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Jimmy Whites Cueball World Feature
Chris Leyton
00/12/0000
We sit down with the development team of Jimmy Whites Cueball on PS2, PC and Xbox.
The Jimmy White series of games from Archer Maclean, who has also brought us classics such as Drop Zone, continues on with a third title. With Archer already having developed the two definitive pool/snooker titles you might not be too excited about Cueball World. What more can his expertise at coding present to the avid game? Read on and you will find out directly from the mouth of Archer himself!
Q: With Jimmy White 2 still selling, how the hell can you present new ideas/game based around the same theme? Can you pinpoint maybe some of the game features that are both discernible and those that are not in Cueball World?
Jimmy Whiteâs Cueball World is far more than a simple sequel. It is all new code, rather than an extension to Cueball 2. Current PC /console computational and graphics power is a magnitude or two higher than it was when we started on Cueball 2 in 1997. For example, the on screen polygon count in Cueball 2 it is less than that of the players hands in Cueball 3! The ploy count is now massive.
I hope people will continue to play Cueball 2 if they are enjoying it. There is a number of online tournaments and internet sites devoted to the game, and I still like to show the game off to people as it didnât get as widely reviewed as it should have as it was rushed out. But even now most people look at it and say âWow â“ when is that outâ !
Jimmy Whiteâs Cueball World takes the concept much further. Essentially in Cueball World players start off where Cueball 2 finished, in that they have to first of all win their way out of the Cueball 2 snooker room and then progressively work their way through a series of elaborately detailed, fully animated environments in which various snooker/pool games are located, along with a host of sub games. For each scene there is a highly detailed pair of hands each with their own characteristics. There is also a lot of video linking footage of Jimmy as he guides you around the world through all the various locations.
We havenât just concentrated on the graphics however. We new game is 100% new from the ground upwards, and as such there have been a great many new features including improved A.I., full 3D ball physics like not seen in any snooker game before, new game types, all new sub-games, new camera modes, action replay, etc. Over the course of the next few questions I will explain whatâs new in this version of the Cueball series and why any snooker/pool fan will enjoy Jimmy Whiteâs Cueball World.
Q: Has the advent of higher PC processors, better graphics cards, improved sounded, etc. made any difference to the creation of Cueball World? Is it just that you can utilise more options for display?
The ever-increasing specifications of modern PCs has enabled us to produce a game we would only have dreamed about when Cueball 2 was written. There are 9 separate environments that we have brought to life using a combination of sound, animation, graphics and programming.
Originally we had 8 unusual locations but based on feedback from initial testing we responded to the universally popular request of including the 19th century snooker room from Cueball 2 as a staring point for your journey through the Cueball World. We also were asked to include the darts subgame from Cueball 2, although this was entirely re-written.
To keep an element of mystery for players I don't want to reveal details on all the levels just at the moment. All environments have hidden animations that play occasionally, so you may play the game several times without seeing them all.
I will write about some of the early environments to give you an impression of how varied they are.
Desert Island
This almost looks like a film of a small desert island! It has a pool/snooker table mounted on a raised wooden platform a few feet up from the sand. But it is shaded from the fierce tropical heat by high palm trees whose fronds sway gently in the sea breeze. In the background is the sound of the waves rolling up the sandy beach that surrounds the island. Occasional birds fly past. The sea shimmers and ripples. Distant sharksâ fins surface and disappear again. Dolphins occasionally leap out of the water too.
Zombie Graveyard
The graveyard is reminiscent of an eerie and misty horror movie scene such as that from the Michael Jackson Thriller Video or those old Frankenstein movies from the 30s, complete with the moon casting shadows all around, and steamy gas and mist swirling slowly about. The tombstones are crooked and slimy with just visible words engraved on them (some jokes are carved there).
Volumetric lighting is used to cast the foggy effects, and all around there will be simple but immersive effects, such as the odd bat swooping through, and an occasional wolf howling at the moon in the distance somewhere.
