Adam Brennecke

As always, a great interview from Josh. Josh can be critical of his and the team's work, however, and as seen in the interview, he always offers positive constructive feedback with his criticisms. Being overly critical can be very counterproductive unless it's followed up with ideas of what went wrong and a plan of realistic ways of improving what's there.

Dude, that's like one of the best games ever made. It's also one of the most difficult games ever made. We actually talk about this game at work. That's how awesome it is. Because you know, we only talk about awesome games at Obsidian.

It's pretty much my favorite animal. It's like a lion and a tiger mixed... bred for its skills in magic.

D&D manticores pretty much look like that. Whether details are Monster Manual-accurate are kind of irrelevant to me because ultimately it looks rad. Today the manticore is better known as the Liger.

*Laughs* Um... yeah.

Josh, you have to agree that the rail sequence on the choppa was pretty sweet. It's funny because that was my favorite part of the game, and it had nothing to do with the normal tactical gameplay. I totally agree with most of your criticisms of GRAW2, and I expected more from a AAA sequel.

Well thankfully people like to archive every webpage ever. http://web.archive.org/web/20050213091953/...mbrennecke.com/ Yes, you are correct that I went to DigiPen, however, most of that stuff is pretty pathetic now, and that's why I took it down. I'm in the process of moving, so I haven't had any time to update the page from home. -Brennecke

I expected more... Fool I am. Hey, it is the coolset website ever! I recently took it down because most of the stuff on it was super old from my college days. Hopefully I'll have new cool programmin shizz to show in the near future. -Brennecke

There we go. All better. Yay!

Here's some more for yall: www.nivbed.com www.adambrennecke.com www.digitolwonder.com

Perforce, Alienbrain, Sourcesafe, etc. How do they compare to CVS/SVN? I would say Perforce > CVS/SVN > Sourcesafe. I haven't used Alienbrain, but from word of mouth I heard it's OK but really pricey. Perforce is nice, and it integrates into max as well. Sourcesafe is elderly, and needs to retire. It has tons problems with really large projects, however as expected, it integrates really well into visual studio.

Perforce, Alienbrain, Sourcesafe, etc.

Visual Studio and C/C++

Just as a side note - All the programmers (including scripters) at Obsidian have four year degrees. Only about one or two of the programmers do not have the degree in computer science. :ph34r:

Hah Ha! That article is great!

Here's a list of books on my shelf at work: Monster Manual, FR Campaign Setting, Two Players Handbooks (3.0 & 3.5), Elementary Linear Algebra, Computer Animation, Geometry Toolbox, Geometric Modeling with Splines, Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, Computer Graphics, Real-Time Rendering...

It's the NWN2 PC Gamer cover art.

Try this book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067232697...2915021-4673516 C++ Primer Plus by Stephen Prata. This is what I learned C++ from. It's always good to have a number of resources on the subject. -Brennecke

I was at DigiPen from 2001-2004. This past weekend I was in the Seattle area, so I stopped by the school and chatted with some of the professors, students and faculty. I wanted to play in the Counter-Strike tournament, but sadly, I didn't get a chance to... And if you all were curious, I wasn't one of the students that needed some tutoring Here is some good advice for people in high school thinking about going into a school like DigiPen - try to get your feet wet with some programming before enrolling in the school. This will help you with your first year, and it will let you get a feel for what you are getting yourself into. I met more than a handful of people at DigiPen that didn't know what programming was all about before they enrolled, and it wasn't what they expected. At most universities, these people can usually just change their major, but at DigiPen there isn't too many different majors to change to. They end up switching schools, and being a year behind in their studies... -Brennecke

Yes, but it's the other way around. You can 'plug' Havok into a game engine. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but you get the general idea.

Source is Valve's engine. Pandemic made the Havok toolset, which adds ragdoll physics to the game. Source handles its own physics. Havok is an independant company that makes middleware physics engines for games. Source is Valve's engine. It uses Havok for physics.

I always wanted to make a platformer. Old-school 2D style.

Yes, that is one of my other favorites. My favorite favorite has to be the boarding of the Ravager cutscene with Mandalore and the Mandalorian troops. -Brennecke

That was one of the more challenging cutscenes in the game that we did titled 'Kreia gets the crap beat out of her'. Chris Avellone designed the cutscene and wrote the dialog. Alot of time and effort were put in by Zaza Essa (animations), John Morgan (camera cleanup and direction) and myself (programming) to get it looking super bitchin and to bring Chris' script to life. And not to forget anyone, many other Obsidian employees worked on aspects of the cutscene as well. One of the more challenging and super cool things in the cutscene is Kreia's lightsaber. For those who don't remember, Kreia gets force pushed by Nihilus into the wall, and her lightsaber gets thrown out of her hand and lands on the ground. She tries to retrieve it using the force, but fails... Believe it or not, that little purple lightsaber was my bane for about two days Getting the timing down with the proper and dramatic camera angles was pretty challenging. This cutscene runs in realtime in the game (711mal iirc) but was recorded afterwards because the movie can fire from pretty much anywhere. -Brennecke