uh... 3dfx?

What is the polycount on those trees ?

What kind of LOD do you use in your engine ?

/David

Nathan, the screenshots of the game here and on your web site look extremely cool imho, especially for such a small team. Can't wait to check out the demo. Best of luck with the project...

ouch those jpg screenshots on your site are about 800kb each!!!
it does look beautiful though i notice antialiasing isnt turned on, does it cause a cetain cards performance to drop that much?
well best of luck

what in the heck is that vehicle? is it a hovertank?

I guess it is a NVidia GeForce 3
=)

The screenshot looks really good but I don't
catch the idea of the game concept
Racing with hovercrafts???

Isn't it a little bit too simple for games today
but this is only my little opinion

But the engine is ... wow did he said REAL-TIME???
IMPRESSIVE

K33p on CoDiNg

And so it begins. We are now going to be barraged by a never ending parade of games featuring cubic-environment mapping on everything from palm-trees to hover-tanks. If any of you watched the Doom3 demo from MacWorld I am sure you will agree that the game had better come with a warning for epileptics. Every single light in the game appears to be a strobe light placed behind some moving object.

I personally think the hover tank looks really bad with the cheesy bumped-environment map layed over an equally cheesy hover-tank texture.

A tip for game creators - just because you _can_ use a neato feature doesn't mean you should. I, for one, won't be playing Doom3 if the end product looks like the demo.

Hey,

Those shots on your sight look sick! The water looked amazing (IMHO), and the reflections were crazy! Is the game as fun to play as it is to look at? It looks like one of those fun MarioKart type games (I have a soft spot for those types of games...). Is this gonna be a console game (X-box, Indrema) or a PC game?

Dude, we all know he's talking about ATI's Radeon2.

cool image :-) .. but hey, it isn't that hard to code such an engine on a geforceII or a radeon. you don't need good visibility systems and all that stuff, just use brute-force and it looks great and is even fast! i don't think that this engine runs on a tnt1/2 a 3dfx or so??? if it does so, then the image quality will suffer a lot ..

just my 2 cents ..

sorry *g* .. just read on your homepage, that your engine supports old graphic-cards .. really good work guys :-))

And so it begins, the complaining. People said that exact same things about bi-linear-filtering, mip-maps, colored-lighting, and hi-res graphics modes in general back when the first round of 3d cards came out, or around the time of QuakeII. Everyone was used to seeing 320 x 200 x 8bit

If you dont like his art (the "cheesy" hovertank texture), thats one thing. If you dont like his game concept, thats another thing. But you are wrapping all of these complaints up into a weak argument by saying that he's just feature-biting from the new hardware cards. I dont think your doing it to flame him, so dont consider this response a flame to you either I just want to say I think your reasoning is poor in this case

This screen shot looks like a shot from a neat game to me not a hardware effects demo

Hey it is obvious that the next-gen card is the new NVidia Geforce 3, they made a deal (much too the nightmares of PC gamers every where) with Apple to release the new technology on G4 systems first. Its only fair, apple needs a boost in getting games on their platform. We only wish that PC users didn't have to wait!!

The screen shot is sweet. I'm glad these graphics cards are not only work horses, but chalked full of memory, which lets us use all kinds of BIG textures to make our models as detailed as we'd like.

Are those textures on the haul plating bump-mapped? The rust and dirt look really nice. I can imagine the freedom of movement this game may offer; it would be cool to plow down some trees, and make your own short cuts! Sweet Shot.

-KodeAC

That looks amazing - to be expected really from Firetoads though. Ectosaver is the only screensaver I've ever paid for :)

That "hover-tank" looks really cool, I personally love the texturing on it. Keep it up!

> they made a deal (much too the nightmares of PC gamers every where)
> with Apple to release the new technology on G4 systems first. Its only fair
...

