[rant ]
really RobK... a leaf out of Valve's book?
the same people who overhyped Half-Life which although was a bloody good game, the ending was a total letdown infact the whole Xen epic was the epitaph of that title ... plus the hundreds and hundreds of bugs which even 7years on they've still not totally fixxed!
or perhaps you mean the same leaf that has Team Fortress2 on it, or Counter-Strike Zero Hour?
you know why they didn't say bugger all enough HL2 being in production? because it started out life AS Team Fortress2, they then saw Doom3's use of shaders and though "Bugger we've gotta catch up" ... they spent just over a year redeveloping the entire engine to use them an hiring new artists who understood Softimage XSI enough to be able to actually create the artwork to backup this new engine.
Most of what the engine has ended up with like the amazing physics engine are just licenses... i have a feeling once people get past the graphical look of the game they'll probably think exactly the same as they did with Unreal2.
[/rant ]
That aside... perhaps we've had a fraction of the time most people have spend on Researching the project and getting things going, but for just over 2 weeks to have 2 professional developers, several more thinking about the possibility, the possible backing of Mathengine as well as 2 DBP development teams with a few more possibilities and an entire staff of professionals who understand hardware & software requirements and have been working with the hardware & software proposed very closely ... then i'd say this project is hardly just being winged as we go.
yes it is mostly a concept now, but even an army of scientists require time to develop the nessary adjustments to even currently working hardware to make them viable together and then further develop the OS and Drivers for the needs available. You want visible results just wait rather than believeing that nothing will turn up.
The reason for this post is
a) the original concept is already here and as we're not giving any finalised information but what is the concepts and currently researched data ... then you can't take any of this as written in stone for atleast a month, at which time information will either be released officially else it'll just be kept to ourselves & the developers.
b) to get the backing of the community that it is being bred from, i mean how the hell do you expect us to convince a worldwide of people if you have a community saying "oh this is gonna fail, i think i'll just see how many ways i can tear thier idea apart."
c) give this community the chance to develop games with a set system as a base, although we hope that the games produced will be placed on this machine ... there is a chance it may not make it to market, or even worse hit the market and fail miserably.
either way the developers will have thier games professionaly published, as FMTau is a management publisher after all.
due to current deals the developers are actually the only people who just plainly cannot loose from this.
quite frankly as far as those who want to knock this machine then do so, thats upto you - personally i'd prefer it if you don't like this you just not post, if you don't like this being a sticky then Puffy did ask Rich and it hasn't been unstuck. Just because something is a sticky doesn't mean you have to post.
we're expanding the areas in which we're looking for developers now, obviously the original post is going to be cutdown in informaiton just really projecting the idea and language to be used as well as the projected system specs.
believe it or not developers DO need to know what system thier developing towards and the language they're to use if they want to know if they can... NDA is all well and good but people don't walk blindly into a dark room, they like atleast a small flashlight.
Rob, think about it hype is all good but we're NOT looking for our consumer market here... we're looking for DEVELOPERS, whats the point in having people developing for a machine which is already on the market? and who will buy one when it is?
none of this is ment as hype in any form what-so-ever, personally i don't care about hype right now - all i care about are people knowing as much information as they'll need to know to convince them to develop.
you know the Specificiations, you know the Media Type, you know the language, you will soon know exactly what the controller looks like plus the drivers will up within the next 2weeks once i finish them (and i can do this because DirectX is the Driver layer in WinNT5 Kernel)
Probably also show off my chopjob controller so you can see roughly what you'll be using.
You also know that it'll have DialUp 56k or Broadband or Ethernet connection capabilities for netplay.
You'll should already know what the TV picture format is for PAL & NTSC TVs
you know that you can use shaders so getting used to useing the standard ASM ones in DBP now would be a good idea, you also know that we're working on Karma Dynamic and Physics functions for you all to use so finding out more on Karma might be a good idea for some of you.
You also know that we're trying to get Softimage XSI as the base modeler so perhaps downloading the XSI-EXP version would get you guys ready for what it will be like, especially as right now were working on KAT exporting and implimentation tools for it.
perhaps rather than knocking this machine you could think of something we're missing and suggest it.
the way i see it developers have ALOT to be looking into, and learning about over the next month or so ... so that when the development machine is fully developed they'll be ready to start programming the second it is released than waiting and then having to learn everything from the start rather than just adapting to the exacting features.
although some of you seem to have very very weird thoughs about what developers need to do for this console and what they need to know, even dispite that i've still tried to answer all the quibbles everyone has had with the machine as much or as indepth as i am actually allowed to.
Within the Epic battle of the fates the Shadow and the Angel will meet. With it will harbinger the very fight of good vs evil!
