Gallius IV Discussion Board

I'm probably not the only one to notice that the original Deadlock game had some pretty decent character animations for their time. While not very 'lifelike' they were memorable and aged very well. Then Deadlock II came around and all of that was replaced with... cheap crap.

Does anyone here know why the original character animations were replaced? I REALLY loved watching the Cyth insult with that 'proper' CGI animation, verses that flat and unremarkable junk we got in the sequel. What caused the quality of the sequel to suffer so greatly? Did they simply take up too much data that they couldn't fit on a single CD with all the other goodies of DL2?

Hello Cyth Lord,

You can find Capelli's answers here: viewtopic.php?p=182#p182 and here: viewtopic.php?p=184#p184

Also related: DL1 and DL2 comparison viewtopic.php?f=3&t=347

Best Regards.

They are actually two completely different games as far as I can tell. I don't even think that they are built off of the same engine. They should have just improved on the original and added on a campaign.

sdu754 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 05, 2019 8:29 pmI don't even think that they are built off of the same engine.

Hi, just to add a technical background, I am writing from what I remember, feel free to correct.

DL1 was made inside Accolade.
It was built using Borland's GUI library for Windows along with WAIL (Miles sound system for Windows Multimedia). Multiplay uses Netbios.
I think the DL1 developers used Borland's GUI tools and made (almost) everything else from scratch, i.e. there is no modular game engine.

DL2 was made by Cyberlore reusing assets from DL1.
It was built using DirectX 5 libraries, they seem to be used for rendering, sound and multiplayer. They share the same archive formats from other Cyberlore games, such as Majesty. They also seem to have custom GUI rendering routines.

Still, both games use Smacker format for videos, in that manner, they could even be the exact same videos... but they decided to make new videos.
Apparently, most (if not all) of the video rendering was outsourced in both projects and they were expensive to pay.
In summary, DL1 was a large project since it required to do everything. DL2 may have started as an expansion project and was certainly much cheaper. Like we all know, most of the buildings and units are the same.
Maybe when they decided to make new videos, they didn't have the same resources to provide the same quality.

sdu754 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 05, 2019 8:29 pm They are actually two completely different games as far as I can tell. I don't even think that they are built off of the same engine. They should have just improved on the original and added on a campaign.

Matthew Ford confirmed to me when I met him that Deadlock II was based on Deadlock I's source, it originally began as Deadlock Gold. I did have some insight given by the rest of the team on this last year, still need to finish the article about that.

They seem like two completely different games. After playing Deadlock II I assumed that they scrapped the original. They should have made Deadlock II look and play like Deadlock planetary conquest and just added a campaign.