Let me guess, you haven't worked with any of this new fangled stuff called hardware
lately, have you? The same card will work in PCs and G4s at release. There is no
"first comes Apple, then comes PC". Thank god for some standards like AGP. And
Apple doesn't need, nor deserve, anything first. Their success, or lack thereof is
entirely their fault. Apple is finally catching on that a closed hardware model is a dead
hardware model. If the G4s didn't have the AGP slot, Apple users would be stuck with
whatever proprietary card came with them.

Dodger_

Ted, I think you are forgetting one _important_ thing. The same card
will not work in a PC vs. a G4 due to the BIOS. I seriously doubt a
PC card with a BIOS written in x86 instructions is gonna fly on a G4
and vise versa. You could try flashing it, but then you run the risk
of totally wasting your money on a card that has a good chance of not
working at all.

Apple doesn't need, nor deserve, anything first. Their success, or lack thereof is entirely their fault. Apple is finally catching on that a closed hardware model is a dead hardware model. If the G4s didn't have the AGP slot, Apple users would be stuck with whatever proprietary card came with them.

Do you forget that it's the open hardware model of Microsoft that has made such a pain for game developers in the past?! As Alan Kay says: "Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas". Have you played Quake III on a new G4? OpenGL screams on it, fully featured. The new G4 powerbooks already run faster than any other laptop does, and the MacOSX platform is far more superior to develop for. The only reason apple doesn't have the games market is the tight monopoly of distribution established to date by the PC market. Apple hardware and software is the most used in the publishing, advertising, and multimedia industries. Traditionally Photoshop, Director, Flash, Quark, Illustrator, were all developed for Apple users, and have now been ported to Windoze so their users can enjoy the same tools. Ted, you should buy one, and relax a little.

> I seriously doubt a PC card with a BIOS written in x86 instructions is gonna fly on a G4 and vise versa.

And I seriously doubt it's very difficult for Nvidia to flash said BIOS at the manufacturing plant. What I was saying is that they aren't going to have two different chips for two different platforms. All of that will be abstracted so as to minimize the manufacturing costs. If the original poster was correct and the GeForce3 is released for the G4 first, it will be a matter of weeks, between the release for the PC. I doubt Nvidia wants to waste any time getting the hardware out to a much larger installed base than Apple.

DragonWorx:

Sorry, I don't support dead end hardware. I don't support Windows either, so stop making silly assumptions and looking like the fool. Stop quoting religion from the Apple bible about your laptop being faster than all the rest(that's entirely subjective to the operation being performed). The "MacOSX" is hardly out of diapers to be saying anything about it's development tools. As for Apple hardware in the publishing, advertising and multimedia industries, that may have been true in the late 80s, early to mid-nineties, but it's not true today. You said the reason why this isn't the case in your post, because all of those wonderful tools have been ported to Windows.

Besides, I wouldn't buy an Apple because they're too darned ugly.

Dodger_

Um... I'm not going to ask ( or back-read ) to find out why you're talking about x86 vs. Mac. I will however say that is an impressive pic! Is that thing on top of the hover-thingy reflective? Either way, nice crisp texturing, and it looks like you've got quite a bit of detail goin on there. About how much is the average poly count per frame? And the trees, are they part of the world geometry, or are they references that you just like, take a couple of meshes and just translate/render them all over to keep the size of the level down?
Dan

Nathan,

Your image looks fantastic. I think the texture looks great, the game looks like fun!

Hi Dodger,

Sorry, I don't support dead end hardware. I don't support Windows either, so stop making silly assumptions and looking like the fool.

Would you like to be specific instead of just being a prick?

Stop quoting religion from the Apple bible about your laptop being faster than all the rest(that's entirely subjective to the operation being performed).

Actually, the quote is from Alan Kay, one of the original Smalltalk team at Xerox, not Apple. If you read his quote again (very slowly), you might appreciate it. As far as the performance test goes, this is a snip from Apples site:

* Based on Adobe Photoshop tests comparing a 500MHz PowerBook G4 to 850MHz Pentium III-based portable computers.

