Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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 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)
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
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.
but then so did [CENSORED]'s description and screenshots
Don't you ever say that name again here. EVER.
--------
This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
Solved lightning? I thought DOOM3 solved lightning, by making everything really dark ....
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
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.
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