The hands for this level look like they belong to a zombie. They mirror what we imagine a zombie would play pool like, slowly with too much shot strength! They have âmedically interestingâ textures and details. So much so that we decided to call the character for this level âOozeâ!
Japanese spiritual garden
The table is set on a high rocky promontory overlooking a calm rippling sea with the sun setting on the horizon. Mount Fuji is shown on the darker horizon, coloured by the red rays of the falling sun, with its reflection shimmering in the water between. Close by will be various spiritual gateways, religious stone carvings and blossoming cherry trees with the odd leaf falling gently to the ground. The Stone Pool table is resting in the middle of this tranquil island lit by a swaying prayer lantern suspended above. Some die-hard games fans may feel this scene is familiar to them for some reason . . .
The Ancient Temple Ruins in the Jungle
Set in the ancient Cambodian temple site at Ankor Wat (or as Jimmy White says in the video âAnkor Potâ). This vine covered 5,000-year-old temple was the inspiration for the monkey scene in Walt Disney's 'The Jungle Book'. This scene puts the players in the middle of the humid jungle complete with steamy haze rising all around, and various levels of fogged out vegetation disappearing through the gaps in the undergrowth. Birds of paradise will occasionally be glimpsed flying through the forest, and shards of sunlight will penetrate the forest canopy. A tropical sound track will permeate the area, with occasional jungle drum rhythms being heard, along with various growling animals and howling monkeys. And yes, there in the middle of a clearing is a Snooker table, featuring your opponent âHairy Potterâ - a pair of very hairy chimpanzee hands that can pot balls!
Q: Have you worked much on the physics and kinetics? Once again how can you improve on near perfection or when the audience may not see or feel that much difference?
This area of code has been COMPLETELY re-written to harness the vast computational power now available for little outlay. The physics is the heart of this game and is critical to ensuring utterly convincing game play. Previous incarnations of the Jimmy White series have always had to be pseudo kinetics solutions that were pre-calculated before the shot was taken, and were also strictly in a 2D plane. They looked and played great, but werenât a patch on what we now have. Now computers are of sufficient power to calculate the movement of every ball, in 3D, in real time, including ALL aspects of ball spin, swerve, skid, sliding, bouncing, jumping, ball throw, restitution effects, variable frictional surfaces at any angle, etc., etc. This is exactly what we have done.
Q: So whatâs let you do that you could not do before?
Well, gameplay is now affected by the same factors as in real life. Everything is modeled as accurately as possible, from almost invisible things like the tiny upwards kick a ball gets when it hits another or the variation in angle received from hitting a cushioned rail with different amounts of power, to hitting the ball off the table and watching it bounce down some stairs. These tiny variations in the response of the balls may seem hardly worth adding into the game but they provide a cumulative effect that can greatly affect the outcome of a shot and make it feel much more realistic. In real life Jimmy can pull off some amazing stunt shots making use of spin / swerve like no other player. We can now mathematically model exactly what is really going on in real time and it looks very convincing.
Cueball 2 is still a good play (and it only needs a Pentium 166 or so, and a voodoo card to run so anyone should be able to play that) and is loads of fun and the snooker and pool are good too. But when you see it up against Cueball World you can immediately spot the difference.
Q: In effect does both the pool table and snooker table work the same in terms of AI? Would you feel that a better experience and more realism come from the Snooker table? (Is there much difference to the creation of the snooker or pool table?)
The ways someone plays pool and snooker are different. The AI between snooker and pool does share the same core because they are both trying to pot balls in pockets, but we have spent a considerable amount of time making sure the computer âlooksâ like itâs playing the game as a human would. That is not quite as straightforward as it may sound though!
For example, we have made the 9-ball players consider doubles and plants to win the game. The 8-ball players donât pot obvious balls near pockets and instead leave them over the pocket so as to block the next player â“ just like any thinking human player would. The better snooker players will seriously consider their positioning for the higher numbered colours, with the ultimate player constantly trying to get that elusive 147 by maintaining a good red-black-red sequence. Strangely, the billiards players were the hardest of all to create because none of us had really played the game in real life before (well someone said they had, but that was 26 yrs ago or something) and it just looks so simple at first glance. .
