Republic - The Revolution Analyzed

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Gamespot hands-on preview of the PC strategy title Republic:The Revolution. This Elixir-developed game, which has had a legendarily long development cycle and has previously drawn flak for claims of an 'infinite polygon engine', looks somewhat unorthodox, with Gamespot offering only qualified praise, and mentioning that it's "..an unusual strategy game, in that it focuses on the world of politics.. Republic transports you to the fictional former Soviet republic of Novistrana, where taking on the establishment requires.. ..extreme measures." You can even visit the official Novistrana website if you'd like to learn more about the (fictional) country featured in the game.

Comments

Infinite Polygons

[dr ttol]

This could be interesting. I mean, current engines render the polygons, and when zooming in, only magnifies the polygons, so instead of normal view, say consisting of 10,000 polygons, the zoomed in view is only 2,000 polygons on the screen, with all the textures magnified (and thus pixelated).

Sounds like this engine, when zooming in, or walking closer to, the polygons are kept at a constant rate so the models look more crisp as you get closer, instead of looking like crap in normal games.

Re:Infinite Polygons

[SuiteSisterMary]

Shiney's Messiah did something similar, where all of the models were supposedly crazy-high polygon levles, but polys were simply removed for slower machines; first ones you likely wouldn't notice, and then progressing up.

An engine that can take a large poly and break it into smaller ones, with meta-data for object curvature and the like, and tiled textures (and detail textures; don't put on a picture of a belt; model a belt) would be a great idea; plus, as you get better hardware, the game would automagically look better.

This is why FF7 for the PC looks much more amazing than FF8 for the PC; FF7 used gourard shading, which meant that the higher resolutions looked higher rez; FF8 used textures, but they didn't resample them for the higher rez, but simply stretched them, resulting in a look of CRAP.

Cyrillic

[danila]

I don't know why, but as many films and games before, Revolution continues the tradition of using gibberish for the Cyrillic language. I can understand almost everything, like using a box with "CAXAP" (sugar) written on it and claiming that it means "shells" or "explosives". But I can't understand why anyone would use cyrillic letters to compose "words" that can't even be pronounced, the equivalent of "BRJIOQZW".

Cyrillic alphabet are not that much different from latin and even if you can't learn it (the alphabet, not any of the languages) yourself, why not hire a Russian (or Eastern European) student, who would compose all Cyrillic text in the game for less than 100$.

Americans often laugh at Japanese who are so fascinated with English language that they on their T-shirts print random cool-looking words that do not make any sense at all. Well, how is that different from showing ignorance in the way Elixir Studios (are they US-based?) does.