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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.'"
at least one of the developers worked on the very cool indie games festival winner 'savage: battle for newerth' (sp?) as well, so they have already proved that they can do some cool stuff, game-design wise
unfortunately the character designs are less than inspired...so many games doing the same kind of blah characters...
but very inspiring to have a team like this blowing the lid off the whole 'throw away your code' attitude that gabe newell spouted a few weeks back, and the 'indie developers wont be able to compete' line that EA tried to pass off a while back as well.
lets hope the online play is as innovative as savage was (even being the natural selection ripoff that it sorta was)...combining an rts, fps and 3rd person game into a very fun online action game...
savage did things in it's online play that haven't been seen in an action game before or since, with the ai controlled npc's mining resources and other very cool things like that.
looking forward to seeing how this project (pardon the pun) progresses...
Gekido's Lair
Torrent of highest definition version of the latest video.
Make sure to watch this before commenting. Seriously. Has a BUNCH of seeds.
The official site.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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.
:(
according to the site it's one guy creating that engine.
the other two are responsible for the nice "i just saw 'the two towers' at the cinema and it was sooo cool" paintings and the character modelling.
which might not be too bad, but it is always easier to do that for a fantasy setting than for something people know how it should look like, and i admit that i did not download/see the movie (compression artifacts blur out the ugliness of game engine artifacts anyways, with the right codec even half-life 1 looks great) so i can't say how good the animation part of the characters is, which is usually more problematic than stills.
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
Please keep in mind that this is done by 3 developers on their spare time! I myself am in AWWWW! it looks great!
They were pretty up front about that, honestly. They want to make a cinematic epic game for next-gen hardware (paraphrasing). To go epic, you need lots of characters, and places for them to run around in and do things. To go cinematic, you need "all those graphics goodies". Then they specifically say "to run on next-gen hardware"...
What is there to not understand?
What they should focus on is making an amazing game. I've wanted a game like that (RTS/FPS with realistic graphics) for as long as there have been computer games, really. If they succeed, they'll make AMD and Intel, and whatever graphics vendors are around at the time very, very happy.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
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
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/
Honestly, we were working on Savage before Natural Selection was announced or released. As similar as they turned out to be, neither influenced the other at all. Nobody at S2 was playing NS while we worked on Savage.
That said, both games I think are great.