The First Exodus - DevBlog

Here comes some new cool models for units and structures in TFE: The Beginning - game

Here comes first finished ground unit:

Lunar Truck is huge transportation unit. It’s dimensions are 21 x 38 m.

Something like in-game interface preview:

We have agreed to aband usage of Papervision3D engine for Flash/Browser based game TFE: The Beginning because realtime 3D rendering in flash can’t promise good performance with speed and quality. In future, when Adobe release Astro Flash Player 10, we’ll see if virtual machine can stand it.

So, we have decided to create isometric enviroment with prerendered graphics of buildings and units. Like this, game engine will have visual quality equal to snapshots you’ve seen on this blog and good perfomances in game execution, but cost will fall on longer loading.

Learning about Glest RTS (Open Source) engine we’ve concluded that it’s greate base for development of desktop RTS: TFE Mars Conflict. Since it’s GPL we’ll release source on our site and offer our improovments to Glest team and community. Development of game we’ll be “opened” for public, so you’ll see some demos just after we finish first steps of job.

We are strongly support idea of creating open-sorce easy-to-mod 3D RTS engine like Glest is.

Check their site:
http://www.glest.org

Dear friends, now you can read a little bit about Mars Conflict story (which is background story for second RTS game we’re developing simultaneity )

Enjoy in new design snapshots for The First Exodus: The Beginning

Here are some new design previews for structures
Hope you’ll like it

This post is introduction about our game and it’s development. Please, don’t hestitate to post comments and to add suggestions.

Introduction: 

Just few days before New Year Eve, we (Nebojša Na? - designer and Goran Grubi? - coder and music producer from Tesseract Studio )  decided to start one big project with purpose to evaluate our skills and test our RIA Application framework (AS3) called Instant Flash Site.

In less than 10 days we created foundaments of game’s story, more than 20 high detailed 3D models, started client side game engine, 5 music themes. Here I would like to introduce you with some technical info about game:

Visualization:

Few days ago we decided to use PaperVision3D 2.0 Alpha for 3D engine insteed our own ifs3DLite. It’s big decidion since ifs3DLite has much of features that we needed and it was coded by me so there was no learning curve was simple, but performances and some stunning capabilities of PV3D 2.0 and Away3D forced me to start learning these Open Source 3d APIs.

Since it’s RTS game, camera has wide view field so performaces are big issue to care about. At this moment we are about to mix 3D rendering (ships, units etc.) and prerendred sprites (Buildings). I’m planing to hack PV3D 2.0 with new type of camera - with isometric projection.

 Interface:

Commanding interface going to be similar to most common RTSs with dropdown menu for additional commands.

Licence:

Game will be free to play online. Maybe we will make offline client using Adobe AIR or Janus. It’s not Open Source, but we will publish particular AS3 sources (some classes and modifications that we add on used Open Source solutions)

Gameplay:

Game is peaceful colonization simulation with economy, production, research and market simulation.  Unlike Lunar Commander and other old games from Moon Base line, this will be real RTS with human resources micro management, ground units, tactical-logistic space crafts, space transportation fleet and orbital facilities.

Single player mode:

For each side player cam play campain (for instance with NASA you are at beginning of story so you have to set foundamental infrastructure and to do some research before some resources production and real colonization begins.

Also, there will be free game mode without objectives to finish, just economy to build.

Multi-player mode:

Once we make sure that every aspect of game works ok, we’ll develop MMOG server and start multiplayer mode with several server speeds.

Music:

Here you can download JAXA main music theme (JAXA is Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency - http://www.jaxa.jp/index_e.html ) . Just remember that this is not Open Source project so all rights are reserved. You may use downloaded files (including music mp3) just in personal purposes.

JAXA Theme V 0.6
http://www.thefirstexodus.com/blog/press/JAXA.mp3

That’s all at this moment!