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Project Offset FPS Amazes
Spaceman40 wrote to mention a post up on Joystiq about a beautiful next-gen FPS called Project Offset. From the article: "Doom 3 engine? Was nice knowing you. UT? Old news. Source? Over there. We'll call you if we need you. You can all stand back, though. There's a new king on the way to town. Project Offset is a new first person shooter, and the developer is showing off what their new graphics engine can do. The movies are not pre-rendered. The developer says they're all real time...The demo looks amazing! Videos are available at the official site.'"
Is it really all that and a bag of popcorn? I sorta recall them saying this about Doom 3.... I'm just waiting for the UT3 engine to have some games under its belt before I get back into the FPS market
My UID is prime... is yours?
Maybe this engine will be licenced in a way that indy developers can use it.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Looks sneakingly similar to cave trolls from LOTR to me.
I couldn't think of a sig.
I dunno, this post alone seems like the work of a hype machine. I'm downloading it right now and expect to see something that leavs D3/HL2/UT2004 in the dust
Torrent of highest definition version of the latest video.
Make sure to watch this before commenting. Seriously. Has a BUNCH of seeds.
Thats cool, but I really don't care. If I wanted a movie I'd have rented one. I bought a game because I wanted to have fun. Its still more fun to duel someone in quakeworld than doom3, and I can play qw on a p100. (Or on a much much better system with 24bit textures, particle explosions, per pixel lighting, and anything else you can think of thanks to the wonders of open source)
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Project Offset has been in development for some time now, and a couple of demos showing actual in-game footage have been released.
The most interesting promise is not how it compares with existing 3D game engines, but how it will standard up with other engines of its class, i.e. Bethesda's Elder Scrolls: Oblivion?
This is , right now a tech demo and not a game .
No matter how good it looks right now it does not represent how the game will play or even perhaps the actual in game graphics. So its a little early to be calling the Death of Unreal Tournament and the Unreal engine etc.
It does look nice and the games description sounds fun as well , but then so did Daikatana's description and screenshots .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The DOOM3 engine, Source, and Unreal Engine are all complete products. They have physics, AI, gameplay logic, networking, and a lot more built in. Unreal Engine even includes its own install system.
It's a cool tech demo, but it's a long way from being a competitive engine. You need more than pretty visuals to sell an engine, you need an environment that makes developing games cheaper.
Heh, well been following Project Offset for sometime now. That article from the post is crap, this is a much better first-look:
f orm/project-offset.htm
:)
http://www.armchairempire.com/Previews/multi-plat
Enjoy!
If these guys keep with that spirit/tradition of Savage, then this game will be awesome.
Yes, we all know by now that pretty pictures don't make a good game, but this game looks like it will have both.
..........FULL STOP.
"The developer says they're all real time..."
Yes, just like Sony says the PS3 video's are real-time. Someone show me some gameplay to prove it. Show me a guy holding a controller and controlling the gameplay. There are too many liars in this industry now to take these claims at face value anymore.
I have a grand idea.
Let's compare an in-progress engine that is probably 3 years away to other game engines that are completed and have been on the market over 12 months.
Ok sounds cool.
First, let me say that I respect these guys and their prior work in Savage, and it sounds like they have a good architecture for a realtime graphics engine. That said, I don't see much invovative work here compared to other unreleased engines. Unreal 3 supports the HDR and normal mapping described on their website. The website also doesn't mention anything about physics or scripting, but it doesn't mean it isn't there. While scripting can be tacked on relatively easily, I have heard from other game developers that first rate physics engines like Havok have specific unusual requirements to maximize the use of vector processing instructions. And one of the bigger questions in future game enginge design I don't see being address is for multicore processing. Lastly, I don't believe these guys have any background on consoles.
Nonetheless, I'm rooting for their success, even if its a niche or lesser market.
Anm
I'm one of those Nintendo fans who looks at gameplay before graphics. But I was very impressed with the video. In fact, the idea of a FPS fantasy game sounds like a lot of fun. The sound cut out near the beginning of the movie clip. What platform is this going to be on?
