Joel_VanEenwyk
Spaceman
Hi all!
Thanks for all the positive responses!
Sonic TH: No, we are not using the "Fusion Engine" of Descent 3. It is a completely new engine designed from the ground-up, although it does build off previous engines I've made. I started calling it the Fusion Engine a few months ago, but had no idea that Descent 3's engine was called that as well...suppose I should find a new name now to avoid confusion.
gevatter Lars: We are using OpenGL for the engine, but do not worry about the problems with ATI cards. There are some "issues" with ATI driver compatibility on newer features, but mostly they are just differences in how things are handled. Some things that are supported on nVidia cards are not handled properly (or not even supported) on ATI cards, but the same is true the other way around. All features and effects will be supported on both, and "hacks" will be used if they're not supported. We are also adding in lots of backward compatibility features so that older cards can still experience some of the cool effects. HDR, for example, is not supported on older cards, but there are tricks to faking blooms and such, and that's a priority for us as we don't want to limit our audience to only those with high-end cards. But in the future, I do plan to add DirectX support; however, this is not high on the priority list, because OpenGL is supported on all major platforms (except of course for some consoles).
As Howard has already said, this demo is mainly for demo'ing the features of the engine. However, lots of the gameplay elements and the architecture for that is being tested in the demo...just behind the scenes. The completion of this demo will be a major milestone for us and the engine, and progress will be much faster once that framework is complete and tested.
Again, thanks everyone for the positive feedback!
~Joel
Thanks for all the positive responses!

Sonic TH: No, we are not using the "Fusion Engine" of Descent 3. It is a completely new engine designed from the ground-up, although it does build off previous engines I've made. I started calling it the Fusion Engine a few months ago, but had no idea that Descent 3's engine was called that as well...suppose I should find a new name now to avoid confusion.

gevatter Lars: We are using OpenGL for the engine, but do not worry about the problems with ATI cards. There are some "issues" with ATI driver compatibility on newer features, but mostly they are just differences in how things are handled. Some things that are supported on nVidia cards are not handled properly (or not even supported) on ATI cards, but the same is true the other way around. All features and effects will be supported on both, and "hacks" will be used if they're not supported. We are also adding in lots of backward compatibility features so that older cards can still experience some of the cool effects. HDR, for example, is not supported on older cards, but there are tricks to faking blooms and such, and that's a priority for us as we don't want to limit our audience to only those with high-end cards. But in the future, I do plan to add DirectX support; however, this is not high on the priority list, because OpenGL is supported on all major platforms (except of course for some consoles).
As Howard has already said, this demo is mainly for demo'ing the features of the engine. However, lots of the gameplay elements and the architecture for that is being tested in the demo...just behind the scenes. The completion of this demo will be a major milestone for us and the engine, and progress will be much faster once that framework is complete and tested.
Again, thanks everyone for the positive feedback!
~Joel