Pillars Interview feature

Over the pass few years we've seen a growing trend in 'game' specific engines, where the features of an engine have been very much determined by the artistic direction and requirements of the game. Crytek for the original Farcry and id Tech 4 for Doom 3 are just a couple of examples of games which deep down, just couldn't work on any other engine.

As you'd likely expect - this is something which also carries through to modding, with the vast majority of mod makers choosing to go with engines/games which best supports what they wish to achieve. Every now and again though you'll find a mod which likes to do things a little differently.

Pillars is an upcoming mod for Doom 3 by a group of students from the University of Stuttgart. While the signature feel of id Tech 4's stencil shadows certainly comes through, the team are making a conscious effort to divert as much as possible from the Doom 3 art style, focusing on angular structures and a bold but deep grayscale colour palette. But games/mods which make artistic innovation while doing nothing to embellish gameplay features are ten to a penny, so what's to say these guys are going to be any different? I caught up with the team to shed a little light on their intriguing modification.

Hey guys, cheers for taking the time out to speak with us. Pillars has slowly been building up quite an avid fanbase and your unique approach to visuals certainly has a lot of people interested, but what's the mod actually about? What's the story here and how does the title Pillars play into it?

Current social trends show that all over the world the gap between rich and poor is widening. This can be seen in European Countries and the USA but also in developing nations. Residential housing situations like gated communities are gaining popularity because the rich parts of the population are longing for security and privacy from (perhaps imaginary) crime infested cities. In the 80s and 90s an urban design movement arose known as New Urbanism. New Urbanism towns often attract people of similar social status and wealth and apparently an inclination towards a strict set of rules.
This is what Pillars builds up on. The story extrapolates the current situation and depicts a somewhat exaggerated vision of the future. The rich upper classes have manufactured themselves a haven of security and opulence in the sky. Their cities lay hundreds of meters above ground level on large platforms resting on gigantic columns or pillars. Hence, this fictional society is called Pillars.

The poor masses are excluded from this privilege and lead lives more or less miserably on the polluted ground levels of the planet. Permanent layers of smog make visual contact between ground level and Pillar cities impossible. Over the centuries the Pillars government has managed to brainwash their population into believing that nothing on the ground level has survived and that it is completely uninhabitable. The government, however, secretly builds up bases and is forcefully deporting or destroying the population on ground level in order to exploit resources necessary for maintaining and increasing living standards in the wealthy Pillars cities. This is, of course, being a parallel to nowadays forgotten conflicts in third world nations and western corporations grabbing wealth in such countries.

More specifically, the original plot focuses on an inhabitant of a Pillars city employed as a governmental service technician. One day you're informed by a mysterious stranger that you're wanted dead by the government. You have no idea why but enough reason to believe your source that you flee from your new enemies.

However the story is currently being rewritten and amended so it's very unlikely that this will be like this in the final story. The setting will stay the same but the whole "service technician on the run" part will most likely be replaced.

How does the art direction integrate with the actual story? Are there some specific reasons as to why you've chosen to go with this style? Were there any certain artists or artistic movements which have inspired the team?

Yes there are. The Pillars live in a highly fascist-iod society. We create architecture radiating the presence of power similar to structures authoritarian governments like to represent themselves with. Think of Nazi architecture by Albert Speer or various socialist buildings such as NDK in Sofia/Bulgaria. More recent examples would be Chinas new CCTV building or some EU governmental facilities.

The design used for the ground level architecture consist of buildings from the Gründerzeit (years of rapid industrial expansion in Germany at the end of the 19th century), modern architecture and socialist style buildings known from African metropolises such as Maputo / Mozambique.

We decided to use a black and white style for the Pillars architecture to increase the feeling of emotionless, clean and efficient urban situations. Film noir elements simulate a depressing and perhaps hostile environment when moving through the Pillars world where the player feels alienated. To contrast this we are using colored, less abstract structures for ground level situations.

