I'm looking for help.

I would like to test my game with older hardware to settle down the minimum hardware requirements. Therefore I'm looking for someone with a NVidia 6600gt/6800gt or ATI 9800 PRO or something similar in this hardware generation.

I would be happy if someone with one of these hardware setups could check if my game starts up and runs (if necessary on low settings).

The kings of hand-painted anything, warcraft and torchlight.
You might want to touch up on your textures though, they seem very 2D designed and cartoonish.. Unless that's what you're going for.

I think this style is hitting the nail. You have an obviously hand painted, not really exaggerated or overly simplified style. Don't see 3d model, look at the posted image as hand painted concept.

Though a more comic/manga style art would suit your background too.

Here's another test, with some tweakage, and using DustyDrakes idea of making the foreground pop a bit by upping a lighting level..

This looks really promising. Maybe you should add some kind of shadow from the sun (=your smiley), i.e. halfing value when not direct lighted from sun or one of your other light sources.

I don't want to justify the ban of asserts (I use it myself extensivly in my game), but there're some disadvantages, most importantly the problem, that the behaviour in debug-mode (developer mode) is different from the one in release-mode (user mode). Best example, as already stated, is

Code:

assert(doSomethingImportant());

.

This could result in endless discussion:
artist: 'hey, the editor crashed from time to time (no assert), don't know why'

developer: 'nah, I tested it (in debug mode) all the time (using only a single test path for 25 sec), try to figure out when it happens. '

artist: 'ok, it crashed right after I got a cup of coffee, seems to be the coffee-machine then'

developer: 'ehmm..no... I will give you a debug build'

artist: 'sry, I can't work with it, it is soooo slow ...'

(half day later, 5 artist are standing around one artist to provoke the bug by drinking lot of coffee): 

artist: 'huh... everything works fine now.. need to hold my deadline, switching back to release build'

(3 mins later)
artist: 'it crashed again...'

The reason: some former rookie coder inserted an important function call inside an assert. In release mode this call was missed and resulting in a crash in an other part of the code.

Yes, pro coders knows what to do (most of the time  ), but you can't expect to have veterans on a single application all the time.

[Historical Pirate Simulator + Racing Game]

Historical Pirate Simulator + Racing Game

You need to race to reach atlantis first to get your dirty hands on all its treasures. To do so you need to race against other pirate ships on the seven seas (=course), pimping your ship in the habours.

Most of what the other already said, plus:
1. You are independent of other software (not waiting for a year to get this bug fixed).
2. Most existing engines are optimized for certain genres (most FPS), trying to make something new with an existing engine can damage your sanity (try to make minecraft in UDK).
3. Every engine has its own restrictions which will force your game design in certain directions.

It looks really lovely, amazing work !

Your presentation, the game and concept art looks really good  . Though in the 90s MMORPGs doesn't really exists and the features you have listed (bounty board, guild system, bank, job board) are really hard to get right. Your first steps are really great, but you aim too high, I would wish you would take a step back and develope one of these nice 90s singleplayer RPGs.

Nevertheless, I wish you good luck 

The simple way is to record everything which affects the game. When you encapsulate this in some interfaces, you can record your game pretty easily. You should write an interface for the clock, mouse/keyboard input and random number generator(not only seed).

Pseudocode:

Code:

Clock
{
  void update();
  long getTime();
}

ClockRecorder : Clock
{
   long currentTime;
   stream timeStream;

   // update is called at the beginning of a new frame
   void update() {
     currentTime = OS.SystemTime();
     timeStream.write(currentTime);
   }
   long getTime() { return currentTime;}
}

ClockReader : Clock
{
   long currentTime;
   stream timeStream;

   // update is called at the beginning of a new frame
   void update() {
     currentTime = timeStream.read();
   }
   long getTime() { return currentTime;}
}

You need to ensure, that the configuration is the same, so you need to export/import the configuration first and ensure that you don't change the code behaviour by i.e. OS features. When you use multithreading and you create threads depending on the number of CPU cores, you will run into trouble pretty fast. In this case a solution would be to either restrict the threads when recording or to work with the same number of threads on the target PC even if it does not support the same number of cores.

I've updated the original post with a link to the first tutorial video of the upcoming alpha version: tutorial video

I have a really big image (> 4096x4096) that i map to a skydome. My implementation works but on some plateforms (mobile) the image cannot be loaded because its too big. Altought i can load it in separated sub textures and openGL can render those smalled textures.
Lets say i separated my big image in 4 sub images (picture 2 rows & 2 cols on the big image source)...Right now i have 1 vertices array (triangle strip), 1 normal array and 1 texture coord array. I guess that I have to generate 1 vertices/normals/texCoord array per sub texture
My problem is that i am not sure how to apply the sub images to my dome vertices...

Anyone did that before?

I think that this is the wrong way to solve your problem. When the hardware is not able to render a 4096x4096 texture, it will have a hard time to render 4x 2048x2048 [~80-90 mb video memory RGBA , including mipmaps, uncompressed).

On the other hand you will see most of the time only the mipmapped version of your texture(assumption: your skydome is roughly a half-sphere and you have a fov of 90, then you see roughly a texture section of 2048x2048, therefore you need at least a screen resolution of 2048x2048 to actually benefit from such a hi texture resolution, and this is quite unlikely on a mobile).

Best to provide several downscaled (4096 , 2048 , 1024) version of your sky texture and choose suitable one depending on hardware features.

wow, looks really cool. 

[SHMUP + Lemmings]

SHMUP + Lemmings

You need to shoot all lemmings before they reach the level end and die...

The only(big) issue is 3D art assets.

Believe me, this will really kill motivation ! I'm developing my engine and several game attempts for more than 12 years now, and art was always the show stopper. Would I not be caught in the investment trap, I would start again with 2d pixelart. You can't really understand how jealous I'm about all this pretty cool pixelart projects flying around here.

3 solutions

1. More cash.
2. Learn to do it yourself.
3. Befriend a 3d modeller.

Eventually 2. and 3. worked halfway for me. I've teamed up with an old school friend and I'm doing lot of the gui/icons/models/textures myself. Next-gen is out of question, I needed to turn down many technical art features (normal mapping etc.) to lessen the art workload and choosed stylized art and a few tricks (gradient maps) to stem the heavy burden.

So if i'd use matrices, would you guys then look at my idea (3d shapes in a voxel editor)?
Or should i start a new thread for that and leave this thread for arguing matrix vs quat ?

Sorry, it was not my intention to hijack your thread.

i just realized i way i could fix the antialiasing..  i guess
if i would use 3d shapes (cube, cone, piramids (4/3 sides) prisms ) to construct a voxel object with, i could rotate the important points of the shapes (the endpoints) and after the rotation i'd rebuild the shapes, fill the correct voxels and enjoy.

so basically the aliasing is fixed as it is always fixed, by using vector instead of pixel

this way of thinking/and building is fruitfull you guys would think ?

You said that for environment you want to use only 90 degree rotations, which would get rid of aliasing. For characters and object you could get rid of the aliasing when you handle them as single 3d objects and rotate them accordingly (much like minecraft characters). It depends on the look you want to archieve, you could even use the marching cube algorithm or something similar to create a more polygonal model from it (kind of anti-aliasing).