Checked out Malfador's site yet??

[Atrocities]

Aaron could charge say $100.00 for a beta tester slot and you know what? We would pay it! Gladly.

[Grandpa Kim]

Well, I know what 3D rendered graphics are but what the heck are "real-time 3D rendered graphics"? If it has anything to do with combat, I ain't interested. Nope, not interested in having the computer train my fingers.

Now, I want you beta-testers to do a real good job because I'm really looking forward to playing the demo for the first time and getting that 8-years-old-again feeling

[Fyron]

No need to have fingers trained at all. As has been mentioned on many occasions, the ability to pause and issues orders while paused eliminates every possible click-festing issue with real time combat. Multiplayer games would likely have combat done strategically, rather than tactically (as in Se4, esp. for PBW games and such), so there is no reason for concern there. Except hotseat games, which can easily be handled by having simulated "turns" where the game runs combat without intervention for X seconds, then pauses, giving each player a chance to issue orders, just like SE4 combat. Except that there will be no turn based combat idiosyncracies, which no possible purely turn based system can get rid of.

[Grandpa Kim]

So, unlike Warcraft II, I'll actually have real control when a hundred ships are in the battle. Cool! "Pause" is good.

I don't doubt this has been mentioned before, but time constraints prevent me from reading more than about 20% of the threads

[Fyron]

Oh you can bet that the beta testers won't let Aaron make SE5 a RTS game. There is a whole world out there outside of RTS (Warcraft, Starcraft, etc. are "RTS", a specific (and small) chunk of what real time games can be).

[Phoenix-D]

Originally posted by Grandpa Kim:
Well, I know what 3D rendered graphics are but what the heck are "real-time 3D rendered graphics"?

Real time 3d graphics means the computer is doing the rendering as you play. As opposed to say SE4 shipsets where all the rendering is done ahead of time.

There is 0 reason they couldn't be used in a turn-based system; they already have been many times. The recent attempt to do an updated Version of X-COM uses the Quake 2 engine for example, and it runs pretty much the same as normal X-com. So does the excellent Silent Storm.

[Atrocities]

I am not sure, but I think this will drastically change the way ships sets are made. I believe, and I could be wrong, that now you must have a wire frame model of your ship and a "skin" to go over it.

Look at BOTF and how they did it.

I hope this is not the case.