page_title: Blade Runner (1997 video game)
section_title: Design
hierarchical_section_title: Blade Runner (1997 video game) / Development / Design
caption_attribution_description: English: Game Developers at a BAFTA event in July 2011.
context_page_description: Blade Runner is a 1997 point-and-click adventure game developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Interactive for Microsoft Windows. The game is not a direct adaptation of the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, but is instead a "sidequel", telling an original story, which runs parallel to the film's plot, occasionally intersecting with it.
  Set in 2019 Los Angeles, the game tells the story of Ray McCoy, an elite detective charged with hunting down a group of dangerous replicants. Although several of the film's characters appear in the game, with some of the original actors returning to voice them, the film's protagonist, Rick Deckard, does not appear in a speaking role. Instead, he is referred to on multiple occasions, is seen several times, and his activities as depicted in the film are mentioned. Other parallels with the film include the reproduction of several prominent locations, as well as scenes and dialogue closely modelled on the original. The game also features extracts from the film's soundtrack.
context_section_description: The game design of Blade Runner was extremely ambitious for the available technology of the time. In contrast to many contemporaneous games, the game engine included pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D characters, but did not require the use of any hardware 3D accelerators. Designers David Leary and James Walls achieved this through a self-developed technology using voxels (pixels with width, height and depth). Castle explains,
  We had to invent a new technology for the characters. We went back to voxel technology and used it as a launching pad. What we are using is not voxels, but sort of 'voxels plus.' We use voxels to do the three-dimensional rotations, transformations, and projections that create the character, but we actually use a very fast polygon rendering engine to render the polygons to the screen. By not having to have a voxel model that is so dense that every pixel is a voxel, we were able to achieve much higher frame rates with much more polygons on the screen and have lots of characters.
  The use of voxels, however, meant 3D accelerators couldn't be used, as there would be too many polygons for a card to render. Instead, the designers used a fast rectangular rendering routine that rendered a rectangle whenever it had to draw a polygon. Speaking in 2014, Castle said "people ask me all the time "Why didn't you just use 3D?" Well, that's easy to say now we have full rendering pipelines and shaders, but back then you just didn't. You had a few vertex-shaded polygons and the texel mapping just wasn't accurate on a lot of the cards. Nowadays I'd do it all in 3D." Another reason for not using 3D accelerators was that the game features roughly 140 locations, most of them open to player exploration. Each of these locations featured millions of polygons, well beyond the capabilities of even the most high end graphics cards of the time.
  The game's environment takes up 60–65% of the CPU bandwidth, primarily because of the moving camera, but also because eight different characters can appear on screen at any one time – a large number for the technology of the time. Because of this, a powerful CPU was required to run the game, since the engine relied on the processor doing all the work in creating the 3D models. However, despite this limitation, the game runs at a minimum of 15 FPS, even on slow systems. The downside to this was that, since processor power at that time was limited, the in-game 3D models tended to look very pixelated, especially up-close and when motionless, due to the low amount of voxels used to display them. However, had the number of voxels been raised to increase the detail on the characters, the game would have become too slow to play, even on advanced CPUs.
  All character animations in the game are based on motion-captured actors, with the characters moving in the pre-rendered 3D environment. At the time, any game that attempted 1,000 motion-captured sequences was considered cutting edge; Blade Runner featured 20,000. Speaking in 2014, Castle stated
  where the technology let us down was in the time and energy needed to process the motion-capture. We were capturing at 60 frames per second, and the characters in voxel space took up so much that we had to go through them, removing those frames by hand using keyframing. The original voxel objects weighed in at around seven megabytes in size while hardware at the time could manage only about 100K. Automatic optimisation would leave them unbearably blocky, leaving Westwood to do it by hand. Naturally, the studio didn't have time for 20,000 sequences, which is why some of the game's objects look plain bizarre. It just took too long.
caption: Louis Castle, co-founder of Westwood Studios, and executive producer, art director and technical director of Blade Runner.
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