Project Offset FPS Amazes

Spaceman40 wrote to mention a post up on Joystiq about a beautiful next-gen FPS called Project Offset. From the article: "Doom 3 engine? Was nice knowing you. UT? Old news. Source? Over there. We'll call you if we need you. You can all stand back, though. There's a new king on the way to town. Project Offset is a new first person shooter, and the developer is showing off what their new graphics engine can do. The movies are not pre-rendered. The developer says they're all real time...The demo looks amazing! Videos are available at the official site.'"

Cool.

[jericho4.0]

In this day and age of skyrocketing game budgets, it's very cool to see a competitive engine being done by three guys in an ampartment. HDR, self shadowing, and an editor.

Maybe this engine will be licenced in a way that indy developers can use it.

Hrmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, this post alone seems like the work of a hype machine. I'm downloading it right now and expect to see something that leavs D3/HL2/UT2004 in the dust

Thats cool but..

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Thats cool, but I really don't care. If I wanted a movie I'd have rented one. I bought a game because I wanted to have fun. Its still more fun to duel someone in quakeworld than doom3, and I can play qw on a p100. (Or on a much much better system with 24bit textures, particle explosions, per pixel lighting, and anything else you can think of thanks to the wonders of open source)

Just one small point

[FidelCatsro]

This is , right now a tech demo and not a game .
No matter how good it looks right now it does not represent how the game will play or even perhaps the actual in game graphics. So its a little early to be calling the Death of Unreal Tournament and the Unreal engine etc.
It does look nice and the games description sounds fun as well , but then so did Daikatana's description and screenshots .

Not a game engine

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

The DOOM3 engine, Source, and Unreal Engine are all complete products. They have physics, AI, gameplay logic, networking, and a lot more built in. Unreal Engine even includes its own install system.

It's a cool tech demo, but it's a long way from being a competitive engine. You need more than pretty visuals to sell an engine, you need an environment that makes developing games cheaper.

These guys have a good History!!

[spineboy]

These three guys are/were part of the 7 man team who created Savage (S2 games) - a must have for ANY Linuxer who plays games. I still play this game 2 years after it came out. The only other game I have ever done that with was Diablo II.

If these guys keep with that spirit/tradition of Savage, then this game will be awesome.
Yes, we all know by now that pretty pictures don't make a good game, but this game looks like it will have both.

Re:Not a game engine

[Lisandro]

He was talking about developers. These days games seem to be all about graphics (sadly enough), but all the amazing graphics this technology has to deliver are of no use for game developers if they can't work with it. High profile engines like D3 and Unreal offer a full developement framework which makes development easier (and cheaper), covering pretty much everything a game developer could need. Including graphics.

    As for the sneak preview video itself... wow. It is mindblowing, and the motion blur effect alone makes the graphics much better. Still, i'd like to know what kind of hardware rendered that in realtime. And yes, for all we know, this is nothing more than a tech demo. An amazing tech demo, yes, but i've seen a lot [nzone.com] of amazing tech demos [nvidia.com] elsewhere... i'll reserve judgment until the game is out.

Just once...

[Wilson_6500]

I'd like to see a press release touting nothing more than a game's "amazing, breathtaking plot and involving, even charming characters!" that turns out to be a tech demo for a novel, rather than a movie showing how much more realistic is the shine in some nameless girl's eye. Maybe instead of graphics engines and physics engines, developers should focus on generating some kind of "plot engine."

Here be duck-dragons

[PromANJ]

I was playing a pretty good fantasy adventure game the other day. I started out near a castle where I found this awesome spear that I walked around with for a while. Suddenly a dragon ambushed me! I tried to defend myself but I held the spear akwardly and the dragon swallowed me whole!

I was thinking Game Over man, Game over, but instead I was trapped inside the dragon's belly where I struggled for long to no avail. Then out of the sky swooped a giant bat, picked up the dragon with me inside its belly! The bat flew high into the sky, and actually gave me a nice little sightseeing of the fantasy world from above.

Why does it take a 27 year old game to Shock and Awe me?
It's funny how an abstract little square can look better than a 20 million polygon monster. But after all, what's all that detail worth if you fail to do anything interesting with it? Detail is only limiting the expression to something very defined, and the more you define something, the smaller is the chance that you push the right buttons.

So no thanks, I'd rather be a attacked by a lowrez duck-dragon.

Checked your 3d card expiration date lately?

