The Dining Room: Last of the Big Three

February 5, 2021

Ah, the dining room. Quite possibly the largest and most complicated room to create in Sleuthhounds: Cruise. Certainly it’s in the top three, alongside the atrium and the pool. This is one of those rooms where a lot of stuff happens during multiple acts in the game. That alone would give it a great deal of complexity, but wait there's more!

Sir Reginald Price placed a heroic sculpture of his daughter in the centre of the dining room.

The dining room is divided into a lower and an upper level. As with all such rooms, this requires a bit of visual trickery. Ordinarily, when a room only has one floor, the higher a character moves in that room, the smaller they are scaled. This is to give the illusion of depth as the character appears to move farther away from camera. However, in a multi floor room, when a character moves to the upper floor they need to switch into a different scaling area so that they don't become really tiny.

The dining room boasts both a main floor and an upper balcony.

Then too, this is one of the rooms in the game that is viewed at different times of the day. So not only must the room be lit for day time hours but also for the night. That brings a whole host of issues along with it as well.

The ambiance changes dramatically at night.

While a great deal of progress has been made on the dining room, there’s still more to do. Various interactions and cutscenes still need to be finalized and the room needs to be populated with extras, as right now it feels quite deserted. For all of that, and a few other things as well, it’s coming along quite well. Once the dining room is complete, it will join the other two big rooms in the done pile. Everything else should be much easier from there.

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