| Submitted by , posted on 26 May 2003 |

Image Description, by Pigs Might Fly was developed as a group project for the 3rd year of a Computer Science degree at University of Bristol, UK. The website is http://www.pigs-might-fly.com. PMF is a two player arcade game with the two opponents being a flying pig and a wolf in a bi-plane. The object to get as many points as possible in 5 minutes. There are several ways to get points, follow check points and finish in the fastest time possible, grab powerups and shoot things or grab the hidden bonuses, like the Balloon Burst Bonus!.
The original gameplay plan was that the checkpoints were the main goal, but during testing it became apparent people were more interested in grabbing the powerups and shooting eachother! So the gameplay shifted emphasis from first through the finishline to who could amass the most points.
The project took a little under 2500 man hours over 9 months with 5 developers.
It makes use of the departments motion pod and as such the game actually runs over four machines. One that does the game logic/input processing/pod movement, three others that provide the front and side views of the game world inside the motion pod. However, it does also run in a single machine mode, that we used whilst developing the game.
The game was orignally going to feature AI, but due to a developer dropping out became a two player game. This turned out to be in our favour as the resulting gameplay is much better than the original plan.
Features:

> - The graphics are cel-shading style (vertex shader)
> - The level design/modelling was done in Maya via a custom written export plugin
> - Uses frustum and occlusion culling (gl_nv_occlusion_query)
> - Uses a motion pod!!!
> - Arbitrary number of clients rendering views of the gameworld

There is currently no executable for download, we used Karma on an academic licence and I'm still checking what that means regarding distribution.
I will be putting up a video of the game running in the next week (the website is http://www.pigs-might-fly.com).
Team Duffman

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