So where along the line did Doom 3 come into this? Did you always know this was the engine you wanted to work with, or was your choice of tech defined by what you wanted to achieve with the mod?

To be honest, when we started development over a year ago we didn't know very much about the advantages and disadvantages of game engines. One of our coders evaluated a couple of them and was very happy with the Doom 3 code so we simply decided to go with it. After half a year we started to look into the Source engine and we started to do a couple of mapping projects in our free time. We were very happy with the Hammer editor and the Source engines beautiful lighting system so we decided to switch. While the mappers loved this decision the coders weren't all that happy with it since, apparently the Source engines code isn't as clean as Dooms. Also the implementation of custom objects and textures turned out to be quite a hassle.

In the end we found out that some of our gameplay elements would be very hard or impossible to integrate into Source and that combined with the easier model implementation convinced us of going back to the Doom engine.

And even though I really miss Hammers elegance and simplicity Doom 3 is, considering all, just better suited for our requirements.

Has the engine been easy enough to work with so far? The screenshots certainly have an admirable sense of depth, has there been much difficulty in achieving that and having your assets work in-game?

Handling a Game Engine probably always requires a lot of learning and can be a real nuisance at times especially if you're used to the comfort of 3D programs such as 3ds Max. To achieve things you can do in 3ds Max within minutes it can take hours to do in a Game Engine, but if you work with it every day you get used to that and in the end it usually works out.

I'm really looking forward to the next generation engines which appear to emphasize easier handling for artists and quicker implementation of your work. The Id Tech 5 and Crysis editors (which I only know from video demonstrations) look like they've taken a very large step in that direction.

What works visually in your mind doesn't always work quite so well once you actually build it, would you say this has been the case here? Has the engine forced you into rethinking your artistic style at all?

No doubt about that. Finding a good balancing between aesthetically pleasing environments and a good framerate is always a major issue. And believe me it's not allways easy to throw out a level or model you've spent weeks of work on just to find out that it makes your framerate drop to the bottom of Loch Ness. But in the end you just have to swallow your pride (or get whacked over the head by your team mates) and toss it out. Start from the beginning, rinse and repeat until both requirements are fulfilled.

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There are a number of spectacular looking Doom 3 mods which are doing great things with the tech visually, but as proven by Doom 3 itself a fantastic art direction can often be completely disregarded if the gameplay isn't of an equal standard. Has the 'against the norm' direction you've taken with your art transferred into the gameplay too, or are you largely sticking with the same formula as Doom 3?

Pillars is a fist person shooter with a couple of new gameplay elements. We've introduced ways so that the player can use the level geometry for his advantage as well as an entertaining way of solving puzzles. I can't really go into more depth about this here since we want to keep this largely a secret until release but i'll just say that within the borders of first person shooters gameplay is very different from Doom 3.

Have you had to adapt much of the engine to fit what you want to achieve or would you say most of what you've required has been available 'out of the box' per say?

Our coders had quite some work. The new level geometry thing mentioned above took quite some time to implement and they had to write new AI for our enemy characters. A black and white post processing shader had to be written which is used in places where colored geometry has to shift dynamically from colored to black and white and things like this.

So all in all we, of course use a lot of things which are standard in Doom, but we also had to heavily modify a lot of things or create them entirely from scratch.

How have you found the Doom 3 modding Community? Would you say there have been enough resources and able modders out there to assist you where necessary?

In one word: Awesome. It's sometimes hard to find specific things online but the community can almost always help you with it. A big thanks to the denizens of www.doom3world.org.

We can see from your latest in-game video that there is some sort of gun which fires vivid, colourful splatters. What exactly is this weapon and how does it tie in with the gameplay and story?

He he, it's a secret. ;)

What other weapons can we expect to see in Pillars? Are there any plans for guns with functions unique to your mod?

Well, the secret gun above consists of unique functions. Besides that the weapons are pretty much your standard first person shooter weapons. Flashlight, pistol, shotgun and submachine gun are currently implemented. An assault rife with grenade launcher and hand grenades are planned. We will determine if we need any other weapons besides that or if we have to kick out some of the implemented ones with further testing and balancing.

And how about Characters? You've got a variety of new enemies working in-game, what's their relevance to the story and how can we expect them to effect gameplay?

They are Pillar troops used for a variety of tasks. The Pillars soldiers and drones are used on the one hand for police and surveillance duties within the Pillar cities but they can also be used as military forces when cleansing sectors on the ground levels in case the Pillars society needs to secure resources or erect a new pillar.

The Cloaker is an assassin. He's used to eliminate threats such as the player character. His special ability is - who would have thought - a cloaking device. Due to the nature of this cloaking device he can't carry any fire arms and is reliant on his melee weapon. But that's not really problematic for him since he can do some very acrobatic stunts in order to get close to his victim.

Last but not least we've got the Shield Berserker who is primarily used to eradicate and demolish population and buildings on ground level. He's a very tough enemy with several different attack modes and a hard to overcome defensive mechanism.

Is music going to play much of a role in your mod?

We don't know yet. There are several ideas being discussed and we have a very talented sound engineer from the VPT Academy in Stuttgart but we're not sure yet.

You seem to have quite a few assets both artistic and gameplay based working in-game now. Can you give us an estimate on a release?

Unfortunately not. We thought we'd finish with the end of this semester since it's our master degree project but it won't be completely finished until then. We wouldn't want to release some half baked mod or unbalanced gameplay so i guess it's one of the good old "it's finished when it's finished" situations.

Between now and then what features are you going to be adding to the mod? Is there still a lot of core work to be done or is it more a case of just building and adding art assets and levels now?

The core work is largely done. There is some character implementation left such as a friendly character. Furthermore there's a lot of tweaking to be done and in the end we know that if an interesting idea comes along we will want to have that implemented.

You've stated that this is for a University project; do you think the team will continue working together on mods once you've finished with Pillars?

It's very likely. Our university, together with some governmental institutions offers funding for students who have graduated if they can show that they have a promising project. We are looking into that and if we're lucky we'll be developing with some financial resources in the background in the future.

If this doesn't work out, well, I'm sure we will at least continue to work together in our free time. After all, modding isn't just work it's also a very rewarding hobby.

In one case or the other, Pillars will be completed.

On an unrelated note, Epic Games recently announced that consoles will very much be the focus of their next technology line. What are your feelings on this? Do you think that Commercial companies directing more attention on consoles will encourage modders to take more initiative with their work or can you see it having a detrimental effect on the community?

To be honest I haven't looked into that very much but i think things are going to change quite a bit in the next years. With things like the Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express Microsoft have opened the possibilities to mod and create games for a console. I hope that other companies will follow and we'll see a lot of interesting mods and indie games for consoles in the future. I can't see a reason for modders to not go with the trend and move over to consoles as well.

On the other hand we all know that modding is getting more elaborate and time-consuming all the time. While the next-gen technology provides nice tools for easier implementation there is also the need for creating this content. It already is a whole lot of work to create an 8000 polygon character for the Doom 3 engine. But one of these slick next-gen übersoldiers with full facial animations, super high quality textures, parallax mapping and all that funky new stuff is a whole new level. A total conversion mod can nowadays only be done by large, dedicated teams over several years. If anything, then it will be this that kills modding.

Or perhaps modding will simply take up a completely new direction. Instead of trying to compete with high budget development teams, modders will concentrate more and more on good gameplay ideas instead of brilliant graphics. Portal led the mod community to the water, now it's up to us to drink.

Sounds good to me! Thanks again to Lumpen Gnom for sparing us a few minutes to complete this interview. You can keep up to date with Pillars here via their moddb profile or check their web site at www.pillars.de. If you'd like to learn more about modding Doom 3 in general, check out www.doom3world.org.