The url is here

The "MacOSX" is hardly out of diapers to be saying anything about it's development tools.

The whole thing is built on top of UNIX, is that "mature" enough for you? I have been using MacOSX Server and it is so powerful. Plus, with the new "Aqua" interface out, it makes other OS's look like toys.

As for Apple hardware in the publishing, advertising and multimedia industries, that may have been true in the late 80s, early to mid-nineties, but it's not true today. You said the reason why this isn't the case in your post, because all of those wonderful tools have been ported to Windows.

This was only done to fill the gap and make money off of poor windoze users who wanted to do the same things already being done on Apple hardware. Give Apple credit where it is due. Since you were talking about "who get's it first".

Besides, I wouldn't buy an Apple because they're too darned ugly.

Man, i would hate to see your wardrobe! If you check the history books, Apple are the ones famous for style. Interface, and the actual boxes. If you don't think that an iMac or iBook looks any good, you're boring and a fool.

One of the nicer images of the day I have seen. This screenshot actually look professional

This game looks jummy!! :P

"Do you forget that it's the open hardware model of Microsoft that has made such a pain for game developers in the past?! "


"The new G4 powerbooks already run faster than any other laptop does, and the MacOSX platform is far more superior to develop for. The only reason apple doesn't have the games market is the tight monopoly of distribution established to date by the PC market. "

hahaha.
where the hell do you get your information? As I recall Apple wouldnt be in business if it wasnt for Microsoft. Hmmmmmmm. And how is it that you think Microsoft engineered the open hardware model? Do a little research before you spout lies.

Just for the record, at my last job (AT&T media services) we compared a dual processor apple G4 500 w/ 1GB of RAM to a Pentium 3 1Ghz with 128 meg RAM in an Adobe Photoshop test. The Pentium machine could open a 8000 pixel x 800 pixel image in just a few seconds, the apple took nearly 5 minutes. Applying filters to that image (or any image) could take up to a minute on the apple, and just a few seconds on the PC. Using industry standard Media 100 software (non-linear video editing software/hardware) the G4 performed like a sick duck.

So I dont know what book you are reading or whatever, but in our test, that certainly didn't hold true. And dont start spouting that our engineers couldnt optimize the mac.

I like the macintoshes, I like their hardware and I like the new OSX, but to sit there and shout out unsupported facts is just wrong.

bit64,

Those facts are supported! Apple even use them at trade shows now, so go bark at them. Visit the Apple site, here.

I like how mac zealots go wild about how great the mac is. Shut up and face your wasted money.

The only app that mac zealots talk about is photoshop - because it is designed on and hand optimised for a mac.

The horrible truth about macs. The G4 setup is a bad architecture - the CPU is strangled for instructions, optimisation is shocking and they aren't going to keep on making the line because of its lack of scalability. The OS is shocking - OSX is the first MacOS to be considered even close to up to scratch - Protected memory, proper memory paging are only just coming into the realm of reality - Features that have been in Windows since 3.0 and early NT.

Then Mac Zealots will tell you how OSX is fixing/going to fix everything. The OSX betas I've used are sluggish on a G4 450.

Understand - A 1.2ghz athlon + 256megs of fast ram + a large hard disk + a Geforce2 can be yours for under 1k. For more you can get a Mac with coloured/transparent areas.

Using data obtained by the manufacturer... I have a bridge I'd like to sell you...

Man, i would hate to see your wardrobe! If you check the history books, Apple are the ones famous for style. Interface, and the actual boxes. If you don't think that an iMac or iBook looks any good, you're boring and a fool.

I'd give you credit for the iMac(somewhat, not that much though) and would be fully willing to give you credit for the cube(thats just sweet), but the iBook???

Couldn't have said it better myself. /me humps your leg.

Anyway, after my last message - I shall say -

I like this IOTD, and I think there is a definate professional look and feel to this screenshot. A "polish" if you will.

Definately something to impress.