Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: Interview

We chat with LucasArts about this new Star Wars game, which bridges the gap between Eps III and IV.

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Based in San Francisco and Oxford, NaturalMotion is a technology company that is all about motion, and in particular the kind of motion portrayed by 3D characters. One of the company's latest tools is Euphoria, a hardware-punishing software package that allows characters to react faithfully to their environments.

As demonstrated in one of the early concept trailers for The Force Unleashed, Euphoria, also being used in LucasArts' Indiana Jones game, allows developers to make their subjects do what you would expect them to do if they were real.

Throw a man into a wall and he'll crumple into a heap. Throw a character at a beam, and it will try to hang on. Throw another, and it might grab the first character's leg, clinging on for dear life. It's all thanks to Euphoria's remarkable ability to inspire in these software creations what Suey calls a "sense of self-preservation".

"I've been playing the game for almost a year and I still see things that I've never seen before, that I didn't think could happen," he adds.

What's good for the "living" is good for the dead, according to LucasArts, so the company brought in another tool creator to breathe life into environments in The Force Unleashed, a package called Digital Molecular Matter by Swiss software house Pixelux.

Digital Molecular Matter is ideologically similar to Euphoria in that its core use is to inject the game with the randomness so inherent to real life. In most games, objects you can interact with have invisible seams that tear apart if you hit the object hard enough. But with Digital Molecular Matter game creators can take destruction to a whole new level.

Using the horsepower of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, Digital Molecular Matter lets you interact and destroy objects so that you'll never see the same result twice, as everything is being generated in real time by the software. Early tech demos featured R2-D2 droids flying through the air into boards of woods that splintered realistically, leaving random jagged edges and life-like debris.

LucasArts is bringing together Digital Molecular Matter and Euphoria to create a game world that reacts more realistically to you, breaking in the way you would expect it to and letting characters react to you more like they would in the real world.

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