http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512

Nice article by one of the guys behing Sins of the Solar Empire. 

that's one of the games that I have to keep in mind for later trying...
(I've been playing UFO and Master of Orion lately.)

It's sorta funny to read some gaming magazines again. It's probably more than ten years since I last took a look. Some editorial personalities have diverged a bit from my views, but some have still something interesting to say.
And the old Mikrobitti computer magazine is nowadays for general consumers, there are even music reviews in there.

It's a hard choice. Gamers and computer enthusiasts are no single demographic. Either you can try to gather for all of them (general gadget consumers) or then the largest segment (single slightly adolescent lifestyle men, studying or working in IT).

Awaiting mikrobitti's pizza reviews. 

Just saw this on Blues...

http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=85990

"Dark Salvation....a freeware Quake III-engine shooter....The game lets the player take on the role of a young dead woman who has been sucked into the underworld and is now possessed by a deadly object. This game will take you back to the days of old school FPS shooters with it's single player fast action game play set in various surreal underground worlds. There are plenty of levels, secrets, monsters and secret weapons to explore, find and fight and we'll be targeting the game at a budget price this 2008 year."

Hmmmm....possible? 

Sounds Like Shadowman, looks like Painkiller.

Hope the team knows that "oldschool" doesn't mean "shitty level design". 

PK comparison is the obvious expectation. Personally, I'd hope not. PK was a good fun game but the single-minded semi-horde combat got old pretty quickly. A game with proper monsters that actually mean something would be welcome. 

I think it was the level design - the monsters were ok for what they were, the occasional cooperative attack AI was nicely done (eg. skull bikers using the normal bikers as human shields) but the levels were basically a series of box maps, with the expansion following the same theme but making trick jumping a progression prerequisite. 

textures/sounds/themes were done very well, but levels were indeed boring. But what made me stop halfway through were the frustrating "secrets" which were mostly movement tests. The fun just stops for me when I need one hour or more for some of the jumps. Pffft. 

and all the shots are full of clich�s but might still be fun if they keep the gameplay as mindless action DooM style 

With Painkiller's (lack of) level design, the game was basically stillborn. It's a shame, because it could have been a great game. 

as bad as painkiller's gameplay might have been, it had fantastic looking maps. since they're using the q3 engine, i wouldn't expect it to look as good as PK, but i think it's something to be strived for, regardless. 

since they're using the q3 engine, i wouldn't expect it to look as good as PK

"nearly as good" is fair enough for me, atleast one can expect good fps from the well optimized q3 engine; whereas for me PK runs with 250 fps in an empty map, but as soon as monsters appear it goes down into the 30 fps range, no matter the settings. Not acceptable. 

I haven't tried it, but I'd assume that a good artist could throw enough pollies and textures at the Q3 engine and probably make it look just as good as PK, whilst running a lot faster. 

The Q3 engine has always been my choice for 'remake of classic quake' fantasy.

a good artist could throw enough pollies and textures

This for me is the problem. One must do more than throw polys and pixels to be a good artist.

The screenshots on Blue's are less than stellar. They have that all-too-common style of game design that looks like someone burned a new age jewellery shop to the ground, dumped the debris in a skip, then threw me in after it.
Glowing, sparking, purple crystals? Really?

Your shaders have to be really neat to make such gaudy choices work. And here's a tip for aspiring modellers out there: if your skillset doesn't cover human anatomy, don't show hands on the weapon models, especially skeletal hands.

Look, I want a decent Quake-like game too. The FPS industry has been choking on so much concrete for the last several years I think my body has actually developed a chemical tolerance to it.
And these guys are at least putting in the work, slogging away for seven years. I wish them luck.
But even Painkiller, with a decent budget thrust up it's heavy-metal backside like a stake in a bloated corpse, wasn't more than a simplistic shadow of what is truly enjoyable about Doom and Quake.

I'll probably buy it when it arrives, more as an expression of solidarity than a vote of confidence.


- Kell McDonald, still waiting for a proper high-poly shambler :( 

Ask Lunaran. I think he's got a high-poly shambler somewhere. 

Yeah, forgot about that. He surreptitiously linked me it when I was sleeping. The perv.

That's a modification of the Q1 shamb though. Not a remake for a Q3-or-later engine.

A new shambler must have fully modelled jaws bearing vicious thorny growths that serve as teeth for the vile beast. And rugose, mouldy flesh that hangs in scabrous furrows from its hulking semi-simian frame, swaying repulsively as it lumbers towards the luckless victim...terrible, barbed claws...that reach...



Excuse me, I have to lie down. 

Sup Kell :}

This for me is the problem. One must do more than throw polys and pixels to be a good artist.

I wasn't claiming that makes a good artist because it doesn't (obviously it doesn't).

My point is that a typical environment in PK uses a triangle count and an amount of texture data somewhat in excess of that seen in Quake 3. To make a visually comparable scene in the Q3 engine, you are probably going to be adopting triangle and texture budgets similar in magnitude. An experienced environment artist of course will use the usual tricks and optimisations to make the most of what he has at his diposal. 

Hello guys :).

Good discussion. PK had some good-looking and striking maps, they just didn't play as exciting as their themes.

I tend to agree with Kell. I think that's the second time that's happened this month! 

I thought Randy's Shambler was a good start:
http://qexpo2005.quakedev.com/booths/randy/148.html

It seems like the Shambler is the most memorable monster as there are loads of fanart. Maybe I will compile a post with some good ones.
This one is most excellent in my opinion:
http://fc02.deviantart.com/fs28/f/2008/050/0/f/Shambler_by_David_the_Cenobite.jpg
http://david-the-cenobite.deviantart.com/art/Shambler-77903614 

of design - "look, we can do this!" instead of thinking "should we do this?".

It's an easy trap to fall into, especially since once new feature X is included the team fires headlong into yet another new feature, instead of getting the previous one to work properly.

Then delviery day comes and the good bits are diluted in a soup of unfinished features. 

That Shambler model is excellent. 

My comments about a Q3-engine PK clone potentially looking good were not in any way refering to that game on Bluesnews, the screenshots of which I didn't bother checking out until now.

Also don't you just hate it when a couple of modders call themselves some stupid shit like "Mangled Eye Studios", completely giving away the fact that it's just some angsty kid and maybe one or two of his internet friends mucking about in the Q3 engine (for seven years apparently). 

Vanilla Q3 is not particularly fast. Try standing in the worst spots of blacktown or tvy-bench - my 7950GT gets single digit framerates for scenes that a modern engine should fly through at 100 FPS or more.

There's a bunch of reasons for this, which boil down the the fact that q3 is a decade old and wasn't written for the fast paths of modern hardware. 

I agree with BlackDog I guess 

those are unoptimized 3rd party maps and ofcourse it�s easy to kill an engine fps-wise by not minding it�s limits (there are plenty of those on lvl); pom.pk3 also runs poorly for me with maxed gfx, but quake engines were always weak rendering big open spaces.

Show me one 8 years old engine that is still able to look very good in these days and also gives good fps. ---> Q3 <3 

i think it's more the number of polygons/surfaces the engine's not good at.