There are two schools of thought about cinematics, the non-interactive scenes often used as chapter breaks in videogames.

Some – we’re looking at you, Blizzard Entertainment – try to cram in as much FX ‘wow’ power as possible, overwhelming gamers with flashes of retina candy and thundering sound before switching back to the oft-clunkier look and feel of the actual game. Others try to blend the two together.

‘I have gamer friends who want cinematics in general to be less than they are now,’ says Omar Morsy, lead animator of cinematics at Ubisoft (Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell) in Montreal, because the too-flashy ones detract from the game as a whole. He believes a more even-handed style is catching on.

‘That means the game itself has to be much nicer,’ he adds.

But this move towards ‘cinematic gaming’ is hard on the makers of animation software, in that programming for realtime environments is much more complex and unpredictable. ‘You have to tell everything what to do,’ says Dave Campbell, product marketing manager at Montreal manufacturer Discreet, makers of 3ds max. ‘Triggering events, surface qualities, AI, sound files, everything that the actual game handles… More and more we need to replicate the game engine in the art package.’

Software packages are also now expected to do a lot of fine-touch work with faces and body language, keeping up with a trend that has seen increasingly complex emotions written into games.

‘This is key to the development of interactive entertainment – being able to create levels of expression like those in books or film… so that characters are more life-like instead of scarily, eerily wooden,’ says Gareth Morgan, senior product manager at Montreal’s Softimage, makers of the development kit XSI. His company recently scored serious bonus points when Washington-based Valve Software used XSI to animate its Half-Life 2, one of the most hotly anticipated titles of the year.

Morgan says it was XSI’s strength with character animation that attracted Valve and, as if to drive the point home, a free, stripped-down version of the software, XSI EXP, has already been released so that dedicated gamers can animate their own Half-Life 2 characters. The game itself is due in stores sometime this summer for PC and Xbox.

Softimage is a leader in character animation, a reputation the company hopes to maintain by touting its Behavior package, which, says Morgan, is tailored to the ‘very challenging’ task of rendering large crowds.

Edmonton gamemaker BioWare (Knights of the Old Republic) is also looking to take character animation to the next level with its next title, Jade Empire. The company teamed with Giant Studios of L.A., following that outfit’s commendable work on The Lord of the Rings, to motion-capture the game’s complex kung fu moves.

Better character animation is also attracting better voice talent. Eric Bana, star of the Hulk movie, is heard in Radical Entertainment’s popular adaptation, and some recent U.S.-made titles have featured the A-list likes of Judi Dench, Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe.

Actor Michael Ironside has voiced two Splinter Cell games for Ubisoft to considerable acclaim and, for the sequel, Pandora Tomorrow, was teamed with costar Dennis Haysbert and composer Lalo Schifrin. Talking with Playback at the Pandora launch party, Ironside remarked that, until recent advances in animation, he didn’t like the idea of voicing a game.

‘But now, as the technology becomes more sophisticated, it can bring through that living, breathing aspect of an actor,’ he said, citing the movie Finding Nemo as an example. ‘The characters look like the actual actors. There’s a certain amount of Ellen DeGeneres in her character. There’s Albert Brooks in Nemo’s father.’

But can the end-user hardware keep up with this kind of film-quality animation? The current generation of home consoles – the Xbox, PlayStation 2 and GameCube – has been on the market for a few years and is beginning to show its age. Sony startled industry watchers at last month’s Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA, when it announced that it would keep the PS2 on the market until 2010, twice as long as most had expected. Microsoft and Nintendo are not expected to release their next-gen systems until 2005 or 2006.

Danielle Michael, VP of business development at Vanouver-based Radical (Hulk, The Simpson’s Hit & Run), concedes that the ‘wow’ factor on consoles will level off somewhat – gaming animation will be about ‘evolution not revolution’ for the next few years – but adds that designers can still surprise us, because they now have a much more thorough understanding of each system’s abilities. ‘They can really push the hardware to the absolute limit,’ she says.

-www.discreet.com

-www.softimage.com