Graphics wizard and solo MMO developer Eskil Steenberg has just posted up a couple of videos from GDC. The first shows a substantial amount of footage from the game itself, with Steenberg playing around in the game world, building, deploying items, creating infrastructure, setting off remote radio bombs, sabotaging AI manufacturing plants, exploring deserts, and so on. Amazing stuff. Perhaps even more impressive, even for the non-technical among us, is Steenberg’s tools demo footage. Go watch. Original trailer here.
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If anyone watches the Revision 3 show Co-Op, they did a huge feature of this game about a week ago. They basically showed a lot of gameplay footage and editor footage. It was pretty awesome. Check it out. on rev3.com, click on co-op and look for their show from about two weeks ago.
@ Bhazor
Well, that’s a pretty good cross-section of the population. I think they can probably keep the journo’s out by putting a subscription fee on it.
You really don’t know (m)any games journalists.
woah woah woah…
“Love making equipment”
Thats should be the SDK’s name, LME.
@Rossignol
I was about to say the same.
I always chuckle to myself when I read articles about game prices or game fees.
The writer almost always makes references to ‘real world’ equivalents like “Hey that’s the same price as a beer!” rather then “Hey that’s the same price as game X!” or not even blinking at the cost of a full Rockband set up when they review the game.
When I was out on a European press tour of the US, and Rock Band had just come out in the US, a dozen random journos bought the boxed set. It was an interesting sight at the airport on the way home.
Journalists do get a stack of free stuff, it’s true, but they also tend not to flinch at buying the most expensive graphics card, or having every single console purchased on the day of release.
I was working at Future Publishing when the Gamecube came out, and the shops were instantly emptied and then back ordered for weeks. I understand it was even worse with the Wii. The idea that we get it all for free is, sadly, an illusion.
Meanwhile, you had 3 of them.
Reply to Heliocentric
Still sounds better than The Love Tools.
Reply to Radiant
Tells you a lot about their lifestyle. My favourite was Walker (in They’re Back ages ago) saying that a budget game was the equivalent of 1000 Haribo cola bottles.
Reply to Jim Rossignol
But can’t you write it off as a business (s)expense? Also don’t use the word random in vain. Unless every single games journalist in the population had an equal chance of getting those items then it wasn’t a random sample. Dummy.
My guess is that this won’t attract racists, griefers or 12 year old kids. Unless you consider any person who plays Dwarf Fortress a griefer because.. come on, who doesn’t play that game to grief those poor dwarfs.
I don’t like so many people saying “well people will just exploit all of these tools, so he should just lock it down so you can’t mess with others”.
I think those people are missing the point. We need a virtual world where we can interact with whatever we see, no restrictions. LOVE will be a failure if it starts limiting what we can do. Don’t build great tools and then tell people not to use them.
I got the impression griefing with tools would be rather hard to do, unless the player is unlucky enough to wander into some bastard’s den.
That den will most likely be mine. Endless cave maze, filled to the brim with traps? Yes please.
I will buy this game, carve a big hole with spikes, and wath for first visitor. “Evil Lair 0.1″…. not.
Actually, I suppose the “Director” will spawn fun missions for the human team, like destroying a enemy base, and stuff.
Why is there a small part of me with this precognitive sense that this one will deliver the kind of PvP experience I’ve wanted in MMOs, but developers have consistently failed to deliver because they simply don’t understand what Mr Steenberg does?
LOVE will be a representation of the internet itself. Expect penises.
Thansk you all for the very kind words!
bob arctor:
There is actually a grid it can be a bit hard to see in the blurry video but without it, as you say, editing would be very hard.
Schaulustiger:
You cant build everywhere that would turn in to mayhem.
Noc.
Its multiplayer only but never PvP. I will run the servers, but I’m considering letting people by all the slots of one server (for a reduced price) so that they can share it with only friends.
Ginger Yellow:
The tools are already available and free, go download them!
Bhazor:
There are a lot of compression artifacts, check out the screen shots for good color and image quality.
“You cant build everywhere that would turn in to mayhem.”
I.e., Second Life.
I can’t watch any of the videos; what am I doing wrong?
Check back at http://news.quelssolaar.com Two new mirrors are up.
See, now, unlike that Tornquist guy who just talks big promises and has a CGI trailer, this is worth getting excited about since, y’know, it actually exists and all that. (:P)
Very excited about this, and impressed by the possibilities shown in the video. The visuals are spectacularly unique as well. I just love how in the demo these structures are just effortlessly deployed, connected, tunneled under and whatnot. There’s also the mind-boggling potential for expanding these systems based on how they work together …. I’m at a loss for words. Just knowing that the power source goes online during the day means you could chain some events together when day breaks! I don’t know why, but that’s just cool.
Can’t wait to see how it works with real people in it! :)
@Marcin:
Uh, sorry, but I really don’t think it’s fair to poo-poo the guy behind The Longest Journey, over this little game.
