I noticed 3000AD had released seventeen (count ‘em!) minutes of footage from the flying section of their now-Beta forthcoming sci-fi multi-terrain elite-force-on-hostile-world-’em-up All Aspect Warfare electrovideogame. They’ve planning to release two more videos, one showing vehicular shenanigans and the other showing tactical fistifights. So well done them. I link to it, primarily as I’m aware that 3000AD are about as PC gaming as PC gaming gets and we’ve never said anything at all about them – and I wonder what everyone’s take on the critically divisive company actually is. Do feel free to speak. I was also considering doing one of my second-by-second running commentary of it, but… seventeen minutes, man! I have angry twitters to write in block caps.
Related Stories:
Oh wait, I did find it:
Contrary to popular belief, the I-War games did *not* have a Newtonian physics model. And even though it had a pseudo version thereof, we all know what happened to I-War 2 in the retail channel and the subsequent demise of the devs.
Thats my take on the whole subject.
I was pretty sure when were building the game that we put a decent Newtonian rigid body simulator in there, but I must have been mistaken. Tread carefully, Derek Smart, because you tread on my dreams.
I-War 2 was awesomeest. Thanks for that!
I played Universal Combat, one of the precursor games, and basically I think it’s the same game with updated graphics now. The major issues involve the interface, which is obtuse, and the tutorial, which was a block of text sixty pages long I had to _print out_ because, IIRC, the game didn’t like alt-tabbing. Furthermore the tutorial mission scenario scripting, should you deviate from instructions by one jot, became unplayable so you’d need to restart the entire thing… Just horribly painful.
As for I-War 2 and I-War, they were some of my absolute favourites. The worldbuilding that went into those games made them incredibly rich and tasty. Also, Jefferson Clay = The Man. But, I think it also had some fairly crucial interface problems, although these were dealt with excellently by the tutorial missions in I-War and the ‘child’ segment in I-War 2.
Derek Smart must be interviewed, the man’s attracted so much negative publicity that the mere mention of his name conjures images of bugs, poor implementation and broken promises. It must be like being Uwe Boll. On that, perhaps a RPS representative could box Mr. Smart post-interview, is anyone aware of his size, fitness, training or blood group?
I think we dropped the ball on the IW2 tutorial by not explaining the importance of lateral (WASD) thrusters to combat. We all knew how to do it, so it just didn’t occur to us that this was unusual, but if you play exclusively with the stick and throttle the combat can get pretty brutal.
I thought you loved independent devs here.
DS must be doing something right if his core audience is still buying his games. All his recent stuff has been self-financed hasn’t it?
He used to pop onto the Blues News forums, back when I frequented them, and while you could set him off sometimes for the most part he was polite and insightful. I personally find his games unplayable (I am currently X3TC’s utter slave, and it’s not like that’s an easy game to get into but seriously the BC series is just bonkers.) but you have to respect his integrity in sticking to “the vision”.
Okay, you don’t HAVE TO. You can just make jokes about him attacking coke machines. Whatever.
@will: Thanks so much for I-War 2. Best game in its genre I’ve played to this day. Fantastic job there mate.
@Will
Hey, I bought a copy of I-War 2 off eBay a month or two ago, never having tried it. I was very impressed, but found the game difficult to play without a joystick – the first proper fights I got into kept kicking my ass. Would you recommend getting one, or I am just pants at the game?
Anyone?
a 360 pad using x padder might well be one of the strongest options.
You can set the 2 analogue sticks to whatever combination takes your fancy and set the analgue triggers to either roll or acceleration i guess.
Probably not enough face buttons but you’ve still got a keyboard for that.
Personally I applaud Derek Smart for trying to make a game with a bit of depth and scope, and having the balls to tackle such an ambitious project. It’s a shame it doesn’t quite pull it off, but these are the sort of games that we should be encouraging a lot more of on the PC, rather than sloppy console ports. For me games like Elite, Midwinter, X-BTF etc are what home computer gaming has been all about. I can’t understand why games like this don’t get more money for development. Just imagine how good it would be if it was done “right”.
