Comments - Rich_Zap

The game looks awesome, definitely my sort of thing, however I do wonder how you would make it possible to manage and keep track of things at such a scale.

The building bar at the top is also a little confusing, it says I am building one particular type of ship yet the other types progress bars continue to be built as well. Not sure if this is a bug or a gameplay feature of some sort but I thought it was a bit strange.

Finally the last little thing concerning controls is the rally point, there should be a visual indicator as to where this is when you select a HQ or shipyard.

The graphics could also probably do with a bit of a boost, the ship graphics aren't very detailed and it would be nice if the images were higher res than they are. Also if you could add some wakes behind the ships that would help a lot as well.

Sorry most of my post is about improvements but I honestly did like your game a lot, it's just these few things would very much improve it I think. There certainly doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the core gameplay which is by far the most important bit.

Downloaded the demo and liked it, the combat between ships is entertaining and allows for good micro control and tactical maneuvering. The strategic element is also there as well in terms of capturing and holding the different regions.

It looks like quite an enjoyable rts, but I do have a few problems with it, they are all mainly to do with the controls and information the player has, these are things that could probably be fixed without much effort so hopefully you will consider patching them in.

The bar at the left side of the screen is completely unnecessary in my eyes, rts games have long just used shift+number key to define groups so I don't know why you need a bar, the same with zoom, this could just be mapped to + and - keys (it is already mapped to mouse wheel). The zoom with the mouse wheel would be much better if it would use strategic zoom like used in supreme commander (and plenty of other games and applications since). This would mean a player could zoom in on an area with just a single scroll of the mouse wheel, not the zoom + pan, zoom + pan arrangement needed now.

Knowing what orders your ships have is also a little unclear, it wasn't really explained in the demo but the nice graphics on the right side bar make it clear what each button does (that's not to say that tooltip's wouldn't be unwelcome). The issue is there is no way (as far as I can tell) to see what status the ship is currently at, i.e. can it use torpedo's or not?

Rather than having individual buttons for this it might be better to have a toggle button which will switch to show whether torpedo's can be used or not for the selected ship. If multiple ships are selected with different settings then it can simply show a split icon between allowed and not.

Continued->

I am skeptical myself, for the reasons that others have already mentioned concerning animation, storage size etc... But also because unlimited graphics in themselves are a trap, games companies already pay hundreds of artists to make what we have now. Increase the detail 100,000 fold and even with scanning and using real world assets the costs are going to skyrocket in terms of manpower.

I doubt that will be affordable, so I wonder if it will ever be cost effective to actually make games at this level of detail, even if the technology does allow it.

Personally I think some of the best games I have seen in the last few years have been indie, in these the graphics show what they need to and no more. This lets the games be quite economical since it keeps down the art budget and hopefully lets most of the work go into the game itself, not the pretty graphics.

I would look for a demo before trying a torrent but I would not take a demo at face value unless it demonstrates all of the games announced features and simply locks off more levels/content. If I like the game and consider it worth the money I do buy it and happily that has been more often than not.

The thing that will absolutely get me to buy it though is online contact. This might be in the form of a key check for joining a multiplayer server or regular updates the way a game like Minecraft has. Buying a game will often remove many of these networking hassles which are honestly too much bother to try and get around repeatedly.

I don't think this should be used without reason though, single player logins may well annoy me enough to not buy it in the first place. The online registration should ideally add some sort of advantage, in Minecraft's case it guarantee's you get your player skin irrelevant of which computer you play on. Useful features like this would be welcomed I think.

Love most of what the piston mod will offer, seems a very useful and adaptable addition. However it irks me a bit that it can push stone and harder materials, I would have preferred it if it could only push soft materials (gravel, sand, dirt). From what I have seen the only thing it can't push is obsidian at the moment.

The kinect is an active sensor, I believe it projects a particular noise based infra-red image into the room then uses an IR camera to look at how the image is distorted by the objects its hitting.

As such if you were to use more than one kinect I would expect you to get a fair amount of distortion. The more kinects you use the more distortion and errors you would get.

You would need a passive sensor to be able to double them up in the way you're describing.

Very nice :)

I like them all, but I have to go with sci-fi as my favourite.

Sweet, looks like dwarf fortress but with an a human friendly interface, going to give this one a try.

Damn how have I not seen this up to now? Looks great and I especially like the fact you don't have shields and instead use counter-measures, much more interesting.

EDIT: Just noticed its regarded as a turn based strategy, it didn't seem like this from the videos, how will this work?

Downloading... Will take a while though as I need the Crysis wars trial as well XD.

Its out but the steam servers are too busy ><

Sweet! This was one of the best mods on 2K4, I am surprised its free though, I would have been happy to pay for it.

...Not that I am complaining :P

Sweet!

Ive used wave and I like the concept but I find it hard to just 'chat' or do anything casual with it. Its better for official and formal stuff in my opinion.

Signed up, ive been wanting this since i first got the game... I hope the unit numbers dont go down too much with the network stuff.

Yup

Really good mod, superb visual quality. The only thing I havent got the hang of yet is the invisibility. Doesnt seem to be so useful when youre moving and doesnt last long enough to make sitting still practical. As such I prefer the support class since it has the very effective thermo imaging.

I also think it would be good for this to be released on steamworks as well.

Wow why havent i noticed this before O.O

Sounds great !

As a long time homeworld fan this looks really interesting. Are you recreating the same gameplay mechanics (i.e. individual fighters, parallel ship construction etc...).

Hope to see more :).

"They should level the playing field & set the contest for a year length & announce it when it's started instead of letting mods that have been in dev for a while compete."

Because of the increased amount of time it takes to make content for next gen games if we did that then no one would even enter until phase 4... Also there are several different categories such as best mutator and best map etc... Additionally RO wasnt entered until phase 2 of the last MSUC.

Everyone will still have the same amount of time using UT2007 to make their mod so sounds fair to me :)

"Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 was a terrible game that wasn't any fun"

Well thats your opinion, i personally think RO wipes the floor with the competition :P

Better get back to moddin', gonna have to work hard if im gonna win this ^^

Sounds awesome ! I assume when you say your using unreal engine 3 you mean UT2007... Theres enough games using UE3 to get confused about now :D