Outside the door you spot a speeder bike. As you dodge laser blasts, you use your Jedi powers to make the long leap through the opening to safety. Picture the scene: you're being pursued by a horde of Stormtroopers and while dashing down a corridor, you spot a doorway leading outside. When you switch to the third-person view you really get a sense of the scale and enormity of some of the levels, especially when you venture outside. It almost goes without saying that some of the levels have to be seen to be believed.

Depending on what view you're playing in, it will look as good as either Tomb Raider or Quake in default resolutions.Īnd as you would expect, Jedi Knight is designed to take advantage of Direct3D and specific 3D accelerator cards, and extra frames of animation, translucent effects and an improved frame rate will transform it into something that's just as remarkable as Tomb Raider running under 3Dfx and Open GL Quake. Once all the objects and textures have been sorted, they'll start working on the frame rate, and providing your machine can handle the rigours of Windows 95, your Jedi Knight won't limp along in jerko-vision in the standard-res modes. This is very early code remember, and as such all the debugging shit is still in there, and it's slowing everything down massively. Of course, such graphical lushness comes at a price, and although the levels we saw had all the elements in place, things were chugging along in only a half-screen window on a Pentium 120, although this was largely down to the sound cutting in and slowing everything down - a problem that LucasArts are confident they can easily fix when everything's finally been pulled together. This is the beginning of a new era for us.'

It's this technology that will keep LucasArts at the forefront of game design.

We can create massive levels for the player to explore and build, with multiple levels, slopes and wide open spaces - it's just awesome. 'This engine can pretty much do anything we want it to. 'We wanted to be able to say to the level designers, this is your world, go and create the best levels you can,' maintains project leader Justin Chin.

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