People would probably have more time for him if he and his community weren’t so angry. They make No Mutants Allowed look like my mother on a lorry full of camomile. They do actually forum ban people who persist in having problems. Alt-tab support, for example, only idiots with short memories need. Access to instant messanger is right out because you’re supposed to “dedicate yourself” to this.
I got into the X games for a while and when I got stuck their forums were polite and helpful by and large.
The hate’s not really about the games. It’s about Derek Smart being an arse.
Well that is rather sad then if he surrounds himself with sycophants and shoots his own game in the foot. I’ve never tried the game myself because I’ve always read negative reviews and comments about it, that and it does look rather ropey. However the idea of the game has always excited me whenever I’ve read about it. Taking part in huge space battles in orbit around a planet, and then flying down through the atmosphere to commence the planetary invasion, and all in multiplayer too, sounds bloody great. Now if only some one would come along and make a decent game like that.
@Chaz: Seconded.
Decent 3 had better graphics.
*sigh*
It is hard to appreciate the challenges of doing something different and something you actually want to do and love doing.
You guys can make fun of me and my games all you like but the fact is, unlike most, I still get to make the games that I want to make, regardless of who thinks, says or does what.
Best of all? I still have a job and a company going into its 14th year and a career spanning 20+ years and fourteen commercial game releases.
Nobody gets to fire me, shut my company down, cut my funding, tell me what I can/cannot create etc. So, uhm, yeah, go ahead, take your potshots.
Fact of the matter is that when you’re doing a 400 sq. km open world game that is designed to look decent at any altitude, there are lots of compromises to be made.
We’re not talking about flight games which look awesome at high altitude and shit at low altitudes. This terrain engine was designed from scratch to be decent at any altitude. Go compare it to the likes of UBi’s upcoming H.A.W.X – which isn’t even on par with the venerable Ace Combat 6 – which by itself, ONLY looks good a high altitude, looks like shit at low altitude and has awesome models based on real-world aircraft.
When you’re doing a shoebox game (see Ace Combat 6, H.A.W.X etc), you can do a lot of things. I am not going to throw in 2D bitmap trees just to create an ‘environment’.
This is not some Unreal Engine game shoehorned to be a combat sim. I do in fact have a SpeedTreeRT license. We just haven’t implemented it yet. And when we do, the barren areas of the planet – e.g. desert, canyons etc will still be barren.
This game, like the title says, caters to a variety of gameplay environments. In this regard, a LOT of compromises have to be made in order to make the game fun, playable and accessible.
At the end of the day, the graphics engines are just fine (only an ass would make a determination based on compressed video footage) for what they need to do and the environment they need to render.
I specifically did this 17 minute combat footage in order to attract the attention of those who *want* to get the real feeling of *flight* when playing a game that touts it; as opposed to the hack (see every Unreal game with airborne vehicles, Frontlines, BF games etc) that is prevalent in most games that give you a ton of assets in which the only differences in dynamics modeling are some variable tweaks here and there to turn a fps traversal engine into a vehicular or aerial dynamics one.
Also, after seeing the footage from the H.A.W.X travesty, I wanted to – again – remind gamers that there are those of us (old school PC game devs) here who *do* value the PC gaming environment. Something I touched on in my latest dev blog entry.
I never have – and never will – design, fund and develop games for the masses. I cater to the same like minded folks who keep buying my games. Invariably, as with all games, you win some, you lose some. Doing what you love and being able to pay your bills so you continue to do just that, is the key to success.
So yeah, go ahead, laugh. Your Pink slip (to go with the Pink tutu) is just around the corner. Me? I get to make games.
Uh-oh, RPS! Look what you started!
Thanks all for the kind words.
@Future I-Warrior
Funnily enough, I reinstalled the game the other day and it worked nicely with my Xbox 360 Controller – I’d suggest trying one of those before getting a flight stick. I didn’t need to use XPadder – it just worked, and the default mapping is pretty sensible. The only big issue is the way the triggers don’t quite work right as the ’set speed’ throttle.
