Sword of the Stars? (New 4x game apparently)

[Mecron]

In case anyone is still interested The first hands on preview of SotS is up at...

http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=29599

--MEC

[AgentZero]

Mecron said:
In case anyone is still interested The first hands on preview of SotS is up at...

http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=29599

--MEC

I need demo! Must show off shiney new video card to Playstation owning friends!

[wilhil]

AgentZero said:

I need demo! Must show off shiney new video card to Playstation owning friends!

get halflife 2 or doom 3 then! this game looks cool, but it does not look like it will be a challenge on the graphics!

[Mecron]

Well...we don't want to leave older cards behind and so have a nice scale of fx...but the thing to remember is that HL2 or D3 are all about the background sets...they only run a couple dozen fx at the same time on a screen. With a full fleet battle in SotS with shields, cloaking, damage venting, explosions and dozens of weapons systems. It runs 10 or 20 times more fx than a shooter.

[wilhil]

Mecron said:
Well...we don't want to leave older cards behind and so have a nice scale of fx...but the thing to remember is that HL2 or D3 are all about the background sets...they only run a couple dozen fx at the same time on a screen. With a full fleet battle in SotS with shields, cloaking, damage venting, explosions and dozens of weapons systems. It runs 10 or 20 times more fx than a shooter.

ahh, sorry! I reread my post and realise I sounded really bad like I was taking the mick out of the game!

I am really really sorry! I didnt mean for it to come across like that at all!

Anyway, as far as I think, graphics dont really mean anything! I hated doom 3 (well I dont really like horror games) it was a bad game with just good graphics (apart from the interactive ingame panels! I loved them!), on the other hand, SEIV is poor graphics with brilliant gameplay, and guess which one I am playing years after buying!

As both a regular programmer and game programmer as well, I personally have a diffrent stance to you though, I personally try to target products that I have a role in to play well, but have as good graphics as possible, as far as I think, people get the latest consoles each 2-3 years, but they expect their pc to be able to run the latest games 10 years down the road! I add compatibility where possible for older generation cards, but I dont make it my main target, It just drives me mad for example on the HL2/Steam forums people complaining that the game will not run well or at all on their geforce 2 and lower cards!

anyway, I read a few comments on the first page and the last one, sorry if you mentioned this already, are you going to release a demo to your game soon, and if so, when!?

[Mecron]

No need to be sorry wil, I knew what you were getting at. Was just pointing out that thing where shooters strain your card in the way of a fine painting where space combat games do it in a more fireworks kind of way. And yeah graphic compatibility is brutal sometimes. I generally ask my team to make to pretties thing they can for the current years tech and then to make sure they can pare features away and still have something playable thats not hideous for older machines.

We are pretty much demo-licious right now and pending final publisher negotiations we will be able to tell you an exact release sate for both game and demo.

[AgentZero]

No! Fie your legal mumbojumbo! Demo now! [sanity mode: ON] Right well, HL2 may have fancy physics and all, and Doom 3 might be all scary, but neither one has anything that comes close to the spectacle of a couple hundred beautiful spaceships blowing the living hell out each other.

Maybe it's not quite as Oh-my-freaking-gawd! pretty as Nexus, but I don't care if I can have hundreds of ships instead of dozens. BTW, colour me pissed of at IGN, went over there to see if their trailers were as good as SotS's (they're not) and downloaded what IGN told me were 3 compeletely different trailers, but they ended up just being different resolution versions of the EXACT same trailer, despite IGN telling me they were all 320x240 resolution. Grrrr...

[Hunpecked]

Pretty, yes. But is it moddable?

BTW, I like the illustration of the "lab accident".

[Mecron]

Very modable...fully data driven engine.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Homeworld with a starmap, planetary resource production, industry, terraforming, diplomatic relations, more research, ship design with 3 sections and multiple weapons slots per ship, fuel, random events but yeah, apart from that it's exactly HW with a starmap.