[Whitelight]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
If you have sex with your motherboard, yes.

According to my wife I already have.. Something she said about me trying to make love to this pc since `im on it so much she said it was my girlfriend...

Not... Goes off grabs wife and, well i`ll leave this part out for reasons of personal value.

[Baron MacDoblin]

Originally posted by karajorma
Let's get back to the really important point of this topic.

Since when has sex been trademarked?

John Romero, for his new game Suck It Down™.

[redsniper]

Are you all playing the same Star Shatter I tried?
Whatever I played was crap and i'm pretty sure it was star shatter. Maybe there's some new version or patch that I missed but all I remember is that there were almost no stars or backrounds of any kind in space and that I couldn't see anything in the atmospheric mission. Maybe it doesn't like my vid card. whatever...

[milo]

Geez, you guys are harsh.  You're going to hurt McDob's feelings.

Soooo... I-War clone, then? Or flight sim as in "actual gravity and air resistance in deep space"?

Neither, particularly.  Starshatter includes three different user-selectable flight models (standard, relaxed, arcade), and three different flight regimes (starship, orbital fighter, airborne fighter).  Some of the flight modeling is rather more realistic than Freespace, but the player is free to choose an arcade model if that is his preference.  None of the flight models are meant to be as realistic as something like Orbiter, but the "standard" model is similar to that of IWar when in orbit, or Total Air War when in atmosphere.

Anyway, yes, Starshatter is cool, yes the graphics are pretty neat, yes it has modding ability, but the interface is a bit too complex.

The demo is more than a year old.  The development version has streamlined the interface somewhat.  The depth of complexity is still there, but I have tried to provide options so that players may skim the surface if that is their preference.  Obviously, you can't have one game that is simultaneously as complex as Falcon 4 and as simple as Afterburner.  Starshatter is somewhere in between those extremes.

If I spend time to download this not knowing how big the file is, will it even run on a 600mhz, just wondering what the minimum mhz, or rather what is required to run it.

The demo and patch files add up to less than 40 MB.  The game will run fine on a 600 MHz machine, provided you have a half-way decent 3D card (TNT2 or better) and at least 128 MB of RAM.

The final version of the game is more RAM hungry, particularly in the dynamic campaign engine.  However, you could get by on 128 RAM if you mainly want to fly single missions or do multiplayer or tinker with Mods.

[Carl]

the models are crap.

i mean, come on: http://www.starshatter.com/shots/s05.jpg

that thing looks like it was made by some kid on his first day using 3dsmax.

[milo]

Thanks, I tried real hard to capture that feeling of youthfulness.

Just curious, what's an example of a fighter design that you do like?

[Kamikaze]

Don't mind him, he's Shivan. No tact.

[Carl]

Originally posted by milo
Thanks, I tried real hard to capture that feeling of youthfulness.

Just curious, what's an example of a fighter design that you do like?

it's not the overall design so much. it's the lack of detail. plain, bloby textures; blocky, straight wings. very few polygons. give that thing some curves.

[milo]

Originally posted by Kamikaze
Don't mind him, he's Shivan. No tact.

Oh goodness, I don't mind criticism; it's just something you have to get used to in this business.  For example, in the past few days I've seen people list Starcraft, Half Life, Counter-Strike, and Battlefield 1942 as being among the worst games they've ever played.  Now if a company like Blizzard can spend millions of dollars on a team of twenty people developing a AAA title, and still get slagged off, imagine what I can expect as an indie developer working part time with no budget at all.

On the other hand, even the most unfocused criticism often has useful information buried within it.  No game can ever be perfect, but the way to improve is to find the parts that people have strong negative opinions about and make them better (if that's possible).  So while I don't have time to follow up on every random negative comment that I get, I do try my best to satisfy as many people as possible.

[milo]

Originally posted by Carl
it's not the overall design so much. it's the lack of detail. plain, bloby textures; blocky, straight wings. very few polygons. give that thing some curves.

Well, you have to remember that Starshatter is designed to run on a broad range of hardware.  As an indie developer, I can't afford to target only those people with P4 2GHz machines and new Radeon cards.  

Anyway, see if you like this design any better.  It's a more advanced fighter that you encounter later in the game.

[mikhael]

Hey that looks almost like the Storm Petrel from the front.