Have fun! I still enjoy the combat + piracy – one of these days I ought to try and finish the storyline…
Oh yeah, and the lack of face buttons isn’t a huge problem. You need the keyboard for external views and stuff, but the flight controls were designed to work on the Dreamcast pad so you can get to (nearly?) everything via the HUD menu using the D-Pad plus A to select and B to cancel. This also works in the menus.
I’m withholding judgement until its released and the reviews come in, for better or worse.
“”Fact of the matter is that when you’re doing a 400 sq. km open world game that is designed to look decent at any altitude, there are lots of compromises to be made.
We’re not talking about flight games which look awesome at high altitude and shit at low altitudes.”"
Mr. dsmart, check again the video because this is not true. On the ground the scene with the human character, the ground look obviously lowpoly and too zoomed. Not even a detail texture or other help. Most engines stop zooming a texture beyond some limit, your engine don’t and the result looks ugly. Your comment is erroneous here. Your engine don’t really seems to support low altitude well at all.
I have one of your games, and I think was a error to buy it. On almost 30 years playing and buying games, your game is maybe the worst game I have buy. And It was almost exactly like that one. And thats was eons ago.
Tei, you have no frigging clue wtf you’re talking about. So please suppress your desire to look ignorant and foolish.
I know that being one of the boys on the bandwagon is a badge of honor for anti-social misfits. So I’m not going to play your game. Don’t like the game? Move along then.
I can’t imagine that you own one of my games because the average person who actually owns – or even plays – one of my games, has more common sense than that which your inconsequential – and rubbish – post seems to portray.
To wit: from looking at shots and videos, you can tell everything about the camera zoom, terrain poly count (which, btw is 2:1 if you even know what means) etc. Apart from the fact that the character isn’t even standing on the bare terrain, but on an asphalt splat on top of it. There are numerous shots – and videos – already released showing the character at ground zero on various parts of the terrain.
You’re just like that other one few posts up wondering why the fighter wasn’t shot down…clearly forgetting what cheat codes during testing are for.
There is a reason why flight combat games look like crap at low altitudes. I’ll leave the reasons for your next homework assignment. You might learn something.
From this 24 shots link
Standing on bare terrain
Standing on a asphalt splat
Firstly. Environments can add visual noise with procedural generation. I don’t care if you add random trees with no hit boxes. Or fractally pre determined ones which factor into hit detection while remaining viable for online play. But add some terrain, i know its early. But space gives you a free pass, it can be empty and thats okay. Planets can just be skybox material. But the moment you let people go to planets that soil must have character or people will realise those barren spheres are vaules in an array of barren spheres.
But figure out how to add natural shifting terrain populated by a range of plant life? Suddenly every inch of the battlefield is real. And the fact you can fly past it at 500kph is massive empowering. Terrifying even. Flying over los santos in a stolen fighter jet in san andreas was to me the emotional pinnacle of the whole game. Jesus, every inch of that place mattered to me. Filled with threats targets and places the road is bumpy. Look at me now, look at me now.
Even in the narratively barren battlefield 2, every tree rock and shack i fly past is real. A place a real person could be hiding. A place i could jump out my plane and land. This hill matters, not because it has a flag on it, but because want that flag, they make it real. Yes, but not just the people, its the burned out cars and the abandoned villages. Its that bush that you can use to hide from the north but still be hidden from the west because of a short wall.
If the inches dont matter, neither do the miles.
I have made this image for you.
Your engine vs Call of Duty 4
As you see, on CoD4 the pixels of the ground texture are hardly noticeable. On your engine the pixels are noticeable, are like 32 pixeles wide… are less noticeable because the texture is smoothed… but you can still.
Maybe your engine is good for a flyiing simulator /space simulator thingie, but this effect I show to you, In my humble opinion, is hard on the eyes. Most games avoid this effect. I suspect you are pushing your engine beyond what It aceptabily renders. Other than that, I applaud your efforts. Is hard to make a game, you have all my admiration on that.
See, it was the COMPRESSION on the video that made it look shit, and it was so long winded to show that it really doesn’t CTD all the time as you’d expect. You guys know nothing.
