Hello. Is there any documentation on the engine that Free Radical Design used to make Timesplitters: Future Perfect and Haze? I believe they used the same engine for both and that it's an in-house engine, but I could be wrong. Sorry about the naïveté of my question, I was just curious. Many thanks
I would greatly like to know as well. I remember many people modding the ps2 version back in the day and uploading some crazy glitched levels.
I've not heard of that - what do you mean? Do you mean via the built in mapmaker, or actually modding the single-player levels?
The same engine was used for the whole TimeSplitters series and Haze, but with major upgrades to it in between. It was very code driven, just about every asset had hard-coded references and all game logic was handled in C, so mods would be really difficult to do. Lovely codebase to work with though, the API was very well thought out (for the time), but was a portability nightmare since there were 32-bit pointers baked into the assets (direct reads of structures from file)
I meant uploading levels via the mapmaker which did many things the mapmaker did not allow. Some of it was very bizarre, almost seizure-inducing. I think I still have some of them on my memory card. There is one level where there is almost like an infinite-staircase effect like in Mario 64, using warp points or something (Future Perfect).
I see. That does sound very interesting! I loved the built-in mapmakers, but the memory pool was sadly too small, meaning that's yet another reason why I'd really love a new Timesplitters game for the PS4/XBox One. The memory pool allocated to the map maker on modern machines could allow for very large or complex maps.
The mapmaker was the main reason I got the games. I will never forget the music that played while you were making maps. But don't be sad! In this modern age you can just download Unreal Engine 4 with some premade templates and make anything you want very easily!
Nice job Would it be okay if I contacted you through PMs? I have a few questions regarding the engine as I've heard that, in the end, upgrades to it caused FRD a lot of trouble with their Battlefront 3 project? Thanks!
I'm afraid that's all under heavy NDA, sorry! I can answer light technical questions about the TS2 port I did, that's about it really.
I totally understand dude, I'll get that PM to ya in a couple days. You've definitely peaked my interest though. I've heard murmurings that there were quite a lot of remnants of the BF3 project left in the engine, especially as you said a lot of the assets for Haze and TS were hardcoded into the engine Cheers!