As well as the strategy of each game type we have made each computer opponent play in a unique style. Some may favour snookers and tactical play, while others like to use sidespin to create stunning looking shots that donât always work. Some players use a lot of power in their shots while others are more tactical and thoughtful.
This has all been carefully balanced through months of testing to prevent the computer from being impossible to beat, or doing shots which no human could ever match, and instead being more of an ever increasing challenge as you win your way up the levels. After all, we could set the AI to just bang 147âs up all day â“ but what good would that be to the average opponent who wants a reasonable challenge?
Q: How detailed are the locales, rooms?
Cueball 2 had only 2 very detailed rooms full of âtoysâ to play with, and quite a complex control system to go with it. To reproduce the same detail in all of Cueball Worldsâ scenes and increase the graphical complexity 1,000%+ would have taken forever! So instead we have a series of beautifully animated scenes, with plenty of ambience, but the player now spends most of their time playing the main games. There is a series of sub games which you win access too as you progress up through the levels. These are all quite good fun and make use of the physics or the animation code. Although we did put Cueball 2âs darts game back in as well â“ but only by popular request and bribery.
Q: Archer you said Cueball would present something that you have never seen before or anything like it? Explain.
I did ? Err, well, when did you last see a snooker or pool game set on a desert island?
Q. What input has Jimmy White had, and has he expressed any wishes for this that may not have been in the previous titles? Also, does he play test and do other things with you? (On the game!) Is he more than a really good endorsement?
Whenever Jimmy has to do any appearances in the area or any work with us for filming/PR he drops into the office to see the latest work on the game. He always seems very impressed with the depth and realism in the game.
His knowledge of snooker/pool terminology and rules has certainly been helpful to us. For example, a few weeks ago he stopped over to do a video interview for TV (which, incidentally, is included in its entirety on the game CD along with our bizarre credits and out-takes list) and he brought up all sorts of colloquialisms on the 14:1 pool game and USA pool which we had not realised over here. Even simple stuff, like Americans call the cushions âRailsâ and a spin is known as âEnglishâ over there, so we added another language set for them! Apparently JW is quite well known in America but for playing Pool not snooker.
He doesnât have time to test the game during its development, however he does have Cueball 2 installed on his PC at home, which reminds me I am overdue to go round there and sort it out as his kids have filled it up with stuff off the internet, and windows sounds like its got a few problems (nothing new there then).
As for play testing â“ well not really, thatâs left to Virginâs testers to comment on. But yeah, he does get involved in a weird variety of PR with us. Also, he recently has been moving house and needed somewhere to store a whole load of stuff, like a very large antique pool table and all his hundreds of awards â“ so these are currently sitting in the basement.
Q. What input does the rest (who are they?) of the Awesome team have?
Lots. This is now a team effort and I always rely upon brainstorming sessions with them to come up with the more bizarre stuff in the game. I encourage them all to contribute wherever possible, although I came up with the original idea for the game based on my past games and wanted to expand the otherwise rather boring snooker/pool themes that every single snooker game has ever had. The first stages of Cueball Worldsâ design were done by myself, Mat Sullivan (Producer) and Drew Northcott (Lead Artist). The atmosphere at Awesome is very creative and itâs my job to steer that force in the best direction for the game.
Q. Have you used lots of data, physics tables, etc. from the last game?
We have drawn on the experience we gained from doing the last game but none of the data has been reused. Sound, artwork and code, has been re-created from scratch to ensure the best possible results. The nearest we get to reusing anything is in the Cueball snooker room graphic â“ itâs actually all-new, but designed to seem very familiar to the player. Darts is also in there but again is completely re-written.
Q. We have seen lots of great challenges from the in game cast in your previous games. Are they again of many differing standards and are there some interesting ones that you can talk about?