I’ll wait for the free version.
@ Heliocentric
Absolutely. No argument there. And we are in fact doing most of that already. As I mentioned before, we alredy have SpeedTreeRT specifically for areas which would benefit from vegetation. Just haven’t implemented it yet until we finish the multiplayer profiling since the added 3D assets has the potential to cause all kinds of problems in a client/server environment.
But again, you’re forgetting the term ’scope’ here. You can do all those things in a small scale and quite effectively. Attempting that on a large scale results in a) irrelevant clutter b) a game that requires higher than normal sys. requirements.
Case in point: The Operation Flashpoint games.
Adding stuff is not the issue. The issue is keeping track off and rendering all of it – at various altitudes. Not to mention the nightmare that is “collision detect” on such a large scale.
@ Tei
You truly are an idiot and have proven – again – that you have no frigging clue what you’re talking about. So you come up with an Apples (closed box level) to Oranges (400 sq km open world) strawman argument? I’m just going to ignore you because it is quite evident that you’re clueless.
Be civil gentlemen, or we will purge the thread.
If you can add rocks to that tree app? And depending on the plot, small towns/burned out millitary vehicles/strange alien monoliths you may well extend your buyers beyond “your customers” to also those who are driven by the emotion of scale and place as i am.
Thanks, Will. I’ll see if I can nab my friend’s X-box controller for a weekend and have a play. Will be just the thing after the spaghetti-monster-awful week I’ve been having.
I suppose a Quake 2 level can be 1×1 km wide. Maybe much more. But If you make the player character 1/400 the original size, the resulting map will look 400×400 km wide.
The problem with that experiment, is that (withouth more changes) the ground texture will look ugly. And thats how that screenshot look. The texture is zoomed in beyond aceptable quality levels. And maybe that easy to fix, adding detail textures, or something.
Here is a tutorial how to add detail textures.
http://www.vterrain.org/Textures/detail.html
Why does will get thanks? I’m the suggestee *sobs*
Tei, true just take a look at HL rally.
Dsmart, if you are afraid the added models will cause a problem in the MP environment then im afraid you are taking the wrong approach. a good thing would be to add them and then test it, then the other way around, since now you can easily modify the base code of the MP client, so it handles the moddels and collision different.
If you really have that many polygons, then why do you even keep the grassy area extremely flat? It wouldnt be hard to add a little noise to it, enough algorithms around for that i would say. Even if it isnt final it helps with showing the concept to the people.
Animations, is it just me or does your engine lack a good support for model animations? The pivot legs of the SAM site seemd to rotate completely, instead of keeping the same firmly embedded into the ground.
Wheels of the big vehicle in the first video:
Whats up with them? Looks like a terrible simple solution, instead of modelling them and then making a fitting texture you just dropped in a cylinder and applied a texture over it, the BG colour of the texture is still visible. No offence, but i would find myself a different modeller and texture artist, the models look horribly simplistic to start with anyway. Do you have any raw figures for us on the engines rendering capabilities, number of animations and polygons supported by model, what format, texture type/usuage per model etc.? That gives us a much better view of what your engine is capable of. It appears there is no shadow map either, from looking on the screenshot that appeared on the website, and AA is also lacking. Will these features be implemented?
Try making a dedicated interior model for the hornet fighter, it looks like your modeller just slapped a few gauges into the exterior model to save time.
Some textures have photoshop filter written all over them, its not a bad idea to make a base in photoshop, but nothing can beat mixing them up with real photo’s, it beats any random generator by far.
Either way, good luck on your engine, maby you shouldnt be putting so much media attention to it whilst there is still very little to show and most of it looks alpha stage.
@ Heliocentric
Actually things like rocks, boulders and such are handled directly by the terrain engine using procedural generation.
The vegetation is handled exclusively by SpeedTreeRT
As for burned out towns and such, uhm, this is a “near barren” alien planet. :)
TBH, I didn’t even think past populating the areas of interests (aka. bases) since thats where most of the gaming will take place.
