DGD: What went in to the creation of the team AI?
Mike Gummelt: When we set out to do them team AI, one of the first, most obvious obstacles was "how do we make them follow the player". I experimented with a few different methods. At first they kind of followed you like a little ball of puppies. That didn't look too good. Every time you took a step, they did too. Every time you stopped, they did. It was kind of like having a squad of Groucho Marx's following you around. Eventually we came up with the idea of giving each squad mate a path. They would try to stay on their path at a fixed distance ahead of or behind you. That seemed to work pretty well. Next we had to add attack AI, which was pretty easy. The hardest part was making them stay out of your way and not be annoying. Then, on top of all this, we added idle animations and speech to make it feel more polished. We also scripted them to do specific things in certain situations. Our intent was to use AI and scripting to make it feel like they were really "with" you- they knew what was going on and reacted to whatever was happening. It seems like it turned out pretty well, judging by the feedback we've been getting. Another issue we had to constantly fine-tune was friendly-fire feedback. We didn't want them to look stupid and ignore you shooting them, but we also didn't want to make the game frustrating and allow you to easily and accidentally kill a teammate. So we made it so that they would complain a few times about being shot and only turn on you if you kept shooting them or killed one of them. In combat, we made it more lenient- they would still complain, but never turn on you if you shot them.

DGD: Would you say that the team has designed a single-player game with Deathmatch (pardon, Holomatch) capability or a multi-player game with single-player capability?
Brian Pelletier: Since we were using the Star Trek Voyager license, our main emphasis was on creating a single player FPS that immersed the player in the Star Trek Universe. With most FPS games coming out lately being geared to just multiplayer, we wanted to go back to creating an enjoyable story to play a game in. Still, the Holomatch part of the game is half the product and we spent a lot of time trying to add new features, while staying true to Quake III Arena. We didn't want to change it too much because we wanted those players to feel comfortable with it when they sat down the first time to play it.

DGD:The interactive cut-scenes seem to be used in a creative fashion. How are these used to create a separate feel for the gameplay?
Brian Pelletier: The interactive scenarios add to the gameplay by making the player think about what they are doing, and not just instinctively doing something. When involved in an interactive event the player's reaction afterwards is different. They think about what just happened and say, "What would have happened if I didn't do that or did something different". This is where the game goes from being linear, where everything happens the same way, to an unpredictable environment where the player's actions change the outcome of events and even the storyline. Our hope is that players replay the scenarios and try something different to see all of the potential outcomes.

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