General TRAOD Thread

[Caesum]

I have a question... Does your archive contain E3/ECTS Tomb of Ancients as well?

I have noticed the CHARS package contains a folder called rat swarm. I remember this being mentioned in the E3 ToA design document. Makes me wonder where else they were going to use the swarm enemy. The idea is like straight out of TR4/5.

[reborninshadow]

Originally Posted by Caesum

I have a question... Does your archive contain E3/ECTS Tomb of Ancients as well?

I have noticed the CHARS package contains a folder called rat swarm. I remember this being mentioned in the E3 ToA design document. Makes me wonder where else they were going to use the swarm enemy. The idea is like straight out of TR4/5.

I've only seen some small leftovers from the E3 version in the files I have (the room with the statue and the bridge area). Regarding the rats though, I did actually find something like that in another later version of Tomb of Ancients, not sure how it would have worked at all though or if it was actually implemented at one point.



Also here's the car placed in parisian ghetto, around one month earlier than release:

[KIKO]

The car probably didn’t add much but why remove it? Was the frame rate slowing down? Were the animations with Janice interacting with the car not finished on time?

[red_lion]

Originally Posted by KIKO

The car probably didn’t add much but why remove it? Was the frame rate slowing down? Were the animations with Janice interacting with the car not finished on time?

Janice has been moved to another place. The car in its orginal position would add nothing to the story. It would only confuse the gamer. Maybe there was not enough time to move the car near Janice in the current position.

@reborn and others. Thanks for the new information and new things. I thought to know everything by now but new things keeps popping up. Keep going with the good stuff

[Zsott]

Originally Posted by red_lion

Janice has been moved to another place. The car in its orginal position would add nothing to the story. It would only confuse the gamer.

I don't see how is it confusing. It's a car parked on the side of the street,which with an interactable npc interacts with. Plain and simple.
It has 0 involvement with the player. If anything it would make the getto a little bit more lively.
Dare I say, when the level was once one big level instead of being cut into pieces , Janice was moving around.Her interaction with the car would've been uniqe and can be seen only once. Then she goes to her current place. Maybe over time she goes back to that car and vice versa.

[Caesum]

Originally Posted by reborninshadow

I've only seen some small leftovers from the E3 version in the files I have (the room with the statue and the bridge area). Regarding the rats though, I did actually find something like that in another later version of Tomb of Ancients, not sure how it would have worked at all though or if it was actually implemented at one point.

Oh I think I know how it would have worked. It looks like they wanted to implement it in exactly the same way as in TR4 and 5. In TR4/5 a swarm is an object that consists of several meshes. All meshes are different variations of same object. Ingame the meshes are constantly swapped to produce an animation. I don't know why there are 12 cases of same rat but there are two possibilities: either there were 12 occasions in which the enemy was triggered, or there was only one place for the swarm of rats, but the amount of them was 12.

[Chamayoo]

Originally Posted by Zsott

I don't see how is it confusing. It's a car parked on the side of the street,which with an interactable npc interacts with. Plain and simple.
It has 0 involvement with the player. If anything it would make the getto a little bit more lively.
Dare I say, when the level was once one big level instead of being cut into pieces , Janice was moving around.Her interaction with the car would've been uniqe and can be seen only once. Then she goes to her current place. Maybe over time she goes back to that car and vice versa.

Yeah realistically the streets would have been full of cars instead

[Mokono]

Thank you, Ligufaca and reborninshadow, for those interesting pictures! I wonder if the motorcycle NPC was supposed to be related to Kurtis somehow, or was it a prototype model for Lara riding Kurtises bike?

[Ligufaca]

Originally Posted by reborninshadow

Also here's the car placed in parisian ghetto, around one month earlier than release:

I really wonder how it would have worked gameplay wise, like, if Lara was front of it and stuff, or was it just a one time thing? Interesting nonetheless!

Have any unused animations for Luther Rouzic's character model shown up?

Sadly no animations for Luther Rouzic, seems he was dropped sometime around autumn 2002.

[Girafarig32]

Maybe the car glitched when Lara ran into it and she runs off into the air to her death like in TRLA?

As someone has said before, they probably couldn't make Janice interacting with a car AND move her to another location where Lara could interact with her possible, so they probably cut the car and made it simpler. Or maybe the car was removed because they were trying to move it closer to Janice's other location, but scrapped it instead. We can only speculate.

We see parked cars in Prague, but if Janice was supposed to interact with the car we would expect that the car also had exhaust and a person inside. So if they cut Janice there, they wouldn't just have some random dude hanging out in an idle car and could have cut it for this reason as well, rather than removing the guy and the exhaust.

Really we could be asking this question about a lot of things. Just look how many versions of parisian backstreets there were. You have to wonder why they decided to move things around a million times when the game was on serious time constraints (not criticizing in any way, I have no idea what actually happened aside from the devs were rushed and there were so many versions).