Unlike standard flight sims which use boring standard boxes and rectangular objects to represent “clutter”, each of our buildings in bases is unique, most have indoor levels etc.
For one thing, flying a Mach 2 and dodging SAMs and surface to air guns, the last thing you’d be doing is staring at the scenery….which, depending on the altitude, you won’t see anyway.
As I said before, designing and developing a game that has prevalent gaming elements such as land, air, sea – and fps action – is daunting in itself, outside of the tech required to actually do it.
Anyway, we still have a few more months to go. I am also planning an open publiic “Tech Test” in the coming weeks. Thats when folks get to abuse me some more. :)
[i]Fact of the matter is that when you’re doing a 400 sq. km open world game that is designed to look decent at any altitude, there are lots of compromises to be made. [/i]
Im sorry to say this, but even the world in Flightsimulator 2002 looked more animated then your train does..
Since when do we have so many fools posting on RPS? This must be the worst comment-threads I’ve seen so far here.
Tei. You first suggest to compare a friggin’ huge mainstream 100+ million budget small-scale FPS with a large-scale indie niche developer game and after that immensely stupid insulting comment you seriously try to lecture him?
Christ..
(I should’ve known better than to reply to it, my apologies.)
@ Pepper
Im sorry to say this, but even the world in Flightsimulator 2002 looked more animated then your train does..
Yes, you should in fact be sorry that you said it; because it is yet another Apples to Oranges comparison has no merit or any basis in reality. At least to those of us who have probably played practically every single game in existence – more so flight sims
Lets not get into the fact that every single MSFS looks like crap at low altitude, has very high DEM use etc. Puhleeze.
Maybe you clearly missed the part where this terrain engine was designed to be used – and played – at any altitude. No, you couldn’t have possibly missed that.
The difference between constructive criticism and taking potshots (aka taking the piss) is determined by one’s IQ and quite possibly one’s tolerance for pain and abuse – since one is not likely to be able to take what one give without some serious medication. Or crack. Or both.
@Nuyan: I was not comparing budget but textures. And both work on the same computer and have the same hardware available. Theres nothing CoD4 or any other engine use, that any other engine can’t use.
Dsmart, first you say your own engine is meant to look good at any altitude, then you say it wont matter how it looks when your up a little higher and flying fast, and have you even seen the newer FS engines? They definitely look a lot better then what you currently are showing. I also have tried about every possible flightsim out there, and i can see that most of them have done a excellent job at looking good from a low and high altitude whilst stretching immense regions. Just check the LOMAC series, it stretches over the whole crimea, with a immensely detailed and rich world. Ever heard of applying LOD maps to the terrain engine? It might actually make it look better.
Sorry, Helio. You did make the suggestion first. Your input is appreciated too – cheers. :)
Anywhere a discussion about Smart and his games occur, Smart himself is sure to show himself and further escalate the discussion, it is a function of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Which, if you know what that is, will seem obvious to you now that someone has mentioned it. Oooooh! your mind will say to itself, or Duh!. And then you’ll smile and all will be as it should.
@Apologist
Its okay you dont have to appol-…. Oh… Apologist… Right, you do have to. Thats so insensitive of me.
Helio, you insensitive clod!( I have been wanting to use that for a while already, thanks!)
Josh, interesting.
I’m sorry pepper your whole life must feel so sorry from now on like you are living in the shadow of what you could have been but time was taken from you before you were ready and you ever never given the chance you could have taken had you just been given the chance and now the shadows of depression hang over you and you look to the wall the same wall it always is and then suddenly you realise you must act…
god…why…. please… let me wheep in this little corner over here..
*weeps*
I like this thread much better now that it’s derailed itself into the far-less-combative brand of cheerful insanity that RPS usually enjoys from its loyal fanbase. We should ignore topics more often….
Derek: I’d be interested in expanding on the example of Operation Flashpoint / Armed Assault. As I understand it, the games look similar in scope but ArmA is visually more interesting.
