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[Viken]

Hah.  With the game developement budgets today, you get really great graphics, and extraordinarily shallow gameplay for millions of dollars.  I'd rather flip that around.  The graphics can be second rate, or even old school pixel, so long as the gameplay is complex, indepth, and utterly awesome. 

[Oliolli]

The graphics can be second rate, or even old school pixel, so long as the gameplay is complex, indepth, and utterly awesome. 

Remember where we are? I'm guessing most people here are willing to take ASCII as long as the gameplay is good

[pilgrimboy]

I think Minecraft has shown the world that graphics are the most important thing to games. 

[Viken]

Hah. I cannot even play minecraft with a decent texture pack. Don't even go there.

[Djohaal]

Minecraft's graphics are simple. That doesn't mean however that stock mojang textures aren't ugly as hell. 

[Darkmere]

Minecraft's graphics are simple. That doesn't mean however that stock mojang textures aren't ugly as hell. 

So much this. "Simple" shouldn't be synonymous with "abominably ugly."

[kerlc]

But... i actually like the default minecraft textures..

[Sirus]

But... i actually like the default minecraft textures..

This...

[Gaslamp-Daniel]

Another vote for default Minecraft textures!

Our lighting is still very much in-progress.  We will have all sorts of those newfangled whiz-bangs that they have in Diablo 3 and whatnot.  Thankfully adding some of these rendering processes is actually quite simple, as they're solved and documented problems, or we wouldn't put too much effort into it.

Just for the sake of context, over the last week I can think of probably 5 or 6 different game design "conversations" that we had which were extremely productive.  Other than the Water Debate (which is a gameplay discussion), I don't think we've really discussed rendering since December.  Our priorities are definitely gameplay first.

For the record, at this point we're leaning toward not having physics-controlled dynamic water sources, largely for technical reasons.  I'm really sad about this decision, but I agree with it.  I love messing around with physics systems, but it's a big enough headache that we had to ask ourselves what the game was about, and it's not about fluids, it