Larian Studios

Relic is behind the development of {Home World II} and {Incredible Creatures}.
Both are real time strategy 3d games but HWII is a full spherical version while IC is a hemispherical version of the same engine.
It is noticeable and admirable that the video options include selecting a resolution between {800x600} to {1600x1200}. The engine includes panning, zooming and rotating the world as well as tilting the world from birds-eye to ants-eye. The zooming option applies to the mini-map, which is kept professionally as a birds-eye as I have recommended for RiftRunneR.

Now I realised that in-game movies are becoming standardised for games to be {Bink} formats and in-game music is standardised to be {Ogg} format.

The technical competition is around 3D engines and how they handle high resolution.
The artistic competition is yet the most open arena in which the story and level editing as well as graphics come in to make different games.

I think that Relic already won the technical competition.
It would be wise to follow their footsteps if Larian Studios could not do better.

it was in gamespy i think that one of the Relic devs was interviewed on the post-homeworld2 event & that he did mentioned the mistakes the team made & the good decisions & plans that helped in game development.

Interview with Relic's Dan Irish

one of the factors, i think that helps in great zooming range in homeworld series is that the models are mostly of basic shapes(variants of spheres, oval, polygons) & there is no (detailed) articulation or movement for each part of the ships. plus, effective skinning of the models make the illusion of more polygons that u imagine even more believeable.

if the model is that of a humanoid, the engine will have to be modified heavily to cater the movement, nuance, & uneven shapes that a humanoid possess.

this is mentioned in an interview on the new Lord Of The Rings upcoming RTS, which is currently developed by EA Pacific. it's called Battle for Middle Earth they plan to use a modified engine of C&C Generals(which originally is clumsy when handling humanoid models).

LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth with screenies

I think (to fomulate it carefully, because I'm no expert on this field) it could be possible to use such an Engine like Relic's one for RPG games, too.

I have one example in mind which could support this theory : Spellforce.

Spellforce uses the Krass Engine ("Krass" is slang used by youngsters to express "something is krass" - meaning more or less "extraordinary") known from the game "Aquanox" and "Aquanox 2" made by Massive Development.

The Krass engine, however, was highly modified and adapted by the makers od Spellforce, Phenomic , to suit their needs. As I recently read in an interview : "Well, at the core it's still the krass engine, but it is so higly modified that even the makers wouldn't recognize it." (Quoted from my memory.)

So Spellbound (and maybe Knightshift, too) is an example of how to use 3D engines for Adventures / Roleplaying / Realtimestrategy games.

The issue to me was the fact that the new standards had been already set and unfortunately ground breaking achievements had been accomplished.

It is not a coincidence that the best games on the market have all agreed to use Bink for video format.
It is not a coincidence that the best games on the market have all agreed to use Ogg for audio format.

It is not a question of possibility any more whether 1600 x 1200 CAN be implemented or not because it is already out and being used.

It is not a question anymore if 640 x 480 is still being supported because it is not being supported any more.

Unfortunately, 800 x 600 is still supported as the bottom of the scale but I guess that such support should not hurt while the game industry is in transition of standards, because I realised that the new resolutions must be out and supported first before the old resolution was not supported any more to give enough time for the users to upgrade without missing buying the game.

Animated items in T3D are still being designed with very low polygon count and with flat texturing, which is quite disappointing when compared with isometric 2D (pseudo 3D). However it is understandable that pre-rendered 2D are super graphics of T3D that was rendered in relatively very long time which may not be implemented in real-time playing. One only hopes that developers push the limits of quality rather than the comfort of accepting a secure and low quality standard.

I have the opinion that specs for low-end-system should - or rather must - be incorporated into any game, at least to give a sign to people saying "hello, we haven't forgotten you".

High resolutions are good - but there are still people out there who are siimply not able to affort the newest hardware.

Remember Origin ? They made games with such high specs that - at the time of relese - no-one seriously believe the average gamer would be able to play the game with fulfilling these specs at that time. Only generations later the average gamer would be able to fulfull the recommended specs.

I don't want that, because it simply excludes some people.

I think the worst thing that could happen to game development is that all games would standardize on the same things.
I also think that not every game can be successfully implemented on every engine. An engine is more than just the graphics you are looking at. Every one of those engines come with a full implementation of scripts, editors and interfaces that simplyfy your development but also restrict you.
As such most usages of the engine result in a modification of these restrictions to cater more to the needs of the game.
An RPG does require different facilities from an engine than an FPS or an RTS or a space sim does.

It's good that there are still some out there who take new approaches and do not adhere to standards. The ogg format would have not existed if everybody would have stayed on the MP3 standard. The reason ogg is popular in games is that it results in smaller files.