Part of the problem, I feel, is that the video is confusing – there are vectors everywhere and it’s difficult to tell who is firing at what, plus the blocky HUD does look like a 1990s flight sim. Using the example of ArmA again, the simulation is detailed and realistic, yet the HUD is uncluttered. I’m all for detailed, expansive games but as an advert, I’m not sure the videos work that well, especially alongside videos for other expansive combat games like ArmA 2 and OpFap 2. I’d be interested to see a more structured video release, though.
@ Gap Gen
Indeed. But the reason that ArmA assault HUD is uncluttered is because they don’t have anything remotely resembling the avionics, target acquisition and weapons logic that we have. Specifically – and I say this again – the dynamics and avionics (even the interface) for my assets are all unique and different. To wit: flying a fighter and doing target acquisition and prosecution with a variety of launch delivery systems is far more advanced and detailed than firing a TOW-like rocket from a vehicle or even a gunship.
So, the more advanced the avionics and weapons delivery system, the more information required in the HUD interface. Every flight sim grognard knows this.
Please take a look at the multitude of shots over here and you will see interfaces for infantry (recently revamped and completed), vehicles, gunships, fighters etc. They’re all different and only the fighters (and possibly the gunships) have more stuff than usual – due to the high end nature of the assets.
If I wanted to go the ArmaA, Frontlines or similar route, I’d have done so. Thats not the game I designed and set out to develop. I wanted a game in which playing as infantry, a flight jock of a vehicle driving hobo felt different and gave a different playing experience. My guess is that all the BF junkies who are likely to bum rush a fighter sitting on a launch pad, are unlikely to do it in my game because, well, first you need to learn how to fucking fly the darn thing. If you want to be bunny jumping you ass off, stay in infantry mode – the most brain dead aspect of the game. Even running around in a vehicle – without a team providing support – is only going to get you killed real quick.
In my game, when you set out to use (or build) a fighter, gunship or vehicle, you’d best know wtf you’re doing – or don’t do it. A really good fps player packing a jetpack and rocket launcher is just as effective as a flight jock doing Mach 1 at NOE altitudes and hoping he gets a lock signature on the target before the rocket even gets airborne – because once that happens, you’ll be busy dodging that and delaying the inevitable respawn that is sure to come. Unless of course you bail out first. In which case, you either trek it all the way back to base and find yourself another fighter or trigger your SOS emitter and hope that a teammater with access to a gunship or vehicle – depending on how far you are – can come get you. Each time you spawn after dying, you lose Experience Points – the key to promotion, access to high end assets, weapons – and the ability to build any damn thing the game can offer.
No, videos don’t tell the full story. Thats what demos are for. :)
As to who is shooting who in the video, I thought it was mighty obvious that good guys shoot at bad guys and vice versa. In this case, as the video says, I was inbound to an enemy base – with my team – and of course the bastards open fired. I manually switched to various assets (e.g. SAM and SAL silos) to show what they were doing.
@Derek
I’m interested to know what kind of detail your avionics simulation goes into as regards target selection – that’s something that was very well served in some of the Janes titles but I haven’t seen in detail elsewhere.
Can you describe the process (as a player story) required for a pilot to target e.g. a tank, lock it up, and fire a missile at it?
That shot of your media room is eyeopening. MAN a lot of stuff I played/wanted to play. So many flight sims,sci-fi, and strategy games!!!
I actually want to try out this new game. I’ll prob have a go at the tech demo once its out, though it doesn’t look like my laptop can handle it.
I think the big hurdle that I personally have to face in playing games like this is that there is defenitely a jump that’s required before I am going to have fun. Plenty of reading/trial-n-error before I can start pkaying. Not saying this process can’t be entertaining, but it can sometimes degenerate into frustration without end.
This game looks like it already has a firm vision that is defenitely apart from other games I know of (seems to be a hard-core realistic sci-fi battlefield) and I think that some extra seat padding, so to speak, for gamers to ease them in for the long flights/fights they’re going to have will help immensely not only for people just jumping in.
Stuff like, oh screen shake when accelerating, some slight horizontal/vertical movement when hovering, in general extra feedback from player input.
Heat blur effect already looks pretty cool and the design of the planes and vehicles looked great! Hope to see this finished and ready this March.