impressive engine

Check this out... rendering planets in real-time. I had a dream about an engine like this once.

http://www.ferrago.com/portal/click/?id=1016862

click the story title and then scroll down a bit for the video on the next page.

Yep. Don't show this to Red :P

They have a web site with a very active community (and lots of info straight from the devs), loads of screenshots and videos, and more here:
http://fl-tw.com

And a combat prototype thing here:
http://fl-tw.com/Infinity/infinity_combat_proto.php


I really hope they do a single player component for this game, or at least make it nice and easy to write mods for.
I've been wanting an engine like this for a long time.


Reading their FAQ, it's a really interesting project!

-For starters, this is being developed by a very small team, yet it arguably looks better than UT 2007. What does that say? These guys are really raising the bar. Hopefully this will inspire a good phase of great looking space shooters!
-Lots of the content is being generated procedurally - like Spore - making its huge scope actually very manageable. It's done by a whole lot of well written algorithms.

Well it is totally impressive. The only bottleneck is the number of players... I prebuffered the entire video... it is a little bit jerky even 100% prebuffred but in 1 year with newer CPU MEM and VGA Cards... that will be smooth as glass. Those guys are ahead of the curve allright!!!

I'm not amazed by the game but by the art of koshime. It's very good!

Next time I write something that runs jerky, I'll know what to say! ;)

LOL.. good one! :)

This is what Boiled Sweets needs for his Elite remake.

Please stop posting things that make me want to give up! LOL

Actually, I consider this game as a bit of encouragement.
It shows that inexpensive procedural content drawn with algorithms instead of artists is a great way to present content!

its cool but all we were looking at was a fancy render engine. I didn't see anything that suggested it had more than a basic input system and WASD flying cam in there.

The rendering looks nice and I straight away thought of elite 4 :)

Regarding flight, the combat prototype doesn't really feel great.

The ships move in a realistic manner, and cool things happen when you get a wing shot off (don't try to roll when you don't have engines to stabilize it, or you will spin wildly out of control). Cutting the engines by hitting Space is feels pretty natural, and so is how the ships do have automated systems for stopping (so it's not completely like Asteroids) but you still feel the impact of flying in an empty environment since stopping takes a while. Especially interesting is how you want to fly slowly for the most part so that a sudden change in direction doesn't take too long.

Other than that, though, they don't have a very interesting feel, probably due to the magical instant turning which is likely there because this is an early test. They just float about and bounce off of things if they collide. I suppose it's realistic that they don't have much kick, but it's a tad boring. I find flying in Orbiter, which is built to be realistic, to be more interesting because of the very noticeable gravitational pull. Flying close to / within the atmosphere of a planet is probably much more fun than in space here.

Of course, this is a very early pre-alpha build so I imagine it will all be fixed in the end.

These things always give me a sense of "this guy is/these guys are really good at one thing, and are a bit naive on other things because they've concentrated all their learning in one area. So these things usually end up being awesome from a technical showpiece standpoint, but having little real-world potential because the developer(s) don't understand the other elements of an engine or indeed a game, nor what others will expect from them, and so are unable to provide it.