In contrast to that I also think that it requires a lot of effort to create a decent engine. I think what Larian Studios would like is to use their current engine and replace the 2D part with a full 3D implementation. Which is still a daunting task even if they use the 3D graphics part of an existing engine.

one of the screenies of RRR featured the look of a game editor, particularly item editor. having tools that made game making/editing easier are also precursors to having better tools for the engine that is made to last at least for a few releases. this i remembered from lar's interview as he did mentioned about having the game engine to be reuseable.

about bink, true it has been some sort of a standard for as long as i've played windows-based games. but i've noticed that some game devs also use others, for example microsoft games will use (obviously) windows media video, & blizzard (for warcraft 3 & also future pc games, i think) as well as relic use DivX format.

use of ogg vorbis format is only recent, i think. with demand for higher quality without taking up too much space, ogg seems to be a good choice even over mp3 as it's open source as opposed to mp3 with its licensing issues.

i agree with alrik about having 800 X 600 as minimum instead of 1024 X 768 as there are many gamers still with older systems who may not upgrade anytime soon. trick is to make the game not only workable but still playable at lower resolution & details. for example, unreal 2003 with all details & eye candy turned off, the graphics still rock.

graphics-wise for RPG, DAD, u should check out neverwinter nights. it's fully T3D with bells & whistles on. any more of those RPGs with a lot of 3D eye candies, myrthos? oh yes, deus ex.

still, personally i have a soft heart for isometric view RPGs like DD & Nox. it may be static environment but it's gorgeous.

what's that about the bink! video?
i saw it a long time in computergames also.
but has this codex better compression rates then all the other formats?

not sure about that but DivX has near DVD quality.

Knight-Shift is yet another new game that supports 1600 x 1200 and uses neither DivX nor Bink.
Also the music tracks are not in Ogg format.

Knight-Shift may be classified to be on the same line of games which Blizzard produces.
You do not rotate the scene and when you zoom in the viewing angle gets steeper while zooming out brings you closer to a bird’s eye.

I am extracting a trend on what is going on in the game industry, and they all agree on supporting multiple resolutions spanning the range between [800x600] and [1600x1200]. They all have very good to excellent sound tracks. They all have stunning graphics too.

Again I find Knight-Shift and War-Craft latest versions to be fabulous on graphics and with an extremely elegant interface with very pleasing details.

Of course this does not mean that the stories and the game-play are equally excellent or appealing to every taste.

By mixing relic’s standards with Blizzard’s and the quality and details of Reality Pump that made Knight-Shift I begin to feel what is on Lar’s mind concerning Riftrunner, and if <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/riftrunner.gif" alt="" /> stands head to head with those fabulous games then <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/riftrunner.gif" alt="" /> would have made it safely.

Producing a true 3 dimensional game with fine details and full 3D manipulation while keeping a smooth performance on all resolutions is a heinous challenge; this means that hardware demands made on the system that runs the high end games certainly must be high specifications too.

It is a matter of common sense and simple arithmetic.
The fan base may demand better graphics, better playability, better music and sound and dialogues, better story and better everything; so that fan base may not protest when the game maker demands a better hardware to run the software that the fan base asked for by asking for more and more and more.

Knight-Shift demo is 484 Mega Bytes and it performed very reasonably on my humble 1.8 GHz CPU running at 789 MHz (restricted by me for heat during summer) and 512 MB RAM, while being fully compliant to Direct X 9 without having sound card HW buffers.

There is a response delay on the mouse-cursor graphics that had been exaggerated, so I have to unleash the full 1.8 GHz to get optimum performance.

I have confidence that Larian Studios can make a leaping effort to catch up with the being standardized trends on Rift Runner, but the true challenge shall be Divinity II.

You mean the Blizzard that has a reputation for testing its games so endlessly that they are near to being bugless upon release? The same Blizzard that might not be innovative but sure as hell know what they are doing when they create a game? The same Blizzard that is capable of selling millions of copies of a PC game?
And those games are to be placed on the same line as Knight-Shift?

I think it takes a lot more than some eye-candy to create a game that is on the same level as those created by Blizzard. I think the eye-candy of <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/riftrunner.gif" alt="" /> will be better than <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/div.gif" alt="" />, but I also doubt they are comparable to the eye-candy as presented in KnightShift. Nor should it be, as has been said before the most effort has been put in improving the gameplay, skills and character development.
To me those improvements might make <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/riftrunner.gif" alt="" /> taking over the number one position on my favorites list (where PS:T still firmly stands).

whoaa....slow down myrthos. DAD's merely comparing graphics, not the overall game engine & gameplay. that's why he put warcraft 3 & knightshift side by side.

besides, why would DAD, being a blizzard fan himself, would insult the company that makes games he enjoy?

