GE - help wanted

Team Name

Digital Brilliance Software

Project name

Galaxy Empire III

Brief description

Galaxy Empire is a futuristic game based on a continuation of the story from the previous two games by the same name. It is a mix of FPS and space based arcade simulation. The single player side will be an open-ended and story based missions to discover what happened to a previous set of colonist who left many years before. It will also deal with current colonies that are disappearing as well. The MP side will be mostly open-ended with the option of player's to complete missions similar to the SP mode.

Target aim

The single player software will be free. The server software will not. It will also consist of a global server which will not be sold, this is to keep out illigitimate servers since there is no direct connect option.

Compensation

None for the time being, that will change later if the server starts selling.

Technology

DirectX 9 is the base renderer using HLSL 3. This is so the game can be played on Windows XP and later versions of Windows. The game is being built from the ground up, it does not use anyone else's game engine. Content within the game is based on freely available tools such as XnView or wordpad. All content is scripted in through plain text INI files. Models are currently based on the .x format with a custom format later on.

Talent needed

Intermediate to advanced content developers

Beginners can help but if your work is sub-par it won't be included

* Voice acting - adult only, there are no children in the game

* UV mappers - many of the stations have not been mapped

* Texturers - ranging from sky boxes to model texturing, no pixilated art will be needed

* Writers - storylines, NPC interactions, cut-scenes etc.

* Modellers - many areas of the game will need models, already have a few good ship models

* Testers - for giving feedback only, anyone is welcome here

Team structure

Lead developer - Lancer Solurus (as in me)

Voice acting - Isaak Wells

Website

Galaxy Empire

Contact

gaming -at- digitalbrilliance -dot- com or use PM by clicking on my name

Previous work by team

GE 1 and 2, tons of utilities for Freelancer, major mod as well, 30+ years of programming, too many to list

Isaak - His portfolio site

Additional info

This game is still in the initial development stage. Due to the massive nature of the project it will take some time to develop everything. It is based far into the future and the in-game design will reflect this. It is part mystery, sci-fi and story telling. Additional areas will be added such as full modding support and automatic updating of said mods. The main part of the game will be from the player's POV but there will be additional support for empire building. Procedural generation may be used for making non-scripted areas of the galaxy.

Feedback

Constructive criticism is welcome, feedback just saying the game sucks will be ignored. That type of feedback does not help any project and I consider it trolling.

Texturing help is always appreciated, let me know when you get some free time.

Here is a couple of new screenshots showing the new atmosphere shader, click on image for full size...

Atmosphere/ring test

Test surface mesh from Stalker (Agroprom) ~90k polys (holes are missing mesh parts)

Alpha-discard shader test

Here is some additional model tests used for walking which is something that has been heavily worked on lately. This entire building can be climbed around in. It's also approx 81,000 polys and renders at the full 60 fps of the game. Does not contain any normal mapping, just has the basic texturing applied.

Click on the image for a larger view. More screenshots can be found HERE.

Actually I'm using an engine I wrote. It is similar to the FL engine in that you use INI files to set stuff up. The main difference at this point is that everything is set in the INI files and I use shaders for rendering using HLSL 3.0. It also uses OGG instead of MP3 that FL uses due to the high cost of the licensing for MP3. I'm always looking for testers but only the devs get the latest version.

Some things standard FL doesn't have...

Dynamic economy
Manufacturing
Persisitant markets
Ship capture
Surface walking, IE a FPS game play style
In-flight mounting/unmounting
Normal mapping
Persistant NPCs
Special upgrades
Auto-targetting

And many other things. This games is still in the very early stages of development (approx 9 months worth) but will be quite massive once it's completed. Since it already supports mods, any type of change can be done without having to modify the original files.

Yep, it also means that anything sold to that base is available for others to buy. So that means if you sell something to a base and want to buy it right back you can. That is if someone else trading there doesn't buy it first. Each bases also manufactures at least one finished good which slowly lowers in price the more they have of it. With a limited cargo hold they can build only so many anyways but the point is once the price gets low enough it becomes a good trade item.

Another thing is once you start researching tech, you will be able to build your own stuff to sell if you have the proper raw materials.

Actually that stuff was written months ago. At present I have been working mainly on the hud, ai coding and faction support. For now only persistant NPCs are supported (with temp versions for the random missions) which means they will live as long as the game is active or until they are killed. I still have to implement more of the temp versions though for in-system NPCs traffic (as in like the FL NPCs).

Many parts of the game such as in-flight mounting/unmounting has already been added but there is a ton of other stuff yet to be done

Actually an older version is available on the website. I will be releasing a new one soon since I finally got around to rebuilding the autoupdater (lost it, the server and global server in a HD crash).