Comments on: Automagic: Love Footage And Tools Demo

By: Rei Onryou

Rei Onryou — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:59:42 +0000

Wow.

If I tried to say anything more, I’d just be diluting the awesomeness of Eskil.

By: Gauntt

Gauntt — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:58:48 +0000

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.

By: Finn

Finn — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:21:21 +0000

…add dwarves, water, some elephants and you have a beautiful Dwarf Fortress GUI….
I think I need new pants…

By: Wulf

Wulf — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:06:10 +0000

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?

By: Quests

Quests — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:21:03 +0000

@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?

By: viper34j

viper34j — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:18:34 +0000

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.

By: Jambe

Jambe — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:39:25 +0000

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.

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:38:14 +0000

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.

By: Jetsetlemming

Jetsetlemming — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:00:53 +0000

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.

By: Scandalon

Scandalon — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:25:46 +0000

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.

By: Scandalon

Scandalon — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:16:35 +0000

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.)

By: Tei

Tei — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:19:37 +0000

Namedropping: “A Tale in the desert”