First Pioneer Demo Delayed

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. :p

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
 
Ah thats good to hear. I am also interested in how you will "fake" features like HDR.
A sidenote about new effects...I hope you don't overuse them. When I look at some of the newer games they overuse it totaly. Everything is so shine and glomy and has reflections and so on. The worst thing I have seen was a person with a skin that made him look like he was made out of plastic.
Still from the stuff you have posted I don't think I have to worry, do I?

Do you allready have some min/max specs on what systems your demo will run?
With max I mean what is the minimal configuration I need to play the game with all features enabled and at...lets say 1280x1024 resolution?

Since you mentioned consoles...are you planing on porting the game to any console? And if so what system?
 
Vermin said:
good thing derek smart hasnt read that ;) we would be having a war right about now.
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A verbal battle between Derek Smart and LOAF would be something I would pay a great deal of money to see. Mainly because I kinda dislike Derek Smart, and I'm slowly learning to really like LOAF. And I'm pretty sure LOAF would win. Great fun would be had by all.

Anyhow, as for the overuse of effects...We're trying to stay away from it. Subtlety is the key, in my mind. HDR blooms when looking at the sun are reasonable. Same with looking at the reflection of the sun off a cockpit window. Not so much (at all) for the reflection coming off the hull.
I'll leave the minimum system requirement stuff to Joel, but I am able to answer the console question. No - we are not porting this to a console. We aren't made of money. And any method of putting this game on any console - any at all - would require ownership of the Privateer license. We don't have that, I'm sure you're surprised to know. :)
No consoles.
 
There's no way to win an argument with Derek Smart, for one reason:
Derek Smart doesn't have to make sense, in order to feel he's won. Same with his software, actually... :D
note: That doesn't mean he actually wins. It just means he THINKS he wins.
 
Howard Day said:
A verbal battle between Derek Smart and LOAF would be something I would pay a great deal of money to see. Mainly because I kinda dislike Derek Smart, and I'm slowly learning to really like LOAF. And I'm pretty sure LOAF would win. Great fun would be had by all.
Click to expand...

Derek Smart spent about a year occasionally posting to alt.games.wing-commander between Prophecy and Secret Ops' release. The best fight was resolved by Boomer, Origin's online public relations guy back in the day.
 
Oh goodie. Any chance of getting a transcript of that conversation?
I'm sure it's a long shot - but no harm in asking, yes?
 
No consoles.
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But you can license it for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer for just *one dollar*! And by the year 2006, which by my watch it is right now, the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer will have completely replaced the VCR, LP player and best friend! Thanks, Trip!

Anyway, you can dig around Deja!Google and find old Derek Smart/alt.games.wing-commander stuff. I haven't found the Boomer post (which was pretty much the end for Dr. Smart in agwc), but here he is thinking young LOAF is cute:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp...?q="Derek+Smart"&rnum=7&#doc_5b58776c4f93f9cc

I actually don't mind Derek Smart all that much. He's a great, great, great PR machine... and his posting gets exactly what he wants. It's amazing that people at message boards ten years later who wouldn't know a newsgroup from a coelacanth still know who Derek Smart is and that they don't like him (and lets face it, love them or lump them, it's remarkable that his BC3k stuff has gone as far as it has).
 
As long as it will run on a 2.0 GHz processor with 512 MB of RAM and a 64 MB graphics card I'll be happy. ^_^
 
lijuin: It should run fairly well on that. Won't be able to do any of the really fancy effects, and I think some of the ship textures will be half-res, but it'll still look pretty cool. The main effects you'll be loosing are the fancy ambient occlusion stuff and the motion bluring. Maybe the screen heat distortions. Nothing that's absolutely necessary for the game to look good.I'll let Joel correct me here if I'm off-base.

LOAF: Thanks for finding that. Had no idea those resources even existed. I guess you learn something new every day. Out of curiosity, what was Dr (snicker) Smart arguing about when boomer popped in? (Andy Hollis, congratulations, and plz read this!!!)?
As for my reasons for not particuarly liking Derek Smart - they're a fair bit more personal than most people might imagine. It stems from my work experience under a boss that could very well be Smart's clone. Blown-out-of-proportion PR and bullshit may be evetually acceptable in the course of hyping a game. However, when that same straight-faced lying and dishonesty refers to my next paycheck...it's not something I can let fly. The guy really wasn't honest with me - even after he found out that I had gotten another job. Still tried to convince me that we had all this money coming our way if we stayed on a few more months.... the same story I had heard over, and over, and over for the past year and a half. Kind of disappointing. Anyhow. Hope that explains it.
 
Howard Day said:
A verbal battle between Derek Smart and LOAF would be something I would pay a great deal of money to see. Mainly because I kinda dislike Derek Smart, and I'm slowly learning to really like LOAF. And I'm pretty sure LOAF would win. Great fun would be had by all.
Click to expand...

LOAF is lovely, and also the most fanatical and enthusiastic WC'er (i swear we should start a LOAF appreciation day - sucking up too the WC god here), LOAF would win - he dosent lie and spout crap, just facts for us all, hes the WC dictionary.

Derek Smart, isnt very....smart. I just hate the guy for the lies (PHD and moon rock thing guys) like saying BC2K was the best thing since anything else that ever existed and anyone who criticized it was wrong in mr Smarts eyes and then have a war with people over the internet instead of making a decent game, in order for them too stop criticize it. i tell you when i a wee lil' wing commander fan i played BC2K (or which ever one was the worst) for the first time thinking wow this is guna be great, 10 minutes into the game i realized, crap graphics, crap (and hardly any) sound, crap physics and more bugs than the undergrowth and those 10 mins felt like 30 years of my life i was never more bored. so WC3 was fired up again.

Ive since heard that the BC games need about a Squillion patches too make them any good, if its not good out of the box, whose going too keep playing it?

back on the topic: any chance of some demo progress reports, would love too hear how close it is and the tweaks and changes :D

Vermin
 
Wow I'm very excited to hear there's a tech demo on the horizon didnt think there would be anything for a ages =)

Cant wait to see it, keep up the good work guys!

Kosch
 
Hmm here I thought it was me, BC2K really did suck. Now I don't feel so bad for uninstalling it and throwing the disc away. :D Almost forgot that game ever existed.
 
Actually, one reason there are less viruses for Macs because the user base is so small compared to Windows. If you are going to take the time and effort to write a virus, would you rather target 90% (random number) of the population or 10%?
 
That reminds me of the browser discussion. What is more secured IE or Firefox. I say none of them. People found more errors in IE because their are just more people using it...and as the Mac has proven to me nether system (PC/Mac) is more save or stable then the other...its just the person using it.

@Howard
I had PMed you but you didn't replayed so...I just wanted to ask if you could post a screen of the cockpit without the textures or even to one of these little movs.
 
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