[AzraelKans]

As impressive as the engine looks, the big power behind it draws from the power of today high end PC's
(ati x, geforce 7 sli combined with multiple CORE cpu's) you may want to sit down if you didnt know, but Its quite possible to do PS3 and X360 quality graphics on it TODAY, actually better than those.

Unfortunately the price is still in the high price range (but will drop eventually) so you probably want to wait before being awed by graphics such as this in your own monitor (check out the ati/nvidia sites for further info). however PC's will eventually beat consoles in the graphics dept (as always)

BTW That game is PC based.

Why does it look better than doom3 and UT engine? easy it uses THIS generation latest tech , doom3, source and UT use the prior generation tech but at least are capable of running in a Medium end PC.

On the game side I really have to aplaud S2 design, the game will be a weird mix between D&D and Halo. Imagine Halo with Dragons, magic arrows and Orcs instead of warthogs, needlers and covenants and you have a pretty good idea of what this will be like (how come no one thought about that before?).

On the negative side Im not sure I like the name and also their motto is wrong, The first Fantasy FPS was Heretic followed closely by Hexen. Im not sure Raven is going to be pretty happy with their trailer.

Anyway I wouldnt count out the next generation of console games NOT to include those effects in their engines, everybody knows each generation of console games is better than the last. Is going to be a neat contest.

And please spare me the "graphics dont make games" speech, we are talking about graphics here not gameplay.

Re:Single Player? Rant.

[dbhankins]

This is exactly the kind of attitude I'm talking about.

Maybe 'better' means something different to someone else than it does to you.

To me, 'better' means a solid plotline and storytelling, interesting characters, the game as essentially a big puzzle to beat.

It does not mean, griefers, cheaters, getting my ass kicked constantly because I'm no good at multiplayer (a man's got to know his limitations and I learned mine in America's Army), having to play when my friends are available or playing with strangers, having nothing to do but see who can make the other guys respawn more, "pwning" enemies, just fighting, fighting and more fighting, who's got the quickest trigger finger rather than the best logic-solver, getting killed in under 30 seconds, etc., etc.

Re:Single Player? Rant.

[chromaphobic]

Multiplayer games sell more copies.

I'm curious where you get this information from. A quick check of the top ten selling PC games for 2004 [infoplease.com] paints a different picture.

1. The Sims 2 - Single player.
2. Doom 3 - Primarily single player, with a fairly flat multiplayer component seeming added on as an afterthought.
3. World Of Warcraft - Okay, that's one.
4. Half-Life 2 - Single player. Yeah, it comes with Counter-Strike & Half-Life 2 Deathmatch (which wasn't available or even announced at HL2's launch) but the core game itself is purely single player.
5. The Sims Deluxe - Single player.
6. The Sims 2 Special Edition - Single player.
7. Battlefield Vietnam - That's two. Though it does have single player capability via bots, so it's not purely multiplayer.
8. Call Of Duty - Fifty/fifty, IMO. It has single player, though many (I suspect most) buy it for the multiplayer.
9. Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 - Yeah, that's single player too.
10. MS Zoo Tycoon: Complete Collection - Single player.

So, only one game in the top ten last year was a pure multiplayer game, with two more that are a mix of single/multi leaning towards multi. The other seven were primarily single player games, five of which have no multiplayer capability at all.

Note that I've only looked at PC games, as this game is only officially announced for the PC. They say they want to port to next-gen consoles, but it doesn't sound like they've even begun working on that. So, for now, it's just a PC game and I want to compare apples to apples.

Motion blur??!!?!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I don't want motion blur. Motion blur is an idiotic concept designed to ape the inferior 27fps of movies or 30fps of TV from the Neanderthal days of technology.

In the original Quake, on a fast computer, pre-3dfx, the software renderer, though pixelly, could do faster than 60fps. It ceased to look like a game, and started looking like you were looking through a window at a blocky, but real world.

STOP WITH THE DAMNED MOTION BLUR CRAP, BUFFOONS! God almighty! Stop it. Just stop it.

Re:I Want This Now!

[AndyL]

Yes, yes, we all know that visuals don't make the game.

We get it. Really. We all get it.

Now is it ok with you if, all else being equal, we prefer more-pretty over less-pretty? Does that meet with your approval if we talk about that for one or two posts?
 
Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule of playing Nethack and Pac-Man to educate us about the dangers of judging a book by its cover, but I think we've got the situation under control now.