I'd like to see a press release touting nothing more than a game's "amazing, breathtaking plot and involving, even charming characters!" that turns out to be a tech demo for a novel, rather than a movie showing how much more realistic is the shine in some nameless girl's eye. Maybe instead of graphics engines and physics engines, developers should focus on generating some kind of "plot engine."
Unfortunetly it's only a sign of things to come when you're computer can't even render a video of the engine at 15 FPS.
:(
I can't seem to play this movie using mplayer. Does it mean I would have to install MSMP for OSX? Sorry, project something, you lost me at "hello"...
I think these guys have watched the LOTR films too much:
:-)
http://projectoffset.com/game.html
Humans, Elves and Dwarves.... and a Wizar in white... even One of those flying scarey things
Oh well, looks good I guess
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I was playing a pretty good fantasy adventure game the other day. I started out near a castle where I found this awesome spear that I walked around with for a while. Suddenly a dragon ambushed me! I tried to defend myself but I held the spear akwardly and the dragon swallowed me whole!
I was thinking Game Over man, Game over, but instead I was trapped inside the dragon's belly where I struggled for long to no avail. Then out of the sky swooped a giant bat, picked up the dragon with me inside its belly! The bat flew high into the sky, and actually gave me a nice little sightseeing of the fantasy world from above.
Why does it take a 27 year old game to Shock and Awe me?
It's funny how an abstract little square can look better than a 20 million polygon monster. But after all, what's all that detail worth if you fail to do anything interesting with it? Detail is only limiting the expression to something very defined, and the more you define something, the smaller is the chance that you push the right buttons.
So no thanks, I'd rather be a attacked by a lowrez duck-dragon.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
How well will it run?
The Source engine is so great because it has great visuals while still running at a good framerate. The new engine being used in F.E.A.R. for example, looks pretty good, but runs like crap. "Realtime" doesn't mean much when you talking about top of the line hardware 2 years from now. Making nice visuals is easy, making it run on realistic hardware isn't.
(note: I will tip my hat though, that motion blur was nice)
I'll stop being cynical when the world allows
It's hard to judge how a finished product will turn out from a few breif minutes of video. There are many questions about the engine we likely will not have answered anytime soon.
We can't very well say much about the engine itself, how easy it is to use, or when it really comes down to it, how much money would it save so-and-so when they're making this game or that.
But we can say a few things about the game itself. We may not be able to judge the plot very well at this stage, but if it's even half as promising as the visuals in the game, I have three little words I'd like to share with those of you who have not seen the video yet for whatever reason...
Oh My God
Three of the guys are from S2, the small company that made Savage.
For me, that means 2 things:
One, it's going to be a great game. Savage was the first FPS game in years that I really enjoyed.
Two, there is a fair chance that it'll be available for Linux, as they already have experience with Savage, and AFAIK they found out there that Linux users give more and higher quality feedback.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
am i right or the more demonic, ugly, unnatural the characters are the better the "engine" is?
or is it so much easier to create ugly things instead of beauty?
As much as I am.... blown the hell away by the graphics, I'm more interested in the gameplay. Bows, maces, dragons, orges... Now that's some hot shit.
Having wasted my time checking out Savage, and looking at the video, it's time to rant:
Why is it that so many people who put out multiplayer-only games fail to mention it anywhere in their game descriptions, websites, etc? There are those of us who prefer single player games.
It took quite a bit of looking at reviews of Savage and reading between the lines to figure out that it has no single-player component.
Since the game devs seem to think that MP games are the only kind that count, I'll have to assume that "Project Offset" is also MP-only. Too bad. A single-player fantasy FPS with pretty graphics might have attracted my gaming dollars.
Yeah, I bought Doom3 for the graphics engine as much as anything. And enjoyed it. So sue me.
What you can do in a tech demo and what you can do in a game are two completely different things. I remember some of the Tech Demos of the Unreal 2 Engine and, for the most part, we are only starting to get visuals of that quality today. The problem with tech demos are that you don't have to worry about physics, AI or even about memory management; combine this with the ability to render your tech demo on unobtainable hardware (for an average consumer) like a AMD 64 X2 4800 with 2 Geforce 7800 SLi (if you made a game for people who had this hardware you'd become very poor)
It is not a game development platform / engine.
