Products and Technology
A Fork in the Tale is a five CD live-action adventure game shot with a
first-person perspective. Fork offers lightning fast action, a whole cast
of characters with whom the player will interact, and a variety of challenging
game-play elements. Adventure gamers are right at home with Fork's inventive
puzzles, plus new game elements including magical gestures, defensive weapons,
chase scenes, and an interactive fist fight add a new dimension to the
category.
Fork was shot over a period of 28 days across 8 locations in Marin County,
California. A total of fifty actors and extras were involved.
ARi has created a solution, a technological breakthrough called the "Immersion
Engine." The result allows "A Fork in the Tale" to feature
seamless branching video with spontaneous interactivity. The system takes
video clips, mixes them with sound, allows graphics to be overlaid, and
creates complex scripts in which multiple paths move the player from video
clip to clip -- and makes it all flow like a movie, except that it is interactive
as well. Another feature is that the engine remembers what the player
has already seen, and presents only new materials based upon the story
development. Normally, a computer will proceed in a linear fashion, finishing
one task before begining the next -- and on a CD, this can mean a delay
of up to a half-second with no action while the read-head repositions itself.
The Immersion Engine takes a different approach utilizing asynchronous
searches. When the game player clicks on a desired action, the program
initiates an immediate search to the new clip while it continues to play
buffered data of the current clip. By the time the current clip has finished
playing, the next clip is ready to go--creating some of the smoothest audio/video
ever captured on a CD ROM.
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