What are chance of getting Vendetta for PS3 ?

zero.

A Wii version would be awesome :)

zero minus one.

yea i heard developing for the PS3 is a real bitch.

it's also very expensive.

Not impossible, but improbable for the reasons stated above (requires a lot of money, time, and publisher interest and support. We've had little of the above).

as per a recent article:

Recent price cuts for the PlayStation 3 have finally turned on the juice in terms of sales, but what the troubled console really needs are more games. By slashing the price of the PS3 software development kit, Sony is clearly hoping to close the gap.

The AP reports that Sony has chopped the price for the PS3 SDK in half, to $10,250 in the U.S. from north of $20,000. By cutting PS3 development fees, more developers may be interested in writing games for the console, which is still looking for an exclusive, killer title (such as Halo 3 on the Xbox 360, or Wii Sports for the Wii).


that's just your starting fees. add actual hardware and dev time and you're in for big bucks.

Hmm, I always thought it was in the 6 digit range. Might be interesting to get a console SDK one day.

On another note, how would you update a game that exists only on a disk? Copy it to the hard drive and update there?

I want iPhone VO!

ill fly with the accelerometer and primary and secondary can be the right and left corners and up and down swipe can control thrust!

The real challenge is getting major publisher backing. A PS3 game pretty inherently means a retail title, at the moment, with all the fun (read: NOT FUN) that goes along with doing that. Plus it has to get past Sony's Q/A people who have final approval on.. everything (game to box to whatever). And then there's the fact that MMOs and consoles don't have a history of getting along real well, and that major publishers and consoles don't have a great love of space games (like my awesome meeting with Microsoft before the Xbox1 launch, where I was told that "space games don't sell on consoles"). Now the original Xbox.. that would have been a trivial port. PS3 w/crazy Cell crap and extensive threading.. not so much.

As more consoles get Xbox: Live Arcade equivalents, hopefully things will get easier. But, we know some WI game devs who went through the XBLA approval process and found it quite harrowing.

For the moment, we're just going to focus on trying to make the game better.

I want VO on the phantom!

We actually talked to them a few times, before they ceased to exist. We knew some pretty experienced industry people who went to work for them.

Instead of a console delivery, what are the chances you could have VO put in some of the Linux distros by default?

The last openSuse install I did had quite a few games available as part of the distro, but no MMPORGs. That may increase the exposure in the Linux arena, although there is exposure there already....

Vendetta on iPhone!

Vendetta on IPHONE

Vendetta ON IPHONE

VENDETTA ON IPHONE!

*crowd*
YAAA CRAZY'S RIGHT WE SHOULD LISTEN!

Vardonx: Vendetta is already part of Gentoo portage (but then, so are a lot of other commercial games including Eve and NWN), not sure about more mainstream distros though.

On the PS3 front, Vendetta would probably fit the PSN model well (which would avoid the whole retail complexities), plus Sony do seem to be currently interested in MMOs for the PS3. However, it would probably require magic (in the form of lots of cash from Sony) to happen.

On a semi-related point - Sony recently mentioned their new game MAG, which they were boasting could handle 256 simultaneous players in a single combat. What's the most number of players that have been online and fighting in Vendetta (in either tests, or for real, in a single sector)? Can VO come close to this? Exceed it?

We've simulated with more than that, in testing (a long time ago). It's not difficult, the issue starts to become one of bandwidth breakdown beyond a certain point. MAG has it a lot easier, as it's a terrain-based standard combat shooter, and terrain makes for very simple network culling (no need to send updates to people far behind some object, etc). Our game degrades update accuracy/frequency with distance (priority, basically), but since most of our combat is so open.. culling with terrain was not an option. This may change down the road with denser asteroid fields and such, but it's where things are for the moment.

We've had over 300 real people online in the game at once, but that's really not at all the same as having that many in a single sector, with major battle combat. We also don't have a fixed platform to depend on, so scaling battles up that high drops a lot of people on slower machines, not necessarily the best choice for us. We could make truly gigantic space battles, but hardly anyone would be able to participate in them.

If nobody was able to participate, wouldn't it be a small space battle?

Hrm.

1: How many LOD steps do you use?
2: How complex are the hitboxes?
3: Ever given any thought to lowering the detail minimum(perhaps as low as the hitbox, if it's not too complex), and increasing the range of detail?

Surely the option of hitbox-level detailing in models would make even our friends with nVidia 5200s run smooth as silk.

The number of LOD steps depends on the ship type. Most of the larger, complex ones have three or more. The "hitboxes", as you call them, are the minimum complexity that we can get away with for a given scale. For instance, our OBBs (we use OBBtree collision detection) for stations are fairly accurate, since the player needs to fly through holes and around things and so on. Capship hulls are moderately accurate, so again, the player can pass through areas that are supposedly to be graphically open. OBBs for fighter ships, on the other hand, are pretty simple.. as simple as possible while still retaining the combat-significant aspects of the ship in question (matching the ship's degree of exposure at a given angle, etc). The lowest graphical LOD setting is really not far off of the OBB hull, although we don't actually use the OBB hull itself, for aesthetic and other reasons. For capships and stations, the lowest graphical LOD is simpler than the OBB itself.

The "detail minimum" you're referring to is often not the issue in large, complex space battles. If the scene were just a lot of complex capships sitting there (or flying around) and doing little else, we could probably put more on screen. A lot of the graphical slowdown comes from the truly insane number of shots being continually exchanged between all the ships, and other effects (continual hits, explosions, etc). I've made some effort to reduce this.. the Border Skirmish Teradon, for instance, now uses weapons that fire less often but do more damage (and the shots themselves are faster to increase potential lethality with a lower number of shots). We're moving in a similar direction for other capships. It's possible for us to further profile the scene and optimize some of these areas, but we haven't had a lot of time to dedicate to this. So.. we're basically "making do with what we have" and trying to make the best large-battle situation we can with the present situation, as that requires the minimum expenditure of time.

The player can manually alter the "scene detail" settings, effectively lowering the maximum for a lot of content, as well as decreasing the effect complexity ("effect detail"), but most would find this situation kind of ugly. So, again.. trying to do what we can with what we have, for the moment.

Even with all of this, I think our Border Skirmish battles are pretty cool. We plan to have both larger and smaller ones potentially going at the same time (in different sectors), people being able to take missions to join whichever one they want, etc.

To answer Trinexx's question, we replace real people with NPCs (and visa versa, rescaling as people join the mission over time), to keep the overall scale of the battle at a given size. This way we can still deliver a very cool "large battle" experience to someone who chooses to play at low-player-density times, etc.

Anyway, like I said before, a lot of the problem has to do with bandwidth, rather than framerate. Degrading at a distance is fine, but you still have to send a lot of data, if there's a whole lot going on (consider every shot that gets added, player updates for flying around, impact explosions, ship health changes, etc). The player's client isn't simulating collisions with anyone other than themselves, so the whole OBB/physics thing isn't an issue.. they're simply receiving the positional/trajectory information on remote objects, from the server. But, that can scale to be a lot of data. Especially if you have, say, 300 ships flying around shooting at one another. Our data protocol is pretty efficient (8-14kbit per user, on average, in non-battle scenes), but the lack of "terrain" to effectively cull large blocks of network traffic puts us in a very different position from someone like MAG.