Quote from: BloodyCactus;618129I think this is gonna be a burn in the long run. Gonna cost them way more than they expect to get to completion. I hope those who funded understand they are patrons not customers and probably wont see anything for their cash (beyond the costless PDF's paizo will hand out) and wheverelse the bulk of the money is coming from dont expect quadratic returns.

WTF are you babbling on about? ...are not by chance from rpg.net?

You really don't get it? This is a project that has been worked on steadily since the first Kickstarter without interruption. The basic game engine is done, There was a place somewhere were you could download a Unity3d walk-thru of Golarion. They have the character class concepts done. They have tons of equipment and accessories, done. What remains are the adventure storylines, and missions/quests (Which I'm sure they have been working on already as well, at least at the outline level (if not actual storylines and quests) on the game design doc.)

Then there is the Beta playtest, where the first round investors/adventurers/factions will get to stake claims to various parts of Golarion. It's going to cost less to complete, because most of it is already done already...

Unity is awesome. You know how much just one decent Level Design guy can get done in a day?

Unity is alright for consoles, devices, things without real graphics cards.  Nothing Unity can really compete with even low power DX10 PC engines, let alone the newest stuff.

Quote from: CRKrueger;618159Unity is alright for consoles, devices, things without real graphics cards.  Nothing Unity can really compete with even low power DX10 PC engines, let alone the newest stuff.

Unity has run DX11 with the new and improved shaders ever since Dx11 was released... Unity Pro integrates seamlessly with multithreaded CPU (and GPU) architecture on PC (Intel and AMD), MAC (Apple), Linux, Xbox 360, PS3/4, Wii and Wii U, as well as for Android and iOS for iPhone.

Every kid with a PC or tablet can download Unity3d to make or add their own content.

When you consider price-to-performance, it's second to none, and consistently ranks in the top 5 for all game engines.

When you consider performance only, and are willing to provide a spare limb, along with your firstborn... you just might be able to build a AAA title with Havok, or Rage, or the CryEngine.

Eh. Wasteland 2 is using Unity and it's got 3x the Kickstarter money; and besides, with $1M, could they do that much better than what Unity allows? I guess maybe if they were hot shit indie programmers but I don't see that they've got that going for them.

I mean, I'm not going to give a shit about it unless it turns into Neverwinter Nights Pathfinder Edition or something – MMOs aren't my thing. I'm just saying.

Quote from: GameDaddy;618154WTF are you babbling on about? ...are not by chance from rpg.net?

rpg.net? no never been there.

Quote from: GameDaddy;618154You really don't get it? This is a project that has been worked on steadily since the first Kickstarter without interruption. The basic game engine is done,

I get it more than you. They only just decided to use Unity. There is NOTHING done game engine wise. The techdemo was not made with Unity. buying a Unity license, does not equal Game Engine, Server Backend, Low Latency network stack for 10,000 fucking players at once load balancing. They dont even have a backend component yet or front end components (if they did, they would name them, They like to throw the names out of everything else they have touched or thought of using.)

Quote from: GameDaddy;618154There was a place somewhere were you could download a Unity3d walk-thru of Golarion.

yeah um righto. I guess that means MMO to you then.

Quote from: GameDaddy;618154What remains are the adventure storylines, and missions/quests (Which I'm sure they have been working on already as well, at least at the outline level (if not actual storylines and quests) on the game design doc.)

nah thats the shit you, as the customer, get to create for them. Guess you skipped over the part where you'll be providing the content.

Quote from: GameDaddy;618154Then there is the Beta playtest, where the first round investors/adventurers/factions will get to stake claims to various parts of Golarion. It's going to cost less to complete, because most of it is already done already...

BWAHAHA. Stop, stop, Ima pee on my kilt if you keep this up.

Quote from: GameDaddy;618154Unity is awesome. You know how much just one decent Level Design guy can get done in a day?

At this point, I'm not sure you even know Unity's capabilities, let alone read some of the dev blog posts on Goblinworks to know the state of things.

Quote from: BloodyCactus;618166At this point, I'm not sure you even know Unity's capabilities, let alone read some of the dev blog posts on Goblinworks to know the state of things.

Mmmm. no. That would be you...

Here's the latest Hangout, from 8:00 pm this evening where Ryan Dancey, and Lisa, and the Paizo crew goes over what's up with the newest MMO as they wrap up the Kickstarter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vNxwSHZ41T0

I have been actively using Unity3d for five years now, ever since it was first released. I chose it after looking at every other notable game engine on the market (Except for CryEngine, of course, the insane bastiches there wanted thousands just to play with it... and never played with the Rockstar Rage engine either.That is a proprietary engine, and I don't get along with Sony, at all... so no loss.

Here's a Castle game level for Windows built in a day with Unity by yours truly right around Thanksgiving, the houses took longer, but were done earlier. You might get by with a DirectX9 video card, but I'd go with Directx11 to keep your FPS decent and smooth. Just unzip the zip file onto your desktop and run it. It's a 41Mb download...

http://gamedevonline.net/unity/Almiris.zip

In the end, I joined the kickstarter for $15.00 (for the Emerald Spire adventure, with Mentzer being the tipping point).

What I really think that this demonstrates is the immense amount of loyalty and goodwill Paizo has managed to generate in the gaming community.  It's stretched it a bit, but the fans want them to succeed.  In the end, there were 8732 fans willing to try and give them a chance to do something great.

So good for them, and I hope they keep creating high quality products.

