Comments - jlambvo

Thanks man! I think we were pretty skeptical at first too, but it's exciting to see the possibilities unfold once some momentum gets going. The important thing is to be comfortable going slow and steady (not burning yourselves out), and keeping that core vision in mind--that moment of gameplay that got you excited enough to start making something in the first place. Certainly wouldn't turn down any charitable souls or organizations from making that job easier though ;)

We love both TB and RT combat, we just feel that they emphasize different aspects of the game and have decided to go with the former. We can expose a lot more intricacies this way, and keep things much deadlier, without it becoming an eye-mouse coordination test. (Jagged Alliance and X-Com are huge influences on our approach). We'd like to think that taking turns for each action will close some loopholes common to traditional TB games, and keep the pacing a little bit faster.

Hey, I *just* now realized that waaay back in October (2005!) you posted some kind of response to a review about a mod, which I can only assume was a different Ground Zero.

cheers :)

*golf clap* well played

There are some huge performance issues with the June release. It mostly has to do with the huge number of entities on screen. Basically, these each have to be sent to the GPU for rendering individually, and the overhead involved makes framerate practically crawl to a halt--even if the models are extremely low detail (I replaced every mesh with a single untextured triangle, and it was barely any faster!). There is also an issue with how the crosshair works, the lighting set up, etc.

Over the next couple releases we will be reducing visible entity count by a great deal by combining structural geometry into more complex meshes that can be rendered in a single batch, and playing with some radius-based hiding and level of detail options. It should end up looking better and play faster. We'll try to include options in the long run for as many of these tweaks as possible, so you can hopefully scale it to your machine.

Thanks for the feedback!

Developer note: we actually have work here from every artist on the team so far. The first image is a character model WIP by Andrew, the car model is by Owen, the car sketch is by Reto, the environment sketch is a Kimmo piece, the fat guy in boots as a new character from Jennifer, and the nifty metal armored dude is by Jayme. Just to give credit where its due :)