/.ians.
It is not designed to be sold (yet) they are developing a game with it, that is the difference.
Doom 3 engine can command millions in licensing and royalities (from the site they are very open).
But, their intent is to use their game engine as a game engine, not to sell it 'competively'.
One more day turning up the contrast on the subtle flaws in the logic of fellow
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
If you'll note, only the single-char demo said "Realtime"... and the graphics for that aren't anything an nvidia demo hasn't done before. There's a big difference between one character on screen and dozens, plus weapon effects, UI, local environment, distance environment...
...remember how good DOOM3 looked in the demos? And how much the gameplay was like turning your monitor off for 5 minutes, then flipping it on to click madly while cutscenes from Alone in the Dark played? Yeah.
For all we know, the "gameplay" in the video renders as poorly as, say, Tribes 2 does. (Kidding , I love you guys)
Now, to truly rant:
It's a pretty demo. Well done. Can I go back to playing WoW now?
Did anybody actually look at the video? It's not a game engine, it is clearly a troll!
It may look good but what about gameplay? Whats the point in playing a game that looks good but leaves you with nothing to do but shoot people. A good rpg like NexusTK which (yes the graphics suck) but has many people who play it and is constantly changing with events that affect the whole world of Nexus will always beat a game that has good graphics but nothing for you to really get into.
Grab two of your closest friends, and do it better.
Slashdot mentions that Spaceman40 wrote to mention a post up on Joystiq that mentions a link to the site where the actual videos are.
Holy S#$%! That is amazing. I don't care how many people want to downplay this or put it down... I've been a game reviewer/playtester for over 4 years and this is impressive!
Fantasy, FPS, realism, this has it all to be THE game to finally get FPS' out of their rut. Anyone and everyone who has way outgrown the immaturity and predictableness of the FPS genre should be on this bandwagon for sure.
It takes a lot to get my attention and this one has it fully. Please dear lord, let this not be vapor and or get changed into a carbon copy of theif or some such to please a corporate backer. We need new blood, and before the next gen consoles hit and they get the usual glut of doom/halo clones now is the perfect time to still influence new titles.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
As impressive as the engine looks, the big power behind it draws from the power of today high end PC's
(ati x, geforce 7 sli combined with multiple CORE cpu's) you may want to sit down if you didnt know, but Its quite possible to do PS3 and X360 quality graphics on it TODAY, actually better than those.
Unfortunately the price is still in the high price range (but will drop eventually) so you probably want to wait before being awed by graphics such as this in your own monitor (check out the ati/nvidia sites for further info). however PC's will eventually beat consoles in the graphics dept (as always)
BTW That game is PC based.
Why does it look better than doom3 and UT engine? easy it uses THIS generation latest tech , doom3, source and UT use the prior generation tech but at least are capable of running in a Medium end PC.
On the game side I really have to aplaud S2 design, the game will be a weird mix between D&D and Halo. Imagine Halo with Dragons, magic arrows and Orcs instead of warthogs, needlers and covenants and you have a pretty good idea of what this will be like (how come no one thought about that before?).
On the negative side Im not sure I like the name and also their motto is wrong, The first Fantasy FPS was Heretic followed closely by Hexen. Im not sure Raven is going to be pretty happy with their trailer.
Anyway I wouldnt count out the next generation of console games NOT to include those effects in their engines, everybody knows each generation of console games is better than the last. Is going to be a neat contest.
And please spare me the "graphics dont make games" speech, we are talking about graphics here not gameplay.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
This is exactly the kind of attitude I'm talking about.
Maybe 'better' means something different to someone else than it does to you.
To me, 'better' means a solid plotline and storytelling, interesting characters, the game as essentially a big puzzle to beat.