Quote from: GameDaddy;618176Mmmm. no. That would be you...

nah. I'm quite familiar with an older version. Last time I used it I chose Torque over it. Things are quite different now. (this was in '09, my employer only had ogre/torque/unity within budget, they were all pretty shit back then.) It was quite different from the commercial engines I've messed with (bullfrog magic carpet, wipeout, afl98, dark reign, powerslide, all of which are quite old predating the unity/torque/ogre. I'm glad I'm out of the gamedev business, no more arguing about Gouraud vs Phong shading over lunch, how many clock cycles does X take in ASM, custom pipeline for cpu Y)

Quote from: GameDaddy;618176Here's a Castle game level for Windows built in a day with Unity by yours truly right around Thanksgiving

How many objects in the scene? Total polys? Have they improved scene management and object heirachy? they were bitches to work with. Lets delete an object.... and come back after lunch. I'd check it out but I dont run windows. You running a custom co-ordinate system so you can have an infinite size map? I remember some bitchtastic lights/occlusion culling bugs in one version we tested ugh.

Quote from: BloodyCactus;618183How many objects in the scene? Total polys? Have they improved scene management and object heirachy? they were bitches to work with. Lets delete an object.... and come back after lunch. I'd check it out but I dont run windows. You running a custom co-ordinate system so you can have an infinite size map? I remember some bitchtastic lights/occlusion culling bugs in one version we tested ugh.

There's a lot of objects in the scene, more than a thousand trees easy... maybe Twenty buildings total, (although they each have multiple windows and doors), 71 working animations.
The Castle is just one object, but there's a fracture tool available that can be called, to you know... destroy walls and stuff.


I don't even count polys and verts, don't have to yet. I'm averaging about a million triangles and 900,000 verts per frame draw. The lights/occlusion issue has been taken care of long ago (I actually remember that by the way, would get some really weird lit up hills in shaded areas depending on where I setup my light sources). The flying snow itself, is 300,000 or so particles...

It's running at 58.8 fps on my system with no one connected, though that frame rate would drop a few fps on a network with clients connected, but probably not on my end, on the client end.

I can delete an object, easily up to a hundred in between frames, and have some new objects spawn in their place (or not) and this puppy won't miss a beat, at least you wouldn't be able to see that. It actually loads the new lod models in between frames depending on how far away the object is from the camera.

This should run on Linux just fine too. Maybe someone would be kind enough to test it as my Ubuntu system lacks the graphics card to run this.

The whole thing about this is you can iterate fast and make changes if things aren't working, and have a patchfile to install when you are done.

Unreal is a pain to work with micromanaging you every step of the way. Intel's Havok is good, but it's expensive, and about midway between Unity and the Unreal engine in terms of being user friendly. I gave Ogre a test spin (probably around 2010), along with the Crystal game engine and it was still sucking hard... (Crystal too).

I never tried any of the other game engines. I wanted a game engine that worked, one where I could load Directx, 3ds, Collada, and Blender, models and animations, and work on scripting out emergent events and Unity is just fine for that.

There's no need for a custom coordinates system, I can write a script that will setup a 3d zone that automatically triggers a new level load whenever the camera gets close to that 3d zone.

The whole game level is about 6km x 6km with the castle roughly in the center.

Quote from: Votan;618179In the end, I joined the kickstarter for $15.00 (for the Emerald Spire adventure, with Mentzer being the tipping point).

What I really think that this demonstrates is the immense amount of loyalty and goodwill Paizo has managed to generate in the gaming community.  It's stretched it a bit, but the fans want them to succeed.  In the end, there were 8732 fans willing to try and give them a chance to do something great.

So good for them, and I hope they keep creating high quality products.

I jumped in at the end for $15 too, just so I could get the megadungeon PDF.  Don't discount the fact that a non-trivial number of people have jumped on the project because it's a theme park MMO.  

Honestly, last night I didn't think this KS would fund, but the spike today was unreal.  

-Skeld

I don't have an ounce of faith this project will end up anywhere good and wholesome, but I've got to salute Ryan for pulling off this success. If I ever need to sell a supertanker's worth of snake oil, he will be my number one guy.

I don't understand why a big part of me wanted to see this fail.

Perhaps its my fear that Paizo see mmo's as the future and the mmo will become the flagship #1 priority at the rpg lines expense. Perhaps it's the shake down of their audience as Dancey rattles the tin to fund something that is unlikely to appear for years if at all. Or maybe its tall poppy syndrome, the innate desire of Australians to see successful people fail.

I can't work it out, it seems almost irrational. Did anyone else hope this would fail?

Quote from: Monkey Boy;618224Perhaps its my fear that Paizo see mmo's as the future and the mmo will become the flagship #1 priority at the rpg lines expense.

I suspect they won't go down this road, unless their mmo becomes a huge overnight sensation.

Quote from: Monkey Boy;618224Perhaps it's the shake down of their audience as Dancey rattles the tin to fund something that is unlikely to appear for years if at all.

Hopefully it won't become like another "Duke Nukem" or "Chinese Democracy".

Quote from: Monkey Boy;618224I don't understand why a big part of me wanted to see this fail.

...

I can't work it out, it seems almost irrational. Did anyone else hope this would fail?

Perhaps it's just simple human nature to indulge in schadenfreude, for both real and potential events.

Ooh, a 3D game engine discussion.

If I had a choice, I'd pick ID Tech 5, without question. This is because of its features, code clarity, and the fact it will eventually be open sourced. My second choice however would be Unity, the only engine that makes the senior producer at Epic Games go 'wow', and triple A titles are about the only thing it CAN'T do. I don't really have a third choice, but I've been consistently disappointed in the open source engines I've played around with.

Quote from: Monkey Boy;618224Did anyone else hope this would fail?

Depends on your definition.