Nightfall
You are an eminent archaeologist exploring an Egyptian tomb for signs of a wonderful secret. Suddenly an earthquake hits the area. You are stunned by rocks and blackout. When you wake up you are trapped, the entrance covered with rocks. Do you wait to be rescued, and risk more aftershocks, or gather up your notes and find another way out? Has anyone been this way before you, and who or what lies in the chambers beyond?
Nightfall was one of the first adventure games in real-time 3D. It was of the Myst kind, set in a world devoid of life and thus based solely on puzzles with no dialog at all. I don't know if it had any inventory-based puzzles; none of the reviews elaborate on this point, and the demo has long since vanished from the Internet.
I got interested in Nightfall mainly because of its custom 3D engine, The Altor engine.
Why make another 3D simulation when there are so many out there? To cut a long story short, we were aiming to do something very different from the engines currently published. Most real time 3D games involve a lot of shooting, and a little puzzle solving. Just try a level of your favourite game and count how many shots you must fire or entities you kill to the number of switches clicked or objects moved into special places. This is a very succesful mix, but a lot of people who enjoy puzzle solving are missing out on the experience of real time 3d (sorry—panoramic images are not the same!). However, to date we haven't been able to buy one where there is a lot of puzzle solving and little or no violence. So we decided to make one!
The Altor engine could handle huge, detailed textures and supports varied interaction with the 3D environment. It was incapable of handling curved surfaces. All objects in the game were sprites, and things like water sprouts or lava looked rather ridiculous. The CD came with some some tools and source code:
- An editor, for laying out the architecture, placing objects within it, setting lighting, behaviors, textures etc.
- Custom resource file builder—formatting data such as images to be efficiently used by the game.
- Custom palette builder—Nightfall requires texture palettes in a specific layout, and this tool can aid in this.
In addition, some source code is provided, to enable you to customize the AI, user interface, puzzle behavior, and audio playback. This is packaged as a plugIn—a dynamically linked library (DLL) for Nightfall.
The editor is the full production version—almost anything we can do, you can potentially do to.
I could not find out what kind of license would have applied to games created with the Altor engine.
