way to experience a game that, in my opinion, is an important chapter in the history of the FPS.