I'm certainly glad you think so, but Carey Chico and Wil Stahl had more to do with the visual appearance of the weapons than I did. I created the particle system and documented it so that an artist or designer could use it without too much trouble. Right before E3, Carey and Wil went and replaced the "stub" weapon effects with much better ones.

Which weapons can we expect to make a comeback from the original Battlezone?

Almost all of the original weapons, especially the basic ones, will make it back into BZ2, but some will likely have significant changes. The most pervasive change is that there are some new hardpoint types (Gun and Missile) and weapon roles (Strike and Assault), preventing some incongruous weapon choices. However, there is a new Gun-hardpoint weapon that combines some of their characteristics; it fires a continuous beam, but rapidly decays in strength over a brief interval (like the laser rifle in Starsiege Tribes).

Which one that's returning has changed the most?

The largest change is in the Comet Cruise missile. Previously, the Comet Cruise missile was probably the most fire-and-forget weapon in the entire game, and was insanely powerful as well. One Comet could literally wipe out an entire squadron of vehicles without any trouble. In BZ2, the Comet will instead be a remote-controlled "vehicle" that the pilot must guide in manually, a la Starglider. In a way, it's a bit like the Redeemer missile in Unreal Tournament.

The MITS mine is a close runner-up. In BZ1, it automatically activated one second after you dropped it, making it way too easy to get stuck in it yourself. In BZ2, it will have an enemy-sensitive proximity trigger, just like a proximity mine. It's a very simple behavior change that makes it far more useful. You could lay out a field of them as a nasty little trap.

Can you give us a description of one of the new weapons?

One of the new weapons is the Scorcher, a vehicle-mounted version of the flame emitter from the Solar Flare mine. It fires a relatively short-range stream of superheated plasma that can burn down a vehicle literally within a few seconds. As a "diffuse damage" weapon, it's not as effective against heavily-armored objects like the Assault Tank, the Walker, or buildings.

Do you have a favorite at this point?

Not yet. I'll wait until all the weapons have been implemented before I choose one.

Will you be sneaking in something that will top the rave gun?

Of course. The most interesting one is called the Hailstorm. Imagine a Solar Flare mine that spews a hailstorm of Popper shells that explode into big purple fireballs and fire miniaturized Blast Cannon beams. When dropped in the middle of a crowd of enemies, it's like the Fourth of July. To add injury to insult, it explodes like a Day Wrecker when it's done.

What's the most challenging part of creating great looking weapon effects?

The hardest part is making sure the frame rate doesn't drop too much. It's way too easy to make the game drop down to one frame per second by filling the screen with dozens of layers of particles. The worst offenders are dense clumps of long-lived smoke puffs. The Hornet Missile and Rocket Bomb trails are some of the biggest troublemakers, as are the smoke clouds generated by collapsing buildings

Are most of your coolest weapons minutely planned out before you touch the code, or are they discovered by just playing around?

Because of the way the weapon system and particle system are implemented, most of the effects work is done by modifying external configuration files. In fact, the only code changes that have been made recently have been some performance optimizations in the particle system. It's so easy to experiment with weapon effects that all of the good effects were created by simple experimentation. I was able to create a new personal-scale rocket weapon just like the one in Quake 3: Arena in less than half and hour.

What improvements in weapon effects are now possible that couldn't be accomplished in original Battlezone?

BZ1 used 256-color palettized textures, even with hardware acceleration, which put a bit of a damper on how colorful the weapon effects could be. There were only a few pre-defined colors in the game's palette (a few greens, blues, and oranges). BZ2 is hardware only, and has no restrictions on color or transparency at all. The result is that the effects in BZ2 can be far more colorful and interesting, but with that freedom comes responsibility; it's really easy to go way overboard.

What types of effects that you'd like to create are still difficult/impossible?

It's hard to get nice-looking volumetric smoke effects like missile contrails and dust clouds that don't slow the game down too much. Dynamic lighting is still too costly to use as extensively as I would like.

Are there min. system or card issues?

Right now, BZ2 leans on your graphics card really hard, especially in the fill-rate department. A Voodoo 1 is the absolute minimum-performance graphics card to play the game with any reasonable speed. I have a TNT and Voodoo 2 in my computer and both run fine.

We hear you're from New Orleans, so we just had to ask - is all that voodoo stuff real?

I haven't seen it myself, but there are plenty of people who honestly believe in it.

Will there be any 'voodoo weapons' in the future of the Battlezone universe?