Simply amazing.
This is beyond incredible!
That man is a genius.
Visually, the game is still astounding. But as for how playable it will be… I’m not so sure.
If there was no voiceover there’s no way I would’ve understood what was happening, and even with the voiceover I found the GUI very confusing and relying too much on icons that look rather stylish but don’t actually convey much about their function. I’m also a bit worried about how similar everything looks; all the objects are the same shade of grey and their shape/silhouette doesn’t really convey much either.
By the way, the city building reminds me a lot of Sauerbraten and its predecessor Cube. I wonder if Eskil played them.
Simply amazing. I wonder how successful this would be as a regular multiplayer game as opposed to an MMO. That is, I can’t see myself getting a subscription for this.. then again, I never was any good at most sim-type games, city builders, etc..
eskil: It’s not PvP at all? But you mentioned an infrastructure (a shield generator, maybe) that goes off for an instant and that’s when someone should attack it, isn’t that a natural PvP momentum?
Besides that, I thought the maingoal of the game was basically to control the territory and hold it against other players’ attacks (which is pretty much the mother of all goals in an online game and it’s a shame so few exploit it)
That’s like… a full featured intuitive realtime 3d development suite (minus animations/characters) INSIDE the game engine. Totally fucking amazing.
And this stuff is free open source software o____O”
Looks great, I’m awed. I think the detail in the mechanics and interdependent systems would go way over my head, but I imagine really creative and smart people could make incredible cities out of them.
The first thing that struck me was that this looks like a game that’s being designed from a really different perspective. For most games, setting comes first, but it looks like setting is, at best, an afterthought in love. What are the gameplay elements? Radios. Bombs. Guns– not crossbows, not AK-47s, not personal pulse rifles, just guns. It’s like Steenberg started from the idea of procedural generation and interesting gameplay, and added elements as needed.
And I believe that interesting gameplay is possible from the mechanics Steenberg described, but I’m still missing the way that modern computer games are role-playing games. Give me a sense of cool, an identity of some sort, evocative art.
The other thing that struck me is how much Steenberg cares about the usability of his tools. It’s hard to get programmers for heavily licensed engines to care about usability; the idea that a one-man team without a published title would give a rat’s ass is incredible. Is one of his goals to produce an engine that he can sell? If so, I don’t think a cell-shaded, procedurally generated game made without the help of any professional artists is going to be the best demonstration model.
I’m afraid I might sound more pessimistic than I am, though. What I can see looks very exciting.
Nate, its realy, REALY not cell-shading. Even the game that most people call cell-shaded ,Wind Waker, isnt.
I love (heh) the visuals, I could just wander around the game looking at all the pretty. I find the painting-like graphics look much better than any “gritty realistic” shooter might offer. Imo Style>Poligons.
Very tempted to call this kid a genius.
Ahhhh…
With every new bit of information about Love I grow more excited.
And those tools are absurdly flashy. I love the way everything spews sparkles and flares up when you select it; totally unnecessary, but so Hollywood.
Yes and YESSSSSSSSSSSSS!
Nutkins Victory Otter: G’arn, you know you want to. I certainly do. Hell, I’ll do it for both of us.
GENIUS!
Much as I want to be optimistic about this game – and goodness, I do – I can’t see how this can turn into anything but troll paradise. Paradise, that is, for the trolls, who love nothing better than to cock things up for decent people.
A little bit of background information. I have only once taken Garry’s Mod online. I wanted to mess around with a friend, see. So we found an empty server and hopped on and started having a good time. All the anti-cheating measures were in place, so you couldn’t kill other players at all. About half an hour later, a third guy connected to the server. He spent the next five minutes wordlessly dropping a train on us (physics don’t count as killing), over and over, right as we spawned, while we tried to convince him to stop. It was disgusting.
The point I’m trying to make is: in a game with lots of emergent systems and player power, no matter how many limits you put on it, they’re always going to find a way to work within those limits to wreck the game for everybody else for no reason. I’d be interested to see what you’ve done to anticipate the problem, though.
For instance, how are you going to stop a griefer from rapidly moving the ground up and down underneath me while I’m trying to build something that requires precision? And if that solution works, how are you going to stop him from preventing me from raising the ground by standing on top of it?
@Mark> naturally I assume one should have limited resources that let him shape the ground, and he would have worked hard for them… now do you think he would waste ‘em just to grief a player?
Honestly I’m blown away by both the game and the tools.
Eskil is a genius for sure, Love is in my ‘most wanted games’ list, and I’m excited by any future games that implement his workflow, or approach to systems.
@Mark
I assume the low number of players per server might help to monitor who is griefing and who isn’t. You should also consider the people who won’t be griefing, as only a small percentage of players are out there to ruin things for other people. ^^
Oh thank god, an update…
one update closer to release…
I’m a programmer.
I quit.
Seriously, this guy is IMPRESSIVE. Genius is the word for sure.
