Dilvish
09-25-2000, 10:02 AM
Hi all! It was with great pleasure I stumbled on your project from rpgplanet. I am part of a team that is building a similar project, and can apprecaite the amount of love, sweat and tears that goes into making something of this nature.
It does not sadden me at all to see other projects like ours underway, for it only can add quality to this rapidly growing industry. I think as more of these "smaller" worlds come online, we will see people begin to realize what well designed online worlds can offer to people to counter the machine-like totalitarianistic mega products.
Like you and your team, we have had extensive experience with what the state of the art of online gaming has to offer nowadays and found it to be lacking considerably. I, myself, have a level 51 wizard on eq and a level 43 four school mage in AC. I don't have to tell you how disappointing those games turned out in the long run.
Our development team is keeping a very low profile, in fact we do not have an external website yet, as things are still changing rapidly enough that any impressions we were to post on the game world we are building might end up being somewhat inaccurate. The funny thing was I was reading your interview and kept saying to myself, "Damn, I could be saying the same thing about our project". I would say we are somewhat behind you guys in terms of development based entirely on your screenshots (which for all I know are old). We are just now completing our first multi-user demo in a fairly small demo world (4000 x 4000meters) and our engine is fairly robustly handling the landscape, with LOD on vegetation and other outside details. We have terrain transitions, paths, and other terrain details, etc. I am the primary engineer on the client side, so forgive me if thats what I latch onto. I particularly liked your trees, which looks like you are using alpha blending on the the "branches", where each leaf is a "bent polygon". We are still using a mixture of solid trunks and cross-cutout alpha blended "flat panel" trees. But I see the trend towards using a few more polygons to achieve better looking trees. Horizons seem to have licked that one pretty well. We are currently handling terrain as a quad mesh which is destroyed and built as you move through the world. I would like to move to an adaptive quadtree for rendering the distant mountains, but I am loathe to give up the nice texturing in nearby view. Took us long enough to figure out how to layer terrain textures with a combination of alpha blended decal and miltitexture to get things like paths, roads and other terrain features.
We plan on releasing our client program as open source, as we do not depend on the client for security. Its our hope that this will encourage alternative interfaces to our world and encourage other such projects in the future.
Heh, like I said, the universe is a big place and each of these worlds will always offer unique environments and gaming experience. I think a few very well done worlds will open the eyes of the "Big Guys", especially when it comes to retention.
I don't know the level to which you feel competitive, or how open you are in echanging ideas on technology and gameplay with other projects. You guys seem pretty open, but I understand if you prefer seclusion from other development teams. Regardless, when we open up our website, I will send you e-mail so you can keep tabs on us (only fair). If you are open to discussions, I would gladly send you screenshots and would freely discuss game technology.
Dave Yazel
Aka Dilvish
Cosm/Dimensions of Xith dev team
It does not sadden me at all to see other projects like ours underway, for it only can add quality to this rapidly growing industry. I think as more of these "smaller" worlds come online, we will see people begin to realize what well designed online worlds can offer to people to counter the machine-like totalitarianistic mega products.
Like you and your team, we have had extensive experience with what the state of the art of online gaming has to offer nowadays and found it to be lacking considerably. I, myself, have a level 51 wizard on eq and a level 43 four school mage in AC. I don't have to tell you how disappointing those games turned out in the long run.
Our development team is keeping a very low profile, in fact we do not have an external website yet, as things are still changing rapidly enough that any impressions we were to post on the game world we are building might end up being somewhat inaccurate. The funny thing was I was reading your interview and kept saying to myself, "Damn, I could be saying the same thing about our project". I would say we are somewhat behind you guys in terms of development based entirely on your screenshots (which for all I know are old). We are just now completing our first multi-user demo in a fairly small demo world (4000 x 4000meters) and our engine is fairly robustly handling the landscape, with LOD on vegetation and other outside details. We have terrain transitions, paths, and other terrain details, etc. I am the primary engineer on the client side, so forgive me if thats what I latch onto. I particularly liked your trees, which looks like you are using alpha blending on the the "branches", where each leaf is a "bent polygon". We are still using a mixture of solid trunks and cross-cutout alpha blended "flat panel" trees. But I see the trend towards using a few more polygons to achieve better looking trees. Horizons seem to have licked that one pretty well. We are currently handling terrain as a quad mesh which is destroyed and built as you move through the world. I would like to move to an adaptive quadtree for rendering the distant mountains, but I am loathe to give up the nice texturing in nearby view. Took us long enough to figure out how to layer terrain textures with a combination of alpha blended decal and miltitexture to get things like paths, roads and other terrain features.
We plan on releasing our client program as open source, as we do not depend on the client for security. Its our hope that this will encourage alternative interfaces to our world and encourage other such projects in the future.
Heh, like I said, the universe is a big place and each of these worlds will always offer unique environments and gaming experience. I think a few very well done worlds will open the eyes of the "Big Guys", especially when it comes to retention.
I don't know the level to which you feel competitive, or how open you are in echanging ideas on technology and gameplay with other projects. You guys seem pretty open, but I understand if you prefer seclusion from other development teams. Regardless, when we open up our website, I will send you e-mail so you can keep tabs on us (only fair). If you are open to discussions, I would gladly send you screenshots and would freely discuss game technology.
Dave Yazel
Aka Dilvish
Cosm/Dimensions of Xith dev team