Realm Wars - Nice Job

#1 I agree, fantastic job so far. The model is 100% professional quality, and I'd put it up there with the best player models for any game, even upcoming games.

The crossbow is beautiful, with an incredibly detailed skin. My only qualm is that, because of the angle we hold it at, so much of this detail is not apparent to the user -- I didn't really appreciate how detailed it was until I zoomed in on one on the ground. Don't get me wrong, it still belongs in the triple-A ranks of game weapons, it's just that the tweaker in me would like to see a design that concentrates more of the detail in a way that is more readily apparent to the user.

A couple of problems so far:

In the editor, whenever I change any of the terrain 'rules' and click 'Apply', all of the textures are wiped from my map, making it white. I then have to go to the Painter. The names of the textures are still there, but the boxes they're above are empty. I have to re-load all of the textures to the correct boxes, at which point it works exactly as advertised. Just an FYI for people that are confused by that portion of it, and a note to GG. Heh it would be nice if it did that automatically.

I'm still puzzling out the workings of the editor. One thing I would really like is a way to make sunlight *brighter* than 1 1 1. The Serious Editor lets you do this; your lights can make a black texture completely white if they are bright enough. This would be nice for adding intense colors, or for instance VERY harsh sunlight to a desert wastes-ish map; maybe not as much as SS does, but just enough to go to lighting 1.1 or so. That would give us a bit more flexibility, so that there could be even greater variety in the lighting of daytime maps.

Also, when we're warned against using more than 4 textures in one area -- does that mean just keep all 4 from blending into each other, say, if they were all adjacent, where you would have polys with 4 textures and a detail texture blended, which is bad for most graphics cards -- or does that mean that we should not have 4 textures within clipping distance of each other? I.e, would I have to make sure that there are only 3 base textures being used within the clipping distance? Or, as I suspect, is it simply a matter of blending -- you can use all of the textures it will let you add, just make sure only three are blending together at any one place?

I figure if anyone should see massive problems with the textures, it should be me, since I have a Voodoo3 2000 w/16MB . . .

#2 Keep in mind, I program for the web, so I am no expert.

I was disappointed with the demo. It felt just like a tribes clone. From the first, it seemed to me it was a alpha mod of tribes.

#3 I found this demo very inspiring to us indie developers. I just downloaded it and there had to be about 50 people playing already. The models and weapons.. I mean.. weapon is great. Keep up the good work!

#4 I was a little dissapointed. I had expected some major code improvemetn/features, more than one model/weapon/map, maybe a few new game rules. Dont get me wrong. It is a perfectly fun little game, and the ideas behind the open community project are very nice indeed. I was just a little let down that there werent any "suprises" from a developer's standpoint. :)

#5 yeah i was kind of disapointed too since i expected to see some nice coded features, but it's just torque with some art and a coded weapon. It's fun and great quality of course, and i know it's only milestone zero so im not complaining but expecting to see some nice coded stuff soon :)
Great work!

#6 I expected exactly this, what we got. As soon as it said that the community would be developing this, I knew it had to be that way.

After all, the gameplay has to be simple, or we won't be able to build on it. Almost anything else they could add at this point, except for more *simple* buildings and trees and other art, would be almost wasted effort.

Not to mention that it's pretty incredible that they've been able to do this much, given how busy everything around here is and with constantly updating the engine and so forth . . .

#7 Luc, the textures are 'wiped clean' because the paths are different. I noticed this when I decided to see what a 'pro' would set their control points at for the various texturing rules.
Personally, I am very impressed with the demo. Those of you who aren't, I believe are those who've already purchased Torque, and therefore are not the target audience. We were always promised a demo one day, and pretty much told it would be just a compiled version of what the SDK offered. Being a broke puppy, I've had to satisy my building urges by playing with the Crimeforce demo that was released around October. I've read all the posts, and I've been intrigued by the various editor fixes I saw mentioned, but they did not prepare me for what I saw in this demo. Awesome does not adequately describe it!
Also, I never expected the initial release of the demo to have much art, models or interiors. The original plan was not to build a game, but to build a game builders template. If the RW guys start cranking out content at this point, I will surely take a look, but as I'm planning to build my own game, and not to steal content, I got exactly what I wanted and hoped for.