Namedropping: “A Tale in the desert”
Eskil, you have simultaneously made me smile inside and despair at the same time. You see, just a few weeks ago I bought Unreal Tournament 3. It has editing tools, and a “paradigm” that I can almost get to grips with, and thoughts and designs in my head from years ago about what I would “improve” on in Doom (we didn’t really have the term “mod” yet) came back. So I started designing a mod for UT3 (much scaled down from my enthusiastic daydreaming, what 15 years ago?), thinking I might even be able to enter it in the Make Something Unreal contest.
And then in the demo you started going on about radio frequencies, and connecting power sources and proximity sensors, and I realized you have already created my mod/game, but even more expansive, more naturally, more emergent.
And then I watched the video on the tools, and my mind melted.
(The irony being the tools have been hosted on the Love website since at least the first official trailer, and I had completely forgotten to look at them when I had time.)
For everyone commenting, please be sure to make the distinction between the game and the engine/tools. Yes, the game itself is abstract, the interface intimidating/confusing (as of now) and I predict that, commercially, it will “fail”*, probably because it’s doing too many innovative/revolutionary/different things at once. Ultimately, I think the game is almost irrelevant. It’s the tools, and the manner in which they work, that are/could/should be revolutionary. (Seriously, he should team up w/ Introversion on their “Subversion” project.)
I think I have an actual hero, who happens to be a genius as well. (He just pronounces “inventory” weird…)
*Meaning it won’t be as successful as it “should” be, but could find a niche and still be profitable, and enough for Mr. Steenberg to live on, support a family, etc.
Holy christ, that’s amazing.
Eskil: Are you using any textures? Or bumpmaps/normal maps/parallax maps/etc? I see you’ve got a UV wrapper, but everything I’ve seen looks like it’s colored purely based on that absolutely fantastic shader setup, that simultaneously prevents the monotony of repeated textures, makes coloring in the world far easier from the developer’s part, gives the world a uniform, “fit together” look that’s absolutely astounding, and I’d bet saved a fair amount of video memory and hd space compared to most modern games.
Absolute genius.
I so wanna play with those tools.
By the sounds of the gameplay, it sounds to me like an RTS without any units besides yourself, with 200 teammates and a monster AI force to conquer. Kinda. Base building, Pylons to place, buildings to grow and destroy.
Quests: I believe without reservation that griefers will waste their own resources on no more entertaining purpose than ruining your day and mine, given the chance. For them, the griefing is the game.
Stupoider: it only takes one.
If I can’t run my own private server I have no interest whatsoever in playing Love; I’ll still appreciate its beauty and procedurally-generated environments, mind, I just won’t play it at all due to the inevitable good-times-ruining griefers.
While I find Mark’s comments a bit pessimistic, he does bring up a good point. How will griefers be handled. Limiting what a player can do just because he might do something he shouldn’t will ruin the game. However, if an interface is implemented where the inhabitants of the world will be able to democratically deal with the offender (temp ban, perm ban, revoking of powers, jail time?), then the spirit of the game will be intact IMO.
I’d like to hear from Eskil on this one.
@Mark> im sure it can be easily counteracted, if it presents itself, we don’t even know if it’s possible to grief, and how, there’s no reason to treat a wound if you didn’t scratch yourself yet.
It’s all presumptions, it’s grieveophobia.
Can anyone straighten this for me, if he has the bit of information? What does Eskil mean when he says there’s no PvP? Isn’t the whole point of the game to build his own city and make it stand against other players’ attacks? Wouldn’t it make it the perfect game? Why play against AI when you fight for holding territory and make your own nightmare cyberpunk city?
Tei, are you on a (distinctly) one man mission to defame Eskil? I have to wonder your reasons for wanting to do such a thing, it seems rather sad, and borne of anger-fuelled jealousy. “Cleverman makes prettythings and has smart computerthinks, but Tei not cleverman… TEI SMASH CLEVERMAN (via snide forum posts)!”
Eskil, I’m curious of how exploration works in this, it’s clear that you use a lot of procedural elements, and that can be pure joy for explorers such as myself. There’s this game I used to like (open source, I believe), but I can’t remember the name of it; basically one could navigate this odd box-ship to a planet, then drop down in a sphere to the surface, the entire thing was procedurally generated, included procedurally generated life forms and behaviour, which could be observed, it was all very basic, but it was still really rather neat. What kinds of things could an explorer expect to encounter when wandering around Love, will there be animal life, uninhabited structures, and other surprises for us?
…add dwarves, water, some elephants and you have a beautiful Dwarf Fortress GUI….
I think I need new pants…
That Dwarf Fortress idea did cross my mind as well. Now that would be amazing.
The tunnelling in the trailer reminded me of it. Assuming you can have levels and levels of tunnels. My mind wants to explode at the possibility.
Wow.
If I tried to say anything more, I’d just be diluting the awesomeness of Eskil.