As some of you may be aware, I worked on the I-War games as a designer. If you've got any questions about the games, their development, or history, then please feel free to ask.

I can't promise to be able to answer everything, after all, 10 years is a long time , so details may be fuzzy :-)

I own the original and the follow up! I just want to personally thank you for these games. They stand alone in their quality and detail, and the story is one of the best in Sci-Fi computer games!

I hope you are doing really really well in your life, because if anyone deserves that, it's the team that worked on these games!

I take it you don't want to talk about who you work for now?

I'd like to personally thank you too - I've spent many, many hours of my life playing these games and intend to spend many more! You all did a tremendous job in creating something completely new. There's still no other space game or sim quite like Independence War.

On with the questions:

Whatever happened to the Lander - it's on the boxart and in the manual of my boxed original UK copy of the game, but the mission(s) featuring it don't seem to be in the games?

And who designed the ships and their systems and how did they approach this - I'm still staggered by how complex the science and engineering theories behind the Dreadnaught and systems are!

Thanks for the kind words - it was an incredible team effort, and I was only one of the team. I wasn't even part of the company originally. I joined them in time to get I-War ready for the US release. But I'd worked with them at the publisher, and I was a tremendous fan of the game, so when it came to getting a job with them - which entailed moving my famiy 200 miles, I jumped at the chance.

The lander - called an LST for Landing Ship/Tank was originally planned to be in two missions where you escort LSTs from orbit to a planet's surface. The intention was to use real orbital mechanics, but in testing it was found to be too confusing and the missions were dropped. The mission scripts were actually on the disc in the original release (not sure if they're in the deluxe version), and someone actually fixed them up and released them at one point as a mod. You can probably find them on the net somewhere.

The Dreadnaught was originally designed by Particle System's founders Michael Powell and Glyn Williams, and was brought to life by the artists at Particle, Andy Turner, Michael Todd and Matt Clark. The ships themselves were designed under the principle of 'form follows function', so the Corvette's hull is circular because it's built around the collider ring. You can see how carefully they thought it all out by looking at the cut-aways in the manual. The whole idea was to make a proper starship simulator, rather than the 'WW2 fighter in space' approach that other games had taken.

The engine cover on the back of the ship was originally designed to be a heat-sink with fins, like the heat-sink on a modern computer processor, but they changed it when they realised that it wouldn't work the same way in a vacuum. The cover is still known as the 'waste heat array' though.

So my question is ... how is Independence War 3 coming along? :P

I wish ...

We had some ideas for Independence War 3, but I'm not going to disclose them just in case I ever get the chance to put them into action!

I wish! If I win the lottery I'll hire all the Particle staff... though that's another question, where have they all gone? Do any of them still work in game design?

They've all scattered to various companies and countries. Some of the artists now do contract CGI work, the designers and programmers now mostly work for different developers, one artist got a job with Pixar for a while. Some of the team I still work with, others I've not seen in years.

How many ppl was working on iwar games? counting without the paper side work (marketing etc)

The original team who developed I-War was six(!) people.

I-War 2 had around 30 people working full-time on it.

I read that all the cinematics (include the epic intro movie) were entirely animated by TWO PEOPLE.

That blew my mind...

There were a total of four artists (including the art director) and two programmers (including the technical director).

Remember that it's not just the intro movie they worked on, there's all the in-game cinematics too.

The sad thing is that the original movie files were lost years ago. They were stored in TV quality on an animation recording PC, which got wiped for use in later projects. I only found out when the first DVD encoding software became available, and I decided to do a DVD version of the movies, because the original Indeo codec and bink versions weren't high quality and didn't really do the movies justice. I was aghast when I found the original edited movies had been wiped!

The reason was In those days mass storage and backup for large files was very expensive so the rendered movies weren't backed up. The intention was if the movies were needed again they'd be re-rendered, as the source files were much smaller, but it turned out that was impractical. In retrospect it would have been better just to copy them off onto another hard disk. Oh well.