It does not mean, griefers, cheaters, getting my ass kicked constantly because I'm no good at multiplayer (a man's got to know his limitations and I learned mine in America's Army), having to play when my friends are available or playing with strangers, having nothing to do but see who can make the other guys respawn more, "pwning" enemies, just fighting, fighting and more fighting, who's got the quickest trigger finger rather than the best logic-solver, getting killed in under 30 seconds, etc., etc.
How many times has an FPS came out with videos portraying it to be revolutionary, and then dissapointed people and not lived up to it's claims
I think I will reserve judgement on whether this is "amazing" until I get my grubby mits on it.
Business Voyeur
Since the game devs seem to think that MP games are the only kind that count, I'll have to assume that "Project Offset" is also MP-only. Too bad. A single-player fantasy FPS with pretty graphics might have attracted my gaming dollars.
Multiplayer often gets much more attention online because we are online and gameplay can change at any moment...much like replies to posts on forums such as this one.
Single player games have a much more limited number of variations of gameplay. The game is scripted and that's what happens. (Deus Ex and Black&White did do much more though).
Multiplayer games tend to last longer (ignoring EXCELLENT games) because playing them is akin to playing a game where anything under the sun can happen due to other humans interacting with it.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
1) It is mentioned on the game's page, only one link deep, that this is a muliplayer game. No digging required.
2) Multiplayer games sell more copies. No one is going to sue you for the fact that you like SP better. But what they will do is make MP games since MP games make better money. For every gaming dollar they lose because of a SP only player, they gain probably dozens from people who enjoy MP games.
Sorry that you are part of a minority, it will make your gaming life harder. But when it comes down to it, the majority of game companies don't give a rats ass that you like SP games, since they are going to make so much more money on the MP market.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
It doesn't take into account physics or AI. It is obviously just a scripted sequence. Well guess what, run a timedemo in Quake and you'll easily get 2-3 times the framerate you do in-game. The reason is simple, everything is scripted so the engine doesn't have to work all that hard to make everything move on screen. Once a game is complete, corners are gonna be cut, and all those purdy little curves are gonna go away.
"The game is targeted for next gen PC hardware. Xbox360 and PS3 are also possible and we are excited about bringing Project Offset to these platforms."
Actually, you're right. It's mentioned in Savage's FAQ (the last link on the home page), 19th question out of 33, that there's no singleplayer campaign.
As for Project Offset, it's mentioned on the Gameplay page, near the bottom of the first paragraph, that you can play alone so presumably there's a singleplayer campaign.
So it's not as bad as I thought at 2AM. Mea Culpa.
I don't mind at all that companies make MP-only games; more power to them if that's where the money is. What I do object to is having my time wasted; having to dig and make inferences and sometimes download a demo just to find out what the prereqs are.
Some games don't directly tell you they're MP only - you have to infer it from game docs. Many of Valve's games and third-party content available through Steam are like this. Action Half-Life sounded like fun until I read between the lines and realized there was no SP campaign. In the stores, Planetfall sounded like fun until I read between the lines and realized there was no SP.
Other games don't tell you that you need another game to make them work. Especially some TCs like Industri and Infection. Infection in particular didn't make it clear that a copy of Quake 3 Arena was required to make it work. Not all TCs need the original game - Code Red: Battle for Earth and Code Red: The Martian Chronicles are good examples of ones that don't.
Multiplayer games sell more copies.
I'm curious where you get this information from. A quick check of the top ten selling PC games for 2004 paints a different picture.
1. The Sims 2 - Single player.
2. Doom 3 - Primarily single player, with a fairly flat multiplayer component seeming added on as an afterthought.
3. World Of Warcraft - Okay, that's one.
4. Half-Life 2 - Single player. Yeah, it comes with Counter-Strike & Half-Life 2 Deathmatch (which wasn't available or even announced at HL2's launch) but the core game itself is purely single player.
5. The Sims Deluxe - Single player.
6. The Sims 2 Special Edition - Single player.
7. Battlefield Vietnam - That's two. Though it does have single player capability via bots, so it's not purely multiplayer.
8. Call Of Duty - Fifty/fifty, IMO. It has single player, though many (I suspect most) buy it for the multiplayer.
9. Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 - Yeah, that's single player too.