Milo, its not bad but its not to my tastes. The Padlock view kills the frame rate--like murders it and then buries it in an unmarked grave. The designs in the demo are uninspired, to say the least. The HUD makes the eyes bleed. The flight model on realistic is not realistic. Its still pretty arcadey.

That said, you did one thing that I consider "the Right Thing". You get big props for understanding that some people have more than one stick attached to their computer. Letting me choose which stick I wanted to use was a stroke of genius. Will the game grok input from all sticks, accepting only X/Y input from the selected one, or what? I like to use a Nostromo N50 speed pad to augment this crappy game stick. Will Starshatter understand all possible keypresses from both controllers?

[IceFire]

I coulda done that...looks like a Morningstar too, only not as good.  The  WC: Saga guys did a better version.

[Unknown Target]

Originally posted by milo
 Some of the flight modeling is rather more realistic than Freespace,
 

Am I missing something? When the hell did FS2 become the benchmark for flight sim realism?

[Styxx]

He's just saying that it's more realistic than FS, not that FS is realistic in any way.

[Unknown Target]

Milo, even tho you're designing Starshatter to be run on a wide range of hardware, Milo, it still doesn't mean you have to make your ships as blocky as, well, Wing Commander IV.

For instance, take a peek at the Perseus in Freespace 2. It's smooth, yet very low-polygon. It has actual curves, not just a bunch of vertex-edited blocks stuck together.

I'd show you a picture of one of mine to show you what I mean if I could find it.

[milo]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
Am I missing something? When the hell did FS2 become the benchmark for flight sim realism?

Any game can be used a benchmark to the extent that it provides a reference point.  My goal is to help people who haven't played Starshatter understand what kind of game it is, and what it feels like to fly a fighter in the game.  I thought to do that by placing Starshatter in a continuum of games that other people were likely to have played (and on this board, Freespace seemed like a good candidate).

From least realistic to most realistic:

Freelancer
Wing Commander
Freespace
Starshatter
IWar
Orbiter

In that spectrum, Starshatter falls a bit closer to IWar than it does to Freespace.

Does that make my point more clear?

[milo]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
For instance, take a peek at the Perseus in Freespace 2. It's smooth, yet very low-polygon. It has actual curves, not just a bunch of vertex-edited blocks stuck together.

Yes, but I don't like the way the Freespace ships look.  I prefer designs that are sharp and angular, like the Raptor I posted above.  Everyone has different tastes.

Fortunately, Starshatter is easy to mod.

[Styxx]

Originally posted by milo
Fortunately, Starshatter is easy to mod.

Whoa. That's damn cool.

I think you're doing an amazing job at it. Keep up the work, we need more people like this.

[Lightspeed]

I played it. Well, not that there wasnt much to play anyway. It's not bad but like the other people, I don't quite like the ship designs, and the interface looks too plain for my eyes.

My view is probably biased though since for me: the rest < FreeSpace

[Stryke 9]

Few games can aspire higher than to be a clone of Independence War, don't see what the complaint there is. Unless it's the evil evil I-War 2 you're thinking, which is evil and should die and not be imitated in the least because it sucked ass and was a puzzle-based game. That's not personal taste, that's the truth- it murders Christian babies and sells their captured souls to Satan in exchange for puppies to torture and drown.


Anyway. Gotta agree on the curves bit- I dig blocky, too. But a lot of the models seem to be lacking a certain something... there's no really consistent theme, near as I can tell (nothing similar at all between the fighter Carl posted and, say, this except that I don't like them), so the focus should really be on just having a large variety of cool-looking models. That one you posted being a good example- it's got a coherent, vaguely recognizable design without being so generic as to bore everyone to death. More like that, less like the other two, and a lot of variety in the forms the ships take would probably be the way to go there. As it is, they're pretty spotty, with some good 'uns and a lot of models looking like they're just five-second placeholders until something more complete can be put in. You don't need a lot of polygons to make a good-looking ship, even- just good textures and an interesting shape. You don't need to make it curvy (though a few curved surfaces for variety wouldn't hurt), there's plenty of room in the "big 'n blocky" category. And some models that didn't look like hastily-textured fighter planes and spraypaint cans would make me twitch so much less, especially given how much else is just plain cool, graphically and otherwise, there.

Incidentially, you ever want help with models or something, I'm game. Just, you know, in case.