DAD, when u mentioned that knightshift uses neither bink nor divx, does that mean the cutscenes are actually in-game engine rendering?

myrthos, i agree that gameplay should be number one instead of eye-candy commonly seen in FPS & recently MMORPG.

<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" />

Hahahahaha

Thank you Myrthos for such a lovely post.

I wanted to insert a wink right after your praise for Blizzard but I didn’t. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

When I said "on the same line" I really meant to the way the game looks and the ideas in the interface.

Firstly, Blizzard introduced the semi-opaque/ semitransparent slide-in interface windows that are very elegant and fabulous. Knight Shift imitated them but decided to make them static popups and rather exquisitely decorated as you have noticed and called it eye-candy.

Secondly, Reality Pump have decided to take Blizzard’s approach of a non-rotating 3D during game play and suffice a zoom in that varies the camera inclination, so it is a 100% Blizzard’s innovation, which Reality Pump just imitated.

As for game play, the animations are softly compromised and are not so annoying.
The feedback and response delay could be largely improved by hardware enhancements so I could not blame the game programming with certainty.

Blizzard is more specialized in Strategy and Adventurous Campaigns with a rather linear story line.

This was implemented in Knight Shift too; they also added a skirmish and an RPG interface.

I tested the RPG, and let me tell you that items are very well balanced with the character, the enemies are randomly generated and the very world is randomly populated with pre-designed zones, which reminds me of Rift Runner’s battlefields being randomly generated.

Your choices of characters is a gay archer who is really funny, a standard knight, a barbarian, a spearman, a male sorcerer, a female priestess and a female Amazon mage who by the way ARE very sexy (looks and voices){{{Morbo comes to mind}}} <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

So I am definitely going to buy that game because it has many good features from Blizzard’s style and also many of the promises made by Larian Studios. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

However, I do not recommend buying Knight Shift if you do not have a powerful PC hardware system.

I am sure that Knight Shift is using a T3D engine that can rotate and tilt the scene perfectly but it was crippled because it performed very poorly on low-end hardware systems.

The background of the very first interface is a rotating T3D world of a battlefield and I mean a battlefield.

The interface has a battle song that is a top notch too and it was a pleasure listening to the Celtic female singer.

I also tested re-play-ability and it is superb with randomly generated zones being very balanced, and to give you a hint I would say that they swap the blue mushroom fields with Celtic healing shrines, where the blue mushrooms are what you ingest to restore health and manna.

Those who cannot wait for RiftRunneR would certainly appreciate Knight Shift.

For me it is like a dream come true because I just love strategy games in which I build my farm and milk my cows. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />
Now add to that that the game includes an RPG style play and what do I wish for more than skirmish, which they have included too.

Come on, let us give them the credit they deserve, I am not a fan of Larian Studios for nothing but for the good time I have enjoyed with <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/div.gif" alt="" /> and expect to enjoy with <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/riftrunner.gif" alt="" />

That is why I am a fan of Blizzard and now definitely a fan of Reality Pump.

Kindest regards. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wave.gif" alt="" />

@Janggut

No and Yes. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

I should say that there are no cut-scenes in the sense of a movie clip, but rather a halt play with a shutter that brings a black third sliding from top and bottom to reduce the screen to a third and display a dialogue after which your RPG avatar has new objectives. So those cut-scenes are story stage markers with a function and not eye-candy.

However, the answer is yes because what we may call a cut scene is in fact an in-game engine rendering if we may call it so. But we have seen that technique in <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/div.gif" alt="" /> because that is typical to the dialogue between Lanilor and Mardanious.
So that type of cur-scene is definitely not a Bink video movie.

They also use a hidden sound engine because all files have the same name extension.

The game simply demands a high-end machine and other than that I would give it Full Marks. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

Kindest regards. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wave.gif" alt="" />

thanks for the info, DAD. by the way, if u ever buy the full version, do let us know how it plays & whether it's worth buying or not. i.e., review. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" />

@Janggut.

Oh My God!
I unleashed the 1.8 GHz and the DX9 that was attenuated a notch and was forgotten.
I also experimented with the right mouse button dragging to rotate and guess what I rotated the world so smoothly that I was fascinated.
This game is huge and almost perfect if not perfect.
They do not use two different controls for zooming and tilting the viewing angle but rather use an arc on which the camera moves to do both simultaneously.

The maximum and minimum zoom levels keep the image in a superb quality, although Blizzard has a glitch on zooming in too much that makes you see nothing but a single polygon.

