Some time ago I played the demo of Sins of a Solar Empire. It's a space RTS game from Stardocks. It's quite complex and it take a couple of hours until one get enough familiar with everything to be able to play.
To help you, there's a a context info/help panel on the bottom right, that pops-up when the mouse is over an item. On the left side, starting at the top - there is an icon-list of all your assets. At the beginning I was quite often searching for a particular ship (like the 'builder' unit) in the icon-list on the top left while having the ship info, from the icon under my mouse, in the panel on the bottom right.
Now, the thing is, I've a 22" widescreen display and I noticed that it's quite a distance for the eyes to move. Doctors probably will love that as it's like eye-training … hehehehe
… but doing this often feels annoying. Actually one might even move the head too. Thus when searching for an item it's: move mouse to an icon, move eyes, read text, move eyes back, move mouse to the next item, move eyes back to the info panel … repeat until desired item was found.
In addition to that, typically in RTs games, you have the "build" menu section, usually at the bottom, and the amount of resources in your procession, usually at the top. It's not always like that but quite often and it's the same with 'Sins of a Solar Empire'. And the distance on my screen from bottom to top is also quite large. It's of course less the the diagonal but still significant. Thus when you want to check if you have enough resources to order/build the desired unit/component, you may wind up in the same procedure like described above for the info panel. Fortunately this has been solved quite well in this game. The info panel is right beside the build menu and not only it gives information about the unit but also the numbers of required resources will be displayed in red when the player has not enough of them.
So this is an interesting topic. Today application designers not only need to consider dual-screen setups but also the variety of sizes and aspect ratios.
As previously mentioned, INTEL is trying to bring GFX calculations back to the CPU system. Their argumentation for this is
(…) that Intel processors offered “more bang for the buck” and that it was more economical to go from single to multiple core processors versus popping multiple graphics cards into a machine. “The fact of the matter is that you’re going to have one graphics card, you may have a dual graphics card, but you’re not going to have a four graphics card or eight graphics card system,” said Fosner.
(…)
This quote comes from this tgdaily article about an interview they had with INTEL on the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai. The real-time demo shows 8 hardware thread on 4 cores in action. It's based on a game-engine framework called "Smoke Framework" and currently it's using OGRE3D for rendering.
INTEL is considering to release the sourcecode to the developer community as stated on the OGRE3D forum. As the OGRE3D community is currently working on DX10 support, the Smoke Framework probably will continue using OGRE.
There are two videos available about the demo and the interview - one is the article mentioned above but I'll list them both here again:
Somehow related to the topic:
Maybe you already saw the plenty of ads everywhere about GarageGame's new gaming portal called InstantAction. I think it's very well done. Most of the site is HTML - only some areas do require flash and of course the games are using an extra plugin. Installation of that plugin in firefox was very smooth - very nice with pictures for each step. The website design is trendy and makes it already stand apart, but also the fact that you can quickly play multiplayer 3d games in your browser - after registration and installation of the plug-in.
On the negative side I found, that after downloading a new game, the process does often hang. Leaving and rejoining the game fixes it. I also had to give internet-connection rights to each game separately. In addition to that, in the lobby you don't see ping times thus lag or disconnection might occur often in some matches. If you want to try it yourself, I'll suggest "Marble Blast" or "Think Thanks". The others are less interesting. A Tribes-Like title is announced called: Fallen Empire Legions.
As we are talking of GarageGames, there is maybe something else interesting especially in regards to the topic of one of my recent postings. They have a 2D-Game Authoring environment called TorqueX Builder. It's layered upon their for their new XNA based engine called TorqueX. They now announced that they added 3D support on the engine level - the editor will be 3D enabled in the future. TorqueX allows deployment on Windows and Xbox360.
The 3ds max 2009 trial download is now available. You can watch some demo videos of the new features online.
New features include
- quadruple bipeds
- mirror biped animation
- falloff tweaking in thew viewport
- spline-based UV generation
- hitting plenty of times on UV pelt or relax is over due new start/stop toggle buttons
- viewport navigation gizmos
Nicolas Gaume, CEO, Mimesis Republic was mentioned in the 3dvia mp press release:
"3DVIA MP is an outstanding development engine that has given our team a collaborative work environment including low-level access for our programmers", said Nicolas Gaume, CEO of Mimesis Republic game studio. "The designers have been able to get results in record time while maintaining triple-A visual quality."
I think he is quite famous in france as he was president of known French game company called Kallisto etc. Anyways back to topic. On the FMX site it says:
Mimesis Republic designs, develops and operates a new generation of social networks: virtual 3D immersive worlds, by leveraging multiple types of gaming experiences to create new and increasingly synchronous social dynamics.
On the site of Mimesis Republic designs it says:
black mamba :
A universe and community in real-time 3D targeted at urbane cultures (Hip Hop).
Released in summer 2008 in partnership with: Universal Music, Sony Ericsson, Orange, Skyrock.
Looks like a GTA meets Singstar in Second Life
But, as Helgason recently announced, there are also several Virtual Worlds and a MMO in works using Unity3D:
– 1 x full blown MMO being made with Unity
– 5 x virtual worlds being made with Unity
– 3 x well funded game portals being made with Unity
It's no surprise, with Networking (based on Raknet) included plus a GUI engine etc. The only think that makes me wonder a bit, is that Unity3D has no real external run-time binary format for loading scenes/objects/components data into Unity at runtime. People write their own serializers but I hope they will add their own format too. Currently the webplayer streams all levels into the memory, but I think there are plenty of use-cases where only a selective loading behavior is desired.
Btw. since the Second Life hype, there are so many companies working on virtual worlds … it soon will be crowded. I think there's a bigger one beeing produced in Berlin, too.
