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.'"

Is it really

[Deltaspectre]

Is it really all that and a bag of popcorn? I sorta recall them saying this about Doom 3.... I'm just waiting for the UT3 engine to have some games under its belt before I get back into the FPS market

Re:Is it really

[zbuffered]

Is it really all that and a bag of popcorn?

Having just seen it... Yes. Yes it is.

I saw a demo of the Half-Life 2 engine at E3 a couple of years ago. The texture quality was awesome. This doesn't rely on just awesome textures. This solves lighting. SOLVES it.

so...

[Anm]

First, let me say that I respect these guys and their prior work in Savage, and it sounds like they have a good architecture for a realtime graphics engine. That said, I don't see much invovative work here compared to other unreleased engines. Unreal 3 supports the HDR and normal mapping described on their website. The website also doesn't mention anything about physics or scripting, but it doesn't mean it isn't there. While scripting can be tacked on relatively easily, I have heard from other game developers that first rate physics engines like Havok have specific unusual requirements to maximize the use of vector processing instructions. And one of the bigger questions in future game enginge design I don't see being address is for multicore processing. Lastly, I don't believe these guys have any background on consoles.

Nonetheless, I'm rooting for their success, even if its a niche or lesser market.

Anm

Looks pretty, but...

[biodeo]

How well will it run?

The Source engine is so great because it has great visuals while still running at a good framerate. The new engine being used in F.E.A.R. for example, looks pretty good, but runs like crap. "Realtime" doesn't mean much when you talking about top of the line hardware 2 years from now. Making nice visuals is easy, making it run on realistic hardware isn't.

(note: I will tip my hat though, that motion blur was nice)

S2 guys = great game

[Tom]

Three of the guys are from S2, the small company that made Savage.

For me, that means 2 things:

One, it's going to be a great game. Savage was the first FPS game in years that I really enjoyed.

Two, there is a fair chance that it'll be available for Linux, as they already have experience with Savage, and AFAIK they found out there that Linux users give more and higher quality feedback.

Holy Crap

[BrainsVolpe]

As much as I am.... blown the hell away by the graphics, I'm more interested in the gameplay. Bows, maces, dragons, orges... Now that's some hot shit.

Single Player? Rant.

[dbhankins]

Having wasted my time checking out Savage, and looking at the video, it's time to rant:

Why is it that so many people who put out multiplayer-only games fail to mention it anywhere in their game descriptions, websites, etc? There are those of us who prefer single player games.

It took quite a bit of looking at reviews of Savage and reading between the lines to figure out that it has no single-player component.

Since the game devs seem to think that MP games are the only kind that count, I'll have to assume that "Project Offset" is also MP-only. Too bad. A single-player fantasy FPS with pretty graphics might have attracted my gaming dollars.

Yeah, I bought Doom3 for the graphics engine as much as anything. And enjoyed it. So sue me.

I Want This Now!

[rAiNsT0rm]

Holy S#$%! That is amazing. I don't care how many people want to downplay this or put it down... I've been a game reviewer/playtester for over 4 years and this is impressive!

Fantasy, FPS, realism, this has it all to be THE game to finally get FPS' out of their rut. Anyone and everyone who has way outgrown the immaturity and predictableness of the FPS genre should be on this bandwagon for sure.

It takes a lot to get my attention and this one has it fully. Please dear lord, let this not be vapor and or get changed into a carbon copy of theif or some such to please a corporate backer. We need new blood, and before the next gen consoles hit and they get the usual glut of doom/halo clones now is the perfect time to still influence new titles.

Re:Wrong - It is a game engine

[Doomstalk]

It is not a game development platform / engine... their intent is to use their game engine as a game engine, not to sell it 'competively'.

From the "Technology" section of projectoffset.com:
"The Offset Engine is a complete platform for creating next generation games. Though it aims to be a top tier engine, OE is not just built with large developers in mind. Every aspect of the engine is designed around the goal of reducing development time and cost, while empowering designers and artists with the tools they need to create spectacular visual effects and immersive environments."

Yeah, they're totally not designing it to be licensed.

One more day turning up the contrast on the subtle flaws in the logic of fellow /.ians.

Seems to me you just turned your own brightness way down.

About Adventure

[PromANJ]

Adventure is a very old Atari 2600 game that probably inspired games like Zelda and played a prominent role in the creation of the whole graphically represented adventure/rpg game genre. If I remember correctly the program code/gfx was limited to 4096bytes (ROM), and 128bytes for variables (RAM), ie. not much to work with so the gfx was very simple. The coder made the graphics himself, that's why the dragon ended up looking more like a duck. Since it was 2D, the dragon could be drawn as a 'slice' with a hollow belly.

Screenshot in this Wikipedia article about Adventure [wikipedia.org]

It might not look like much, but it's actually very refreshing and new to get physically trapped inside the belly after you've been eaten. The enemies also leave permanent corpses (unless you restart). In most new games stuff just go 'poof' when it dies cuz they don't have processing power for persistance with the level of detail/framerate they're going for.