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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.'"
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
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.
Is it really all that and a bag of popcorn?
Having just seen it... Yes. Yes it is.
I saw a demo of the Half-Life 2 engine at E3 a couple of years ago. The texture quality was awesome. This doesn't rely on just awesome textures. This solves lighting. SOLVES it.
Synergy is your friend
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.
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'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 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
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
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.
is it so much easier to create ugly things instead of beauty
:)
Take a look in the mirror and ask your momma how easy it was to make you
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.
Solved lightning? I thought DOOM3 solved lightning, by making everything really dark ....
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]
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
Bah! Novels created based on a screenplay always suck. :-P
Please keep in mind that this is done by 3 developers on their spare time! I myself am in AWWWW! it looks great!
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.
It is not a game development platform / engine... their intent is to use their game engine as a game engine, not to sell it 'competively'.
/.ians.
From the "Technology" section of projectoffset.com:
"The Offset Engine is a complete platform for creating next generation games. Though it aims to be a top tier engine, OE is not just built with large developers in mind. Every aspect of the engine is designed around the goal of reducing development time and cost, while empowering designers and artists with the tools they need to create spectacular visual effects and immersive environments."
Yeah, they're totally not designing it to be licensed.
One more day turning up the contrast on the subtle flaws in the logic of fellow
Seems to me you just turned your own brightness way down.
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/
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 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.