Shadowcat on 24/1/2006 at 03:55
This will be a MMO space sim that models billions of worlds, lets you seamlessly travel down to the surface of any of them and back out into orbit and beyond, maintains high detail in terrain meshes and texturing, while calculating all of the data (more or less) on the fly. I'll have to reserve judgement on the
game (too little information, and some mighty big questions, especially given the basically ridiculous size of the universe), but the technology being created for it is just incredible.
It's still a long way off (I'd say 2-3 years minimum) but the developer (and here I refer to a
person rather than a company) has been kicking unbelievable amounts of arse.
The recent video (75MB) showcased at (
http://fl-tw.com/InfinityForums/viewtopic.php?t=234) his forum is the best introduction to his work-in-progress, I think. It demonstrates the terrain system he's been working on in recent times, and while it's still missing a bunch of future features (atmospheric effects are incomplete, clouds are not volumetric and are visible only from orbit, the rings are currently just a bitmap, etc...), it's still amazing. Remember, the terrain data and textures are not permanently stored anywhere. It generates them on the fly, as required, based on the seed numbers for the system, and you would find this degree of detail no matter where you went.
Jaw-dropping stuff, IMHO.
dj_ivocha on 24/1/2006 at 09:26
The terrain looks like it was created with (
http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/) Terragen.
The game certainly looks promising, I hope he manages to create a live, interesting universe. :thumb:
ASHASSIN on 4/5/2010 at 11:21
One word - Awesome.
Pyrian on 5/5/2010 at 01:00
Hrm. Seen things like this before. Turning them into games was often the sticking point.
gunsmoke on 5/5/2010 at 01:06
What do you actually DO? Where does the gameplay kick in?
Shadowcat on 5/5/2010 at 08:37
(
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features/spotlightFB/page2.asp) Page 2 of that interview talks a little about gameplay, but it's clearly early days for that side of things -- it comes across as a bunch of fairly vague plans.
I'm not interested in MMOs, though, so the big question of gameplay hasn't really bothered me. I'm just assuming that even if it's really well done, I'm not going to care all that much. The technology developed for this thing has me well and truly blown away, however, so I might well buy it just to fly around and explore the universe :)
DaBeast on 6/5/2010 at 23:25
Isnt there a multiplayer team death match in space type of thing or has the server been taken down?
It was really just a teaser/test platform for space combat. Creating just a small percentage of whats been promised is a massive task that fully fledged companies would struggle with.
