Llamasoft does TxK for Sony Vita

[SiN]

"a new step into a new thing totally differnt from anything we done before"

Interesting! Has Neon been retired, then? What direction is this "new thing" taking?

[gilesgoat]

"a new step into a new thing totally differnt from anything we done before"

Interesting! Has Neon been retired, then? What direction is this "new thing" taking?

There could be a bit of a long story here to tell, however let's say so in bullet points :

- after N games we saw how much what we use of Neon FOR A GAME and how much of that is instead lovely for a SYNTH

- here you could already have some sort of "split", one thing would be modify/continue the Neon engine in a "games direction"
and another into "a synth direction" kind of issues/problems/results would be different, one of the two ( the synth ) is that
mobile and such devices still would have a too poor CPU/GPU for the kind of stuff we have in mind

- Neon engine redesigned "in a different way" keeping some 'core stuff' that can be used inside game code withouth
the need of a complex editor (*)

- slimmer/faster/better/simpler ( even if of course not totally 'the same' thing a full synth would be )

- time/resources constraints/machines constraints too

Then TxK itself .. as "it usually happens", you start with some ideas then at some point "the game begins to define itself".

It's a very very delicate / critical process once "that thing" begins to emerge and you begin to think "yeah this is it" then
"you have to be cereful not to spoil it", not too litlle of that, not too much of it, a bit of this and a bit of that but don't
overdo it and don't underdo it.

An example after those last N games I got literally fed up of certain functions/stuff for certain on-screen things I
had a good thinking and I re-done completely some stuff thinking "ok NOW should be much better/cleaner/simpler" than before.

But then TxK was quite into "that look" and it's like "Well .. I can't mix this with that it would not look/feel right" and then
you see "the previous things" and you look at them and you think "yeah .. that fits really well into this context" ..

And it's like "but we never done it in the other games before" .. *sigh* .. put all that code "at rest", do all a NEW code
for a completely different thing/problems/stuff .. another week or so of swearworks until I got it right.

Let's say also in this type of game we really have "more much about vectors and geometry than bitmaps and textures"
which is interesting because it's opens ( or better to say continues ) some directions we were experimenting about
in various different times long ago.

So the interesting thing is really "all about the future" because depending on the time and resources we'll have available
after this "new start" how/what kind of "other directions" the Neon engine will take will depend on it, ideas and things to
do and stuff literally we have "fucktonnes" BUT also, as we are in a way "already seeing it NOW" making something
"oh yeah THIS IS IT" TAKES LOT LONGER THAN SOME MONTHS.

And that's again/always the core of it, we are seeing it now, we always knew it, and there's NO fraking way around it.

TxK already is "tight" on time, the allocated time we have for it is "good but still tough work", for anything else I'd say
"so much trippy and such and Neony and all" at the very least we are going to need the same amount of time/resources
of TxK if not even quite a bit more the TIME of that.

And yet I could "feel" that "even today, quite some people would probably 'not get it' that much' " you may be surprised
( or maybe not ) the amount of people when they ask you about Neon and you say them ".. have you seen that visualizer
on the Xbox 360 when you play music .. " .. and they answer "NO, NOT really, I NEVER seen it" ..

Not to mention that "do you know is INTERACTIVE ?" .. almost nobody knows ( and / or seems to care much about .. ).

So Neon is still "a delicate beast" we can work on it "in various doses" ..

So part of the "New direction" about Neon is also "something that allow us to work faster with it rather than something
that is more 'for the general user' " the other part is also "making it more fit for the specific purpose of the moment"
rather being 'even far more general purpose'.

For now at least, of course all the new ideas/solution/etc. they all become part of a "big baggage" of stuff we made and
we can use again in other things.

[gilesgoat]

Also "on the top" of all this one SHOULD NOT UNDERESTIMATE the amount of time spent and the amount of hair I ripped off my head trying to understand/reading TONS of documentation to figure out "how the heck all this thing works and what do I have to do for ?" ...

[PVB]

I'm sure most are following Yak on Twitter and have seen all the TxK pics, but here's a vid:

http://minotaurproject.co.uk/YakImages/moo.mp4

[adam]

very choppy though here, any chance you chaps could put it on youtube or vimeo? looks lovely

[Yak]

save it and play it locally? smooth as a baby's arse here, proper 60fpsness

[The ghost of raids past]

On a purely personnel level I find the background chevrons to be distracting. I realise its your game and I am probably not representative but I would like to be able to turn them off. I find it hard to concentrate on the foreground when the background is moving.

[adam]

save it and play it locally? smooth as a baby's arse here, proper 60fpsness

took a lot longer than 9 seconds to play the first time, didn't even reach the end looks great

[PVB]

On a purely personnel level I find the background chevrons to be distracting. I realise its your game and I am probably not representative but I would like to be able to turn them off. I find it hard to concentrate on the foreground when the background is moving.

As Yak's already said:

I doubt such a thing will be necessary. The game is quite delicate and the backgrounds not at all intrusive. No great gobs of intense feedback in this one.

If you find that unplayable, you'd not do very well on T2K or T3K.

[Sir_LANs-a-lot]

Perhaps maybe slowly pulse the chevrons in and out (maybe in time to the music or something?) so they're not on all the time per se?, or stick a fader/slider in the options so you can set it from 0.0f to 1.0f?

Just a thought.

*shrug*

Nice to see it coming along.

[PVB]

Then you'd need trophies/high score tables for each setting.


Anyway, with the llatest firmware update to the Vita (out today), you can now do this:

[Sir_LANs-a-lot]

You could just have trophies/hi-scores for unmodified "factory settings"... - Not unlike Twin Galaxies?

[gilesgoat]

You could just have trophies/hi-scores for unmodified "factory settings"... - Not unlike Twin Galaxies?

Don't even dare to talk me about that NOW !

I am already getting NUTS with score tables and "savedata"

[Yak]

You can see from PVB's picture there that the contrast between game elements and background is really pretty high. I can't say that I've ever felt the background was getting in the way during play. Sometimes explosions are going on, true, but that's part of the game .

[Dave]

It's so damn smooth looking!