Each AI opponent looks and plays in a different way. The early level players merely bang balls about and do some potting but donât think too much, and maybe will lay a snookered shot if they have too. They are easy to beat, as we want people to get into the higher levels quite quickly. The ultimate player is capable of being totally unbeatable â“ but we deliberately dumbed it down otherwise no one would ever beat that player or maybe never even get to the table. Some of the mid level players are capable of tying up there opponent with constant safety play and making it very difficult.
Q: The animated hands - what is the present and previous poly count and have you added to them in any way? Can you explain a bit to readers who are not au fait?
In âJimmy White's 2: Cueballâ we motion captured the hands and just had one pair of white gloves throughout. They were represented by approx 500 polygons each. I did the hand movements, while wearing a pair of cyber gloves costing over $30,000, and it took about 4 or 5 days to sort out the raw data, and 4 or 5 months to edit/tidy it all up. The gloves themselves were very delicate and did not come with any sort of guarantee! As a result they were very carefully put on and calibrated each morning, which took an hour or more. Then all day long I could not eat / scratch / go the loo, etc.⦠until it was time to carefully remove them. And whatâs more we did that in a week, which turned out to be the hottest of the year. The whole process was much like what actors must go through. Good fun, but fairly exhausting too.
For âJimmy White's Cueball Worldâ we learnt from the previous process. The motion-captured data needed a considerable amount of editing, filtering and adapting (read âmonthsâ) before the results were useable. And if we wanted to change/redo something we couldnât just go back and film / capture some more. So, instead of going through it all again, we employed a highly skilled animator all the way from sunny Spain to design each hand for each environment and then animate hundreds if not thousands of complete hand sequences using the high-end art package, Maya. This has given the hands the freedom to express themselves in ways that are not possible by motion capture and we can revisit the work at any time. Also, (with the addition of some really neat programming by one of the lads here) we can compress these animations down to an incredibly small size, much less than the motion captured data was, therefore allowing us to have many more of them. Also, the Cueball World hands have approx 3,000 polys per hand. Thatâs more than was used to represent the whole of the previous game on screen at any one time. .
Q.Can you list the various pools and snooker games/rules on offer?
Main game types are categorized into: -
Snooker
9-ball
8-ball USA rules
8-ball UK rules / Pub rules
14:1 Continuous pool
Billiards
Each rule type can be altered in many different ways. Initially everything is set up according to the latest âofficialâ rules from the organization controlling that game. However, we found that most people make a few changes to the official rules like nominating, or not, which pocket the black ball has to go into, how many balls must hit a rail from a break, etc. So, all the important areas for conflict are changeable with a rule editor system in a submenu of the games set up menu.
As far as we are aware Cueball World is the only game to feature Billiards. Although I was initially dubious about Billiards thereâs at least one chap in the office who swears itâs his favourite (but he swears a lot so it might not be that important) because it requires much more tactical and skilful play than is at first obvious.
Q: Is everything to scale?
Generally speaking everything is correctly proportioned and measured out as close as possible to real life. In real pool the Cueball is slightly smaller than the other balls (so that it can drop through a ball filter underneath a real table and end up in a different collector) and this helps explain why real pool balls jump about a bit more than snooker. We too do this and sure enough our game balls get flipped up in the air under certain conditions because the Cueball is slightly smaller than them.
All the tables in the game have been reproduced to the same scale as their real life counterparts. Under most circumstances you can recreate real life conditions in the game and the outcome will be the same.
Q: Pool stunts, how many on offer? Did you get them from Jimmy and his chums? Can you give a couple of examples and can you create your own and save them?
In house we can edit table layouts to position balls anywhere you want â“ this is shown in our credit video, but not included with the final game at present. This can be used to create trick shots with bizarre things like spiral loop-the-loops, etc. But since we have gone from signing a contract/ through building the enlarged company and delivering Cueball in under a year, we had to drop the amazing trick shot editor where you could drag and drop various weird obstacles and ramps and so on anywhere you wanted. We may release this post launch.