10. MS Zoo Tycoon: Complete Collection - Single player.
So, only one game in the top ten last year was a pure multiplayer game, with two more that are a mix of single/multi leaning towards multi. The other seven were primarily single player games, five of which have no multiplayer capability at all.
Note that I've only looked at PC games, as this game is only officially announced for the PC. They say they want to port to next-gen consoles, but it doesn't sound like they've even begun working on that. So, for now, it's just a PC game and I want to compare apples to apples.
Damnit, you got me. I made the mistake of assuming. I rarely remember to include the sim and tycoon games when I think of popular games. Maybe I should have specified "good" single player games (that is of course relative to the player, I am simply being facetious).
That being said, it is not hard to see that the industry as a whole is moving to multiplayer style games, and has been for a while. In a lot of games these days the SP component serves only as a pale imitation of the Multiplayer game. This can be seen as far back as Quake 3.
I think, on the PC front anyhow, things are going to start sucking harder for single player fans before they start getting better.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
Not so fast. The WoW effect has been to suck a heck of a lot of revenue away from other titles. Remember that every copy of WoW out there is pulling $13 or something like that from each customer, each month.
I buy far fewer games since buying WoW. How about you?
It would be a video of me running out of a castle in Scotland as I shoot down tourists with my compund bow. NICE WORK GUYS.
Since the game devs seem to think that MP games are the only kind that count, I'll have to assume that "Project Offset" is also MP-only.
And what happens when you "assume"? Say it with me - you make an "ass" out of "u" and "me"!
From the site:
"Yes this game will have single player! And you will be able to play with friends as well. We have many things planned for this single player that will excite fps players and rpg players alike. Information about our single player/coop will be given soon."
Hey guys, just to clarify a couple things: - We're ex developers of S2 Games, but no longer affiliated with them. Offset Software is a new company. - Project Offset is not a multiplayer only game. We have a single player and coop mode planned. I've been developing this engine for about a 1.5 years now, and Travis and Trevor (the artists) started helping me out full time about six months ago. We feel like we've been making good progress, but we don't plan on completing the game with only the three of us, so we are looking for publishing opportunities and other forms of funding (licensing the engine...) Our goal is not to just make a game with pretty graphics. We're dedicated to making the gameplay equally as good. Sam McGrath www.projectoffset.com
Yeah. Broke a cardinal rule: Never post at 4AM.
Hey guys, just to clarify a couple things:
- We're ex developers of S2 Games, but no longer affiliated with them. Offset Software is a new company.
- Project Offset is not a multiplayer only game. We have a single player and coop mode planned.
I've been developing this engine for about a 1.5 years now, and Travis and Trevor (the artists) started helping me out full time about six months ago. We feel like we've been making good progress, but we don't plan on completing the game with only the three of us, so we are looking for publishing opportunities and other forms of funding (licensing the engine...)
Our goal is not to just make a game with pretty graphics. We're dedicated to making the gameplay equally as good.
Sam McGrath
http://www.projectoffset.com/
" I've wanted a game like that (RTS/FPS with realistic graphics) for as long as there have been computer games, really."
To have a game that is the feel of a classic RPG (epic battles, might and magic, etc..) with the control of a FPS, this is something I would jump on in a heartbeat...
To me all of the WOW and EQ games look cartoonish and out of sorts... blows away the whole immersion aspect of the game to me.. to date the only thing rhwy have done with massivley multipler FPS is army simulations (BF2, BF1942, RTCW, etc..) to play a game like lord of the rings in a FPS would be awesome...
Adventure is a very old Atari 2600 game that probably inspired games like Zelda and played a prominent role in the creation of the whole graphically represented adventure/rpg game genre. If I remember correctly the program code/gfx was limited to 4096bytes (ROM), and 128bytes for variables (RAM), ie. not much to work with so the gfx was very simple. The coder made the graphics himself, that's why the dragon ended up looking more like a duck. Since it was 2D, the dragon could be drawn as a 'slice' with a hollow belly.
