By:
Altor Sys

Time to take a quick gander at yet another 3D first person action/adventure game. We're pretty sure that most of you haven't yet heard of Nightfall by Altor Sys (actually you've probably never heard of Altor Sys either, right?). Thus, what in the hell has Nightfall got in terms of 'meat' to make sure that it stands rigid against umpteen other 3D first person action/adventure games? Well, if you're looking for the chance to go postal, then Nightfall won't necessarily be the right remedy for you. Altor Sys has made it clear that they are trying to veer away from the mainstream 'kill anything that tries to get jiggy with it'. Instead, they're heading in the direction of exploration and puzzle solving but without the essence of 'fragging'. You play the role of an eminent archaeologist who happens to be exploring an Egyptian cave. Then, like a bolt from the blue, an Earthquake strikes and the cave um… 'caves' in. Fallen rocks then obscure the exit. Oops.... Thus, your goal is to find your way out whilst exploring and puzzle solving within the vast rooms, tombs and under water passages. Ultimately your quest evolves into finding a tele-porter to another planet- somewhat reminiscent of the Star Gate flick.

Nightfall's 3D engine is an in-house custom built animal, which should be able to deliver many of the modern day features that we all want to take for granted nowadays. High geometrical complexity will be the order of the day, with rooms containing hundreds of polygons, and levels being composed of millions of polygons to boot. Customary real-time lighting will be coined with portal rendering that will be tailored for dynamic scene culling and hyperspace effects. The hardware renderers will utilize mip-mapping for crisper and filtered texture rendering as well. And if you're looking for lighting effects in Nightfall (isn't that a bit ironic?) then you'll be glad to know that a volumetric lighting model will be implemented via dynamic light source shading depicting colored fog, dust, mist, glows and other effects.

At this stage, Nightfall seems to be heading in the direction of Tomb Raider, minus the guns and oversized (and overpixelated?) mid-rift. It could be turn out being pretty sophisticated and visually impressive with its sharp 3D engine for 'all the family'. Apparently you might even learn something too by taking in the surrounding Egyptian culture. Nightfall is set for a late Q4 1999 release and we'll keep you in the loop. In the meantime take a look at the two new shots grabbed from their latest build of their hardware accelerated 3D engine.