The physics themselves, while certainly impressive for 1998, have loads of quirks. Objects have a strange tendency to spawn an inch or two above the floor, only to clatter to the ground once Anne touches them. If two objects collide in a way that causes them to become wedged, the resulting physics calculations will crash the game. Since the game is absolutely rife with physics-based puzzles and combat, this can happen quite easily. Even something as innocuous as dragging a box through a doorway or throwing a rock at a raptor can cause a crash. The dinos' movements are also controlled by the physics, and the results are downright comical; they falter and flop around like muppets controlled by a drunk puppeteer. Furthermore, the physics calculations that the game performs constantly, even for basic actions like walking, are incredibly bloated and put such a strain on the CPU that even modern computers have difficulty running it. A typical PC in 1998 was nowhere near beefy enough to run Trespasser at a playable speed.
Agree wholeheartedly with the Trespasser mention.
The thing with the physics is a bit interesting, it's weird, glitchy and crashy as it is. But it was supposed to be more(and not glitchy/crashy). They had loads of smaller objects scattered around the levels, things like cups in offices and other stuff to make the world more realistic and "lived in".
The small physics objects made the physics behave even weirder and the game much, much more glitchy and crashy. But it was under development and things don't work perfectly from day 1, the physics engine will be refined and the bugs will be ironed out. So they made levels with lots of objects like that.
Later on, way past the "it never works from day 1" idea the physics engine was still a mess and the problem persisted. But it could be solved, just iron out the bugs etc.
Then the order came down from above, this is your release date so wrap it up. They scrambled to fix all the bugs, jank and crashes as the day to send the code out to manufacturing/pressing approached. But the physics, the fucking physics... At the last minute they made a decision: we must remove the small physics objects.
They couldn't just delete the resources and be done with it, they had to remove every instance of them from the levels. So they scoured the levels and item by item they deleted every small-ish object in the game by hand just before their deadline. Apparently that's why so many sections seems empty and most physics objects are relatively large. The game was still fucked up but not as fucked up as it could've been.
A contributing factor to all of this was a lack of direct and immediate communication due to a lot of team members working from home and they also had somewhat flexible hours. This made communication slow and inefficient. Minne Driver and Attenborough was really great though, a high-water mark for video games at that time. There's also a really good post-mortem on Gamasutra for anyone interested.
Trespasser also had bump mapped textures, almost the first in games, done in software because no hardware supported that effect. It did a lot of things in software and that's why running it 3d accelerated is pretty shit. A game with a similar problem was Outcast, a really ambitious hate-love game in its own right, it did some truly amazing things graphically that was beyond what graphics cards(they were entirely fixed function at the time) could do. They eventually released a patch so the game would support 3d acceleration and it, predictably, made the game run like shit.