Screenshot in this Wikipedia article about Adventure
It might not look like much, but it's actually very refreshing and new to get physically trapped inside the belly after you've been eaten. The enemies also leave permanent corpses (unless you restart). In most new games stuff just go 'poof' when it dies cuz they don't have processing power for persistance with the level of detail/framerate they're going for.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
I don't know, I think they've pretty much balanced out. There will always be a market for single player games, just as there will be for multiplayer games.
There's a lot of single player games in a lot of genres I'm looking forward to over the next year or two: HL2: Aftermath, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., F.E.A.R., Hellgate: London, Prey, Unreal 3, Quake 4, Dragon Age, Civilization 4, SiN: Episodes, Alan Wake. I could go on, but you get the idea.
I suspect you primarily enjoy MP games, so maybe you pay more attention to those games and pay less attention to the SP games. So, from your POV, there are more MP games out there. I'm just guessing here, making no assumptions. I'm quite the opposite, I prefer SP so I pay much more attention to those games. I'd have a hard time naming any upcoming MP games, outside of Day Of Defeat: Source, which I actually am looking forward to. Heck, the only MP-centric games I can even think of coming out recently are the Battlefield series and WoW.
I think it all comes down to POV. From where I'm sitting MP games seem to be on their way out, even though I know that's not the case. I just don't pay enough attention to those games to keep up-to-date on what's coming out.
"I think it all comes down to POV."
Not even something I considered, but entirely possible. It really takes a phenominal single player game to get my attention (Half Life 2 comes to mind) and yet a ho hum multiplayer game can keep me coming back for years (Planetside... why oh why do I resubscribe every couple of months?)
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
I don't want motion blur. Motion blur is an idiotic concept designed to ape the inferior 27fps of movies or 30fps of TV from the Neanderthal days of technology.
In the original Quake, on a fast computer, pre-3dfx, the software renderer, though pixelly, could do faster than 60fps. It ceased to look like a game, and started looking like you were looking through a window at a blocky, but real world.
STOP WITH THE DAMNED MOTION BLUR CRAP, BUFFOONS! God almighty! Stop it. Just stop it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Aside from MMO's, multiplayer game sales do not come close to single-player game sales. Compare the stats of how many people are playing MP versus sales for the games:
http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/
Also, while a game may be MP only, it may have an SP mode. Unreal Tournament is pretty fun when there's nothing else to do, and the network's down, even in SP mode. Bots are your friends :P
To me, intelligent posting represents an informed opinion. Where as you opened your shithole and spouted some trolling crap you made up about it not being single player. The game is fucking MP and SP, and is proudly proclaimed on their site. Give them a break you no-hoper, they're a thousand times better than you.
Now the excuses come out. Clearly you lost all hope of defending your precious opinion.
Fucking jackass.
Sigh. I should get modded both offtopic and flamebait for feeding the trolls, but sometimes it's just too hard to resist...
At least I have an excuse for having been a jackass that one time.
I start out with a scene looking down on my team (army, band, whatever) from above, Warcraft III-style, but nicely rendered.
I click on a guy to directly control, and the scene zomms and pans until I'm looking at the same scene through his/her eyes.
There are so many things that could be done that haven't been (at least not well)...someday, my game will find me. Maybe it'll be this one.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Probably not, there are dedicated physics add-in cards in development. (Can't find a link at work though)
If you can find it... try Dungeon Keeper 2
It has this exact functionality that you are describing.. although it is a rather old game (5+ years or so) it's gameplay is unduplicated since it's arrival...
You can prolly find it in a bargain bin for 5 bucks or floating around somewhere...
I'll keep my eyes peeled...who was the publisher?
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Bullfrog was the original publisher, then i think it got picked up by EA who now offers it as a bargain bin item at like fry's or best buy (if you can find it...)
Searching on ebay i was able to find a number of copies selling, often at a starting price of 1 dollar with a total price of 5 with shipping...
Just search for Dungeon Keeper 2
(the harder part will be finding the latest patches, but google should be able to help...)
Ageia is one company. I saw their demo system at Quakecon. Seems pretty neat but I'm skeptical about a long term market for them.