So a few major things to talk about. New Technology, New Video, our fundraiser and our team! Lets start with the most exciting of it all! Our new video! Its simple, its short and sweet and hopefully amusing. Here it is.
Next, the new Technology!
Yes as I am sure, Everybody knows UDK just made two major announcements! one about an increased royalty threshold for developers, which is fantastic, Epic is giving every developer a better chance at getting off the ground, properly, with less hands in your pockets taking your money! This is fantastic, and actually amounts to a lot of money we get to hang on to.
UDK also just released a new build with DX11 Support! This is BIG news for knights, Our goals of being a NEXT generation game on the PC is now much more possible.
Here is a snippet of some of the new features in UDK and the new royalty threshold.
"Important DirectX features now shipping with UDK include:
- Tessellation and displacement;
- Geometry shaders;
- Multisampled textures; and
- Shader Model 5.
High-end rendering features include:
- Image-based reflections that allow surfaces of any shape to reflect an approximate version of scenes, with varying glossiness across surfaces, anisotropic HDR highlights and anti-aliasing;
- Subsurface scattering (SSS) that simulates the light that scatters inside semi-translucent materials, making character skin come alive;
- Anti-aliased masked materials that super sample the edges of masked and alpha-tested materials, making character hair more look realistic than ever before;
- Deferred rendering with MSAA support;
- Bokeh depth of field providing close to film-quality DOF, with artist-controllable Bokeh; and
- High-quality dynamic shadows from many lights on the environment, such as shadows for point lights and other light sources.
NVIDIA’s APEX technology has also been integrated into the engine and ships with UDK.
In addition, Epic has raised the royalty-free revenue threshold for UDK commercial developers. Under the new license agreement, developers don’t pay any royalties until their total revenue exceeds $50,000 (US). Beyond that, developers keep 75 percent of each dollar they receive and Epic receives 25 percent. A great article to reference is here."
What a fantastic time to be a UDK developer!
Next up for discussion is the Kickstarter.com Fundraiser for Knights: Spiral Islands. Things are going good, we are at 30 backers! but we only have one month to raise 8500 dollars! We really do need your help to make this happen! Please do what you can to drum up some support for us, Talk to Youtube Channel operators, People with massive Twitter followings, News sites, whatever you can to help us reach our goal. Knights is young, its new, We do not have much of a following, and that makes the fund raising quite difficult when our audience is so small. We have had support in the 500 dollar range, as well as the typical pledge of 50 dollars, Which is fantastic! we just need more volume, more hits, more more more.
Okay Onto our team! We have One new member, who is infact an old member, He was a 3d artist on Eon with us back in 2004, and he is now a professional Flash programmer, so he will be doing our Scaleform UI and Menues as well as 3d art, So Welcome Billy Kurilko to our small but expanding team of Myself, Roman, Brad and John. This gives us a solid development team with all aspects covered! But that still leaves us entirely overwhelmed! so please, if you know a programmer, technical artist, artist, Level Designer, musician, sound tech or anything looking for a project to support, please, send him my way (barrycollins@gmail.com). Now is the time to start expanding our team, now that our development is picking up speed. Interested in helping?
Take care, and thank you for reading and i hope you enjoy the video!
Do not forget to help support us by pre-ordering or buying limited edition prints Here on Kickstarter.com! Every Pledge, no matter how big or small gets in on the multiplayer beta and full multiplayer release.
Barry Collins
Lead Artist
PlayGround State
Playgroundstate.com
Best of luck guys! Here in South-Africa the UDK is starting to pick up and more people are developing new builds of everything. Your game looks epic.
Oh god the singing.
That was hilarious.
And aye, it seems like some very welcome changes made to the UDK and the royalty threshold.
Good luck with your project, which still seems madly interesting.
I no I'm going to get a lot of heat for saying this I feel its constructive:
Every week you've pushed out a new video of the same beach scene then asked for kickstarter donations. (At least as far as the News I've seen posted here on Moddb)
Yes its a VERY beautiful beach scene but what else do you have?
Yes UDK updated, but pushing out a "news" update restating theirs just seems like a cheap ploy to get more donations without giving us actual news.
Give us something more to chew on and you will get all the donations you need from the community. I'm saying this in the most sincere way possible as I do like the video. Its quite well made and wish you all the best luck!
Fair Enough, This past week has been un-productive in an external sense since the GDC and Contract work is occupying the time of everyone on the team, We are just excited, and honestly, more than a pre-order or two, we just want a few more people to see knights, and hopefully get excited about it. gaining a few fans at this point is the most important thing.
the real news you want is boring, its a lot of "so our team is getting better organized and expanding. Also documentation has progressed and visual designs are progressing well" like, typical stuff, I was just amused by the video and hoped it'd catch the eye of a few people who haven't heard of knights.
I want to know where they describe that reflection thing! I saw that in the demo but wasn't sure what they were talking about or how they did it.