As per your comment to Myrthos, now I believe that it is rather an Insult to Reality Pump Technology if I said that they were in line with Blizzard.

If the game "Knight Shift" is anything like the demo then that game is definitely the new benchmark I shall use for all games to come for the next ten years replacing the old Zelda Legend.

I am talking about technology here not cows and sexy polygons. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

I have no idea if the story is good or if there was any story at all.
They talk about a banished prince that was trapped in a rift of spacetime and was freed by a sorcerer called Gallus.

The Prince is supposed to be the character you should develop in the campaign mode.

Most probably the story is a very simple plot for entertainment and not for any serious novel prizes.

BUT the technology is shocking. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" />

It is not a very low polygon technology like Blizzard’s at all, but a much better detailed true three dimensional graphics.
This game, as I estimate, took more than 300 men-years of work, so if one man wishes to make a similar game he needs 300 years to make it. Since this estimate brings in a very big question mark, I think that they have used ready made top quality libraries for the standard three dimensional graphics and focused on the characters and items as well as the eye-candy.

To give you an example, there are rivers in the game and you can see the fish swimming exactly like in nature and you can see ducks too and they swim and dive also. The sky is not quiet either and it is full of a variety of birds that keeps you interested and never bored. There are hemispherical bee hives around which you can see the swarms flying due to perfect implementation of particle-graphics, which is accompanied by the buzzing of the wings in a way that you can call it nothing else but a reality pump.

Kindest regards. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wave.gif" alt="" />

I bought NightShift last week. Technically it is realy a great game. And very good looking. It is stable like a rock. I played only the RPG-part (don't like RTS). My Playtime so far is 28 hours (as displayed in savegame dialog) without a single crash, glitch, error. That is out of the box without a single patch. Now, that is something I've never seen before...

Gameplay is okay. A little boring, but challenging. It's pretty dificult. I'm at the end of level 7 and can't beat the endboss. He kills my amazon with one single hit <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/disagree.gif" alt="" />

There are random sidequests. But these are boring and repetive. I hope the battlefields in RR are not like these. Your avatar is somewhat braindead. He can only remember one single sidequest at a given time. Only when one sidequest is finished he can get another.

Oh, and the pathfinding is the best I've ever seen in any RPG.

Great! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" />

Then it is as I expected exactly.
They claim to be the first developers to implement a new technology called "Per Pixel Shader".
I think that PPS is the T3D replacement technology of ray tracing because ray tracing, which is deadly perfect, is too slow.

Thank you for mentioning path finding, which is certainly superb.
So what we have here is the technology edge of T3D RPG so it is a very acceptable compromise to find no big deal story or level design. They gave you an editor to do that, and when their fan base compile many scenarios they can get better ideas on what makes a role playing theme ticks.

I may go as far as saying that Knight Shift is an introductory or a test product telling the world that Reality Pump is in the game of developing games and that they are strong.

Having proved that they have the technology, they need to find a better story maker and level designers.

BTW, I noticed that they have implemented something called "most suitable weapon auto-selection".
This means that they have implemented the logical relation between the effect of a weapon and the nature of the foe.
Skeletons are resistant to slashing and poisoning of course but they are vulnerable to bludgeoning and smashing.
Then you may not smash a bear but you may slash it or burn it, and so on.

So again, those guys at Reality Pump are good at logical settings, but they need some time to gain experience on the art of entertainment and story telling.

They should employ professionals who know how to create excitement, thrill, curiosity and motivation.
However they do know how to make fun and soft, soft software. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

It is cute to hear the lewd voice of the Amazon mage calling you darling. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wave.gif" alt="" />

nice one, frenki! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" />

to DAD & frenki, u can chat more about knightshift or 'once upon a knight'(former title) in general chat area as DQueen has opened a thread on the game. yep, she bought it as well so check the thread out & i hope 2 find the game & buy it. no more doubts. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" />

anyway, more screenies on LOTR: battle for middle earth here.

it utilises modified game engine used in C&C Generals.

DAD, reality pump or zuxxez(?) or another primordial name which i forgot developed Earth 2150 RTS game, which was the first ever 3D RTS game with fully deformable terrain, T3D models, ....., let's just say everything was 3D. & that was years before warcraft 3 or any other 3D RTS games ... . the zooming feature, pan & tilt camera angles, split screen options, night-day transition, weather effects, air-water-land-subterrainean levels in one map, .... . it's the grandaddy of 3D RTS. & that was before relic's homeworld(this i'm not sure). oh yes, this game supports 640x480 all the way till 1600x1280.

not surprised if almost nobody heard of this game as it's among the top 5 most underrated games ever in my book.