So to get around this lack, we included a game mode called âstunt tablesâ. The stunt tables are unusual shaped pool tables with obstacles/ramps/tricks on them that form one of our hidden sub-games. You must pot all the balls on the table within a set time limit. To give you an idea of how unusual, I'll describe several for you:
- The first table is a miniature pool table with full sized balls â“ great for migraine sufferers.
- Another is a regular sized pool table with a ramp at either end. To pot a ball you must hit it over the ramp and into a basket ball hoop.
- One table is square with a series of obstacles in the middle that can be avoided or used to bounce the Cueball in unusual ways.
- Then there is the round one with banked sides. Pockets are cut into the sides of the table. I especially like this table because it requires you to think about shots differently from taking them on a flat surface.
Q: Your previous Cueball 2 game included such items as your very first 1983 8-bit game, Dropzone, running inside a table top game cabinet, and a jukebox so what else is on offer? (Sub games?)
There are four types of sub games that can be played in Cueball World. Each is unlocked by winning various parts of the game, although we may be kind and make one available from the start.
The four sub games are:
Stunt tables - Unusual shaped pool tables with obstacles like ramps or pits. There are two ways to play the game. The first is a simple pot all the balls inside the time limit. The second way to play is to pot balls into pockets that are worth a different amount of points, and win by beating the preset score.
Maze - The maze tables started as a physics experiment and have grown into a whole sub game. You must tilt the maze in different directions to roll the ball past the obstacles to the exit point within a time limit.
Darts - In Cueball 2 we had a dartboard in the snooker room, which could be played. This was very popular and got lots of mentions, loads of emails to us, and even has its own online league, so we have converted it to work with Cueball World â“ but only by popular request.
Thumb War - Probably the most unusual feature of Cueball World. In Thumb War you control one of the animated hands as they wrestle. The object is to fight the opponents hand and pin it to the mat for a count of three. There are various hands and each gets progressively harder to beat. I told you it was unusual :-)
Q: Can you explain briefly how the interface works?
The interface for the PC is mouse driven with icons as well as being able to grab the screen and zoom it, etc. much like its predecessor. The main game control / menu screen system has animated, moving icons that guide you through the setting up your games. While playing the game some icons can be expanded from either side of the screen to give you fine control when needed, or removed / shrunk down so as to provide more screen area. The game is playable either through the icons, the keyboard or by using the mouse to push the cue backwards/forwards.
Q: Will the way the cameras work and move be the same as in previous games? If not explain on this version?
This time there is a pop-up camera control icon system, which allows you to totally customise what, you see and how you see it, or simply disable it altogether. There are also remote-cameras which allow you too look around the scenes more bizarre views as well as look at the game from a quake style âcampingâ mode.
Q: Will the PC differ much from the PS2?
Our in house PS2 programmers are working on the conversion. Visually the two games should look very similar, however we have made some changes (for the better) on the PS2.
The control system has obviously had to change to support the joypad. I hate games ported from a PC to a console that simulate a mouse interface by using another layer of code to simulate moving a pointer about. We have redesigned the controls for the PlayStation-2 and have put all the major functions on the one controller â“ complete with one visual help screen.
TV screens are never as sharp as a PC monitor so we have redesigned the interface a little to increase text size, make icons more visible and make text input more friendly. There is little we can do about loading times though, as we are loading 20mb or more of data for each level, although the main menu control system is available at all times.
Q: Sum up the experience?
During the making of this game we have built a strong, creative team that will enable Awesome Developments to do great things in the future. Cueball World has been a great deal of fun for us all to create and I hope it will be as much fun for everyone to play. But of course being a tad perfectionist I would ideally have liked to off polished the game for a month or so longer like I used to when doing all my one-man games in the 80s and early 90s â“ it really showed too. But nowadays I have to face up to the realities of cash flow and project milestones and delivering on time.
