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Paul and EC Dryere - you guys rock! RR is IGotY material

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Paul and EC Dryere - you guys rock! RR is IGotY material Empty Paul and EC Dryere - you guys rock! RR is IGotY material

Post  cjcurrie Mon Jan 07, 2013 3:16 pm

I am a hardcore fan of space games and have played almost every major title involving space ships to come out in the last fifteen years. I stumbled across RR from a PC Gamer article and immediately downloaded the alpha. After seeing perplexingThoerist's post, "Lack of user posting", I felt compelled to create a forum account and do a little fanboy rave.

As an indie game developer myself, I can really appreciate the scope and scale of what Paul and EC have created so far. What really blew my rocks as I played the Alpha was how polished and *pretty* the whole thing was. I remember looking at universe map on the scenario selector and just spending a few minutes scrolling it back and forth, watching the (post-processing?) effects and the polar coordinates change. A similar moment happened when I was playing the Sub-Rostrum minigame. It was damn fun, but the quality of the effects and physics is what really set it apart.

This was before I even played the campaign.

I know I've only gotten a taste with the tutorial, but the combination of high-low-high-stakes action, witty character dialogue, strange lore (some of it is *really* strange), excellent gameplay, and secrecy of the rising action has got me hooked. I'd been playing a lot of Space Pirates and Zombies lately, but this game is miles and years better than even my current favorite space game. All you really need is a better website Smile


tl;dr Your game is great. You made an instant fan out of me and I'll be proselytizing all my friends on your behalf.

cjcurrie

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Post  Paul Dryere Mon Jan 07, 2013 4:57 pm

Thank you so much for your kind words! We have poured our hearts and souls into this game for the last 4 years and it is great to hear someone appreciate what we are trying to do. Very Happy
Paul Dryere
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Post  Paul Dryere Mon Jan 07, 2013 5:07 pm

And yes, the map uses animated 3D simplex noise to get that holographic look. The whole map is generated procedurally, including the travel routes. All I have to do is define the polar coordinates of a given place and the map will generate the paths, which are spiral segments due to the nature of travel in the Ring Runner mythos.
Paul Dryere
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Post  cjcurrie Mon Jan 07, 2013 11:33 pm

Makes sense. When working on a voxel engine I used simplex noise filtered through a couple fractals to make infinite terrain. Small programming teams tend to gravitate toward procedural

I noticed the travel-along-the-rings animation. One of the things that always bugged me about space games was the ability to fly in a straight line from one planet to another. Even on an inter-system scale, it would make more sense to get into orbit around the star formation(s) first.

But then again, there are a lot of realities of space travel that just cannot (yet) be expressed in video games. How would you deal with relativity? Light cones (not applicable to RR)? Gravity wells distorting space-time? Sigh. At least we can conserve momentum and angular momentum.

Speaking of which.... Are you using PhysX, Tokamak, Havok, DMM, or rolling your own physics solution? If it's under wraps then I don't mean to pry. Can't remember if I saw the Unreal splash or not. What is your engine composed of? Professional interest and all that.


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Post  Paul Dryere Mon Jan 07, 2013 11:53 pm

The engine is made completely from scratch in the XNA Framework. The only third party library being used is Photon Cloud for multiplayer, which happens to be what I'm working on right now. Smile

In retrospect I should have probably tried to make use of more third party libraries to save on development time, but this being the first game I've programmed I wanted to code as much of it as I could in order to learn. study
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Post  cjcurrie Tue Jan 08, 2013 12:04 am

I hear you. I used photon a bit when I was mucking around with peer-to-peer decentralized networking in Unity. Wound up going with SmartFox server, though.

XNA. I guess you're using DirectX after all. Dang. For a moment I had hoped a multiplatform port would be possible Very Happy I'm an OpenGL programmer so I would be the first to volunteer to do it!

Seriously, though. If you ever need any volunteer work, please PM me. I believe in you guys and what you're doing.

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Post  Paul Dryere Tue Jan 08, 2013 12:29 am

Yeah, If I could go back I would have probably used Unity to make the game, but at least I will be able to get a version of the game on Xbox. Smile

Photon Cloud has been pretty easy to integrate, only complaint is the latency can get a bit high. They keep adding new regions to the cloud so hopefully it will improve with time.

I did a fair amount of research before settling on Photon, but I never came upon SmartFox. What made you choose it over Photon? Just curious. Wink
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Post  cjcurrie Tue Jan 08, 2013 12:35 am

Smartfox's Unity library was a little easier to understand Razz

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Post  Paul Dryere Tue Jan 08, 2013 12:41 am

Haha, I feel ya, networking is already hard enough. Razz
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Post  madpinger Wed Jan 09, 2013 12:12 am

XNA Is a pretty solid kit. The license is survivable. I hear the fees for updates on XBLA can be a bit obscene tho.

Ended up with Unity for some prototyping and proof of concept drafts. Still considering QT tho. QT5 will be adding Android as a target. So that's everything but iphone I think.

A good read tho, good posts ^.^
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