CptStern
suckmonkey
- Joined
- May 5, 2004
- Messages
- 10,303
- Reaction score
- 62
good in depth Q & A
interesting bits:
- we have a 32,000 by 32,000 unique texture that covers the entire terrain, so visually you have a unique landscape. You can have rocks, cliffs, and tarmac blending into sand, grass or gravel. And we can also draw all the way to the horizon.
- You can stand at one end of the map and look across it diagonally and see for a mile and a half. But what's really cool about this is, besides the visual benefits of having what is effectively a very high resolution texture with full dynamic lighting,
- You'll see a different type of effect emitted from a hand brake turn while on asphalt than you would on gravel where you'd be able to see stones being kicked up. This also affects audio, so you'll hear those stones hitting your vehicle while you're on the gravel.
- You can do all of the things that you can expect in whatever vehicle you're operating, so if you're driving fast enough and you think you can jump the ravine you probably can. If you want to do a barrel role in a helicopter it would react exactly as you would expect. If you shot the wing off of a fixed wing plane it would spiral and hit the landscape.
- It [the Anansi] has a set of thrusters on the side that give you reverse thrust. You can be hammering down a valley, put it into a spin and maintain that backwards momentum because you've maintained velocity.
- The Strogg have the Goliath Heavy Walker ...It's massive....One of the players comes up to the foot of the vehicle
- This gives the Goliath some disadvantages of how it'll defend itself especially from air attacks, and how it deals with that problem is it can transform itself into a hover down mode where it sets a lower profile but it cannot move forward. It's like a placed turret but the turret can spin around.
- A result of that we have an experience point system that rewards you for team play, so your points when you play are based on your team play actions and supporting the team. I mean you get points from kills and from doing other things, but if you want to really be at the top of the scoreboard you need to have been helping the team progress.
- One of the good things is you can pick a class, and even if you don't have an idea of what that class is supposed to do or what its weapons load out is, when you first start playing as a newbie, you'll get two or three core missions at each stage of the map which will give you something to go and do, it will tell you exactly where to go and do it, what you have to do when you get there, and what your rewards will be for accomplishing it. That system fades away once you become an experienced player, so there's no risk of the server forcing a team to lose by giving it silly things to do. It will ensure that you'll always find combat when you first start playing and you'll learn how the different classes work.
Chris Buffa: When does the game ship?
Kevin Cloud: We're looking at a ship time of around 2006. Paul and I have been working on the game design for about two years but it's only been in full production for a little over a year.
the game sounds like it's still at least a year away ;(
this has me a little worried:
The game design is built around what we think is a sweet spot for player numbers at 24-32 in play at the same time. Obviously, like any of these games, bigger servers can run big games, but the game design isn't built around that. Because we have a centralized objective, if we were to put more players into the battles things would devolve into a street fight. Individual effort wouldn't pay off. People would just become fodder, and we've seen this in other multiplayer games. Once you exceed a certain number you're just getting gunfire from everywhere and you can't get close enough to an objective to do something
if the maps are small will it make using airplanes/flying vehicles difficult because of the limited map space?
interesting bits:
- we have a 32,000 by 32,000 unique texture that covers the entire terrain, so visually you have a unique landscape. You can have rocks, cliffs, and tarmac blending into sand, grass or gravel. And we can also draw all the way to the horizon.
- You can stand at one end of the map and look across it diagonally and see for a mile and a half. But what's really cool about this is, besides the visual benefits of having what is effectively a very high resolution texture with full dynamic lighting,
- You'll see a different type of effect emitted from a hand brake turn while on asphalt than you would on gravel where you'd be able to see stones being kicked up. This also affects audio, so you'll hear those stones hitting your vehicle while you're on the gravel.
- You can do all of the things that you can expect in whatever vehicle you're operating, so if you're driving fast enough and you think you can jump the ravine you probably can. If you want to do a barrel role in a helicopter it would react exactly as you would expect. If you shot the wing off of a fixed wing plane it would spiral and hit the landscape.
- It [the Anansi] has a set of thrusters on the side that give you reverse thrust. You can be hammering down a valley, put it into a spin and maintain that backwards momentum because you've maintained velocity.
- The Strogg have the Goliath Heavy Walker ...It's massive....One of the players comes up to the foot of the vehicle
- This gives the Goliath some disadvantages of how it'll defend itself especially from air attacks, and how it deals with that problem is it can transform itself into a hover down mode where it sets a lower profile but it cannot move forward. It's like a placed turret but the turret can spin around.
- A result of that we have an experience point system that rewards you for team play, so your points when you play are based on your team play actions and supporting the team. I mean you get points from kills and from doing other things, but if you want to really be at the top of the scoreboard you need to have been helping the team progress.
- One of the good things is you can pick a class, and even if you don't have an idea of what that class is supposed to do or what its weapons load out is, when you first start playing as a newbie, you'll get two or three core missions at each stage of the map which will give you something to go and do, it will tell you exactly where to go and do it, what you have to do when you get there, and what your rewards will be for accomplishing it. That system fades away once you become an experienced player, so there's no risk of the server forcing a team to lose by giving it silly things to do. It will ensure that you'll always find combat when you first start playing and you'll learn how the different classes work.
Chris Buffa: When does the game ship?
Kevin Cloud: We're looking at a ship time of around 2006. Paul and I have been working on the game design for about two years but it's only been in full production for a little over a year.
the game sounds like it's still at least a year away ;(
this has me a little worried:
The game design is built around what we think is a sweet spot for player numbers at 24-32 in play at the same time. Obviously, like any of these games, bigger servers can run big games, but the game design isn't built around that. Because we have a centralized objective, if we were to put more players into the battles things would devolve into a street fight. Individual effort wouldn't pay off. People would just become fodder, and we've seen this in other multiplayer games. Once you exceed a certain number you're just getting gunfire from everywhere and you can't get close enough to an objective to do something
if the maps are small will it make using airplanes/flying vehicles difficult because of the limited map space?
