Sirius Online: Empires Rising Windows game

0 comments by TheD3X on Mar 13th, 2013

Hello followers and stray viewers!This is the GNS on Air again! My Name is Dex and I'm the lead developer for Sirius Online: Empires Rising. A long time has passed since the last news, the SUP-Episodes stopped quite a long time ago and the latest comment was about "inspired" spaceships from EVE. So, now as a brand new start of the next BETA, the so called BETA3, I want to inform you about the lot of changes that are coming up.

As most of you expected the first Beta 3 Update on 1st of February, you probably just were disappointed as this profile remained silent. No words from Kickstarter, nothing new anyhow. These issues and concerns I want to adress here. We had long staff meetings, about the game itself, how to manifest a steady position in the market. We had meetups with the german governmental funding agency. We had a lot of interesting discussions about new stuff.First, we decided about the realistic approach and finally come to the conclusion that third person view, like in this big idol - Freelancer - is the key for a better game feeling and scalability.With this in mind I restarted developing the graphical part on the new gameplay.
Up next we finished the final cover art, which you will see in several licensed, exclusive stores. Any preorderer so far will get his own special edition with a Boxart of a Planet of his choice and signed by the dev and team.

With this change in mind and the new approach to the game, we also decided to move over to the Guild-Wars Model of "Pay once for the game, play free", with a fluff item shop. We adjusted the Boxed Edition and Digital Key prices to 10€*/5€, with the boxed edition containing 500 Elitium, the ingame store currency.So there were a lot of changes in the past six weeks, but we hope our long absence here hasn't left big harm in you looking forward to this project.

*Additional Shipping Cost, depending on Country.

While I was doing some code-maintenance anyways, I decided to step more indepth and am happy to announce new additions to the DDX7.5-Engine, called Stencil-Shading and Dot3-Bumpmapping. We still have to evaluate and balance on the performance part of this powerful feature for a directX7-Based Engine.

• Dot3-Bumpmapping for more Detail
• Stencil-Shading for model-accurate Shades on any surfaces
• 3rd-Person-camera for more space beauty
• realistic planet transfer
• revised gating system
• greatly reduced texture size
• new patcher downloads and patches your game automatically

Oh yes, about that... we are still grappling all our videos together to make an interesting pitch video. Our initial goal is to achieve 10.000$. This would cover the initial startup cost. However the more funding we receive, the more merits are in for you. More when Kickstarter actually launches.

On another note, to get you introduced to our team, we will do two-weekly team portraits, where a member of the team introduces himself and tells you about what he did the past two weeks. As initiator of this its my turn to begin with.
Okay, as you may eventually know, my real name's Rene, I'm almost 25 now, and I live in Wilhelmshaven, a medium sized town at the north sea. I started developing at the age of seven on my trustworthy Amiga Plus 4. Actually my dad helped me into it by showing me how to make games - and that was it. I was magnetically attached to coding, back then with Ami BASIC, later with Q BASIC and now with DDX7.5. When I'm not counting all the pauses in between the first stones of Sirius were set in 2001, with a barely playable alpha which still embarrasses me, because its still somewhere in the web (but I won't point you there).I'm currently unemployed (in a City like this there are next to no jobs in game industry and I cant move away from here.), so I'm doing this project as full time and try to get my life's dream done with Sirius.When I'm not at the computer I challenge Sheldon from BBT as being the biggest Nerd in history by watching stars through my telescope, try to disprove relativity theory or do more nerdy stuff.
The last two weeks were a lot of business meetings about founding and funding a company, attending several meetings with advisories, with personal trainers and more.
You can ask me more in the comments, I will for sure answer!

Every week a news post, and a new Q&A section.
New Video.
More about the new system.

If you can't wait for Kickstarter (date unknown) or just have a few spare bucks over for this project, we'd be happy to get generous donations. All donators doing this over paypal will get the same rewards as later kickstarter backers + plus a secret bonus. Also all backers and donators will be named in the credits until otherwise wanted.