Heavy Gear II

• Title — Heavy Gear II • Developer — Activision • Publisher — Activision • Director — Jack Mamais • Producer — Eveline M. Cureteau • Designer — David White • Programmer — Jean-Marc Morel • Artist — Danny Matson • Writer — Ted Peterson Robert Berger • Composer — Albert Lloyd Olson • Series — Heavy Gear • Released — Windows Linux April 5, 2000 • Genre — First-person shooter Vehicle simulation • Modes — Single-player multiplayer • Platforms — Windows, Linux

An atrocity caused by the New Earth Concordat (NEC) — the destruction of the Badlands city of Peace River by an antimatter bomb — leads to a formal cease-fire between the Northern and Southern Leagues. A team of elite Special-Ops pilots from across the planet, equipped with advanced prototype Gears and a newly unveiled intersystem assault shuttle, are sent through the interstellar Tannhauser gate to the planet Caprice, the nearest NEC base, to find out more and strike back at the enemy.

Heavy Gear II incorporates third-person and stealth elements.

Development of Heavy Gear II began during the autumn of 1997 with an aggressive 13 month schedule which aimed to ship the game in autumn 1998. The Heavy Gear II team was a newly formed group within Activision, composed of some of the best and brightest employees that the firm had available, each of whom had experience working on several 3D games previously. The design team wanted to move away from the larger BattleMech style gears as found in the original Heavy Gear, and to smaller, more agile gears, staying truer the Heavy Gear universe and allowing for faster paced and more diverse gameplay. Work began on a new game engine, named Dark Side, to power the title. Built in C++, the first priority for the engine was stability, with a focus on memory management and leak tracking, allowing developers to spot memory leaks as soon as they occurred, rather than later on in a test cycle. By adopting a modular approach to their engine design, developers could easily switch in and out different systems as they experimented during the development process. Although there were debates within the team regarding the issue, it was concluded that software rendering was insufficient to deliver on the teams' visual goals, and so support was dropped from the engine, making video cards a necessity to run Heavy Gear II. This allowed the team to focus on delivering a single high quality product, saving the team from having to replicate in-game assets at lower level of details for lower specification machines, cutting time in production and testing. By targeting only video card equipped machines, Heavy Gear II could feature more units on screen and greater environmental detail. Offloading the visual rendering to dedicated video cards allowed for CPU cycles to be freed up for other uses such as AI systems. The approach to AI was to go for a high level "autopilot" system, whereby non-player characters could decide for themselves what objectives to achieve and how to go about it. This reduced the need for individually scripted actions, and enforced a consistent feel across all missions. Enemy units have a tactical awareness on the battlefield, and will keep track of the successes and failures of different approaches against the player character, varying their tactics depending on the situation. Enemy units may split off into separate fireteams, call upon reinforcements or order artillery strikes against the player. Multiplayer was an important element in the game, and it was implemented using an internal Activision networking SDK early in development, before even the single-player portion of the game. Although co-operative multiplayer was also planned, this feature had to be dropped, as it proved impossible to populate the game with enough enemy units to make the game challenging. The missions designed for the planned co-op mode were, however, saved for the standalone single-player "Historic Missions" in the final game. Despite the experience of the team, Heavy Gear II did not adhere to the intended schedule. The team underestimated the work needed to produce a demo, and did not factor in costs involved with employee turnover into their original schedule. When the game was released in June 1999, it had missed the intended ship date by approximately nine months. This slippage also had a negative impact on the effectiveness of the marketing campaign. The Dark Side engine would be used again in Activision's Interstate '82, released later that year. In October 1999, Loki Software was assigned to port Heavy Gear II across to Linux. The Linux port took Loki Software approximately 6 months to complete, and was described by Loki as "their most challenging product to date". As Heavy Gear II uses Microsoft's proprietary Direct3D API for graphical rendering, Loki had to port this to OpenGL in order for it to run on Linux. To realise the game's 3D sound on Linux, Loki worked with support from Creative Technology to build an open standard audio API from scratch with a cross-platform free software implementation, named OpenAL. Heavy Gear II was the first Direct3D game to be ported to OpenGL, and was the first to implement OpenAL. The Linux port was released in April 2000, and a demo followed in June.