Elite on Kickstarter...

[Mark]

There are worse deals. There's a machine in Morrison's near me that exchanges coin for vouchers that you can redeem in store, that charges 7%, when a bank would exchange them for notes for free.

Why would anyone use one of them when the self-service tills will take whatever change you can throw at them for no charge? I wouldn't normally use them, but for disposing of silly amounts of small change they're pretty handy (if time consuming).

[adam]

i like flinging change into the self service tills, sainsburys is most satisfying, nice big hopper

[techno12]

Ditto - I'm a Tescos addict but love shoving all my shrapnel into the slot. Quite therapeutic...

Back on topic - I didn't fund (as I'm living off savings while writing 'apps' which may make bugger all!). I remember the excitement of seeing Zzap no. 1 with Elite on the front cover and I couldn't wait to get the game. I only made 'Dangerous'

Looks like a lot of the tech is there, as the vids are polished. So, its definitely doable - though not sure about the multiplayer aspects (takes time and money to nail those)

Also, expect slippage. I'm still waiting for my Pebble watch!

[jawafour]

I remember the excitement of seeing Zzap no. 1 with Elite on the front cover...

Oliver Frey covers... good times!

[Kenz]

Ka-DOOOOOSH!



De-logofied by little old moi.

[axel000]

Thats great Please post it to the frontier.co.uk Elite forums, the fans would love it

[Darkflame]

You know what would be awesome, if there was a rendering style that made the game look like that artwork.

[jawafour]

Nice one, kenz!

I must re-look at my Oliver Frey art collection book; it's terrific:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Fantasy-Art ... 843&sr=8-1

[IronGiant]

You know what would be awesome, if there was a rendering style that made the game look like that artwork.

Agreed!

[gravy]

We've look at that sort thing quite a bit.

The issue is lighting. Painted images are constructed to look great for the still frame and the lighting specifically tailored to that goal.

When you move about it gets very hard to work out generalised rules that keep your image looking great but still make sense. The painterly look for the rest of it isn't that much of a problem.

There's probably some solution for this but it's not easy or obvious.

[adam]

there are these toon shaders, comic book style would be fairly straightforward by the looks:



http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~462/projects/p4/

doing it without lighting or much simplified lighting might be easier - lights inside all the objects for instance,

other than that i don't know if you can texture a whole screen - the paper texture background if you like - and a global blur or similar over the whole lot - not the texture though

[adam]

texturing the whole screen might be putting a translucent bump mapped plane right in front of the camera

[gravy]

texturing the whole screen might be putting a translucent bump mapped plane right in front of the camera

Again you can create good still images but you get a temporal dissonance with a fixed texture sitting in screenspace if the camera is rotating.

[adam]

ok, i was thinking it might be easier if it was an on-rails type game

i had these thoughts earlier on about how south park was made in maya - layers of flat objects, once again easier with a static camera - could be faux 3d then, objects just getting bigger or smaller instead of moving - not really painterly though.

[Darkflame]

You could put the bump inside a sphere to fix rotation, but that wouldn't fix tracking.
Maybe you'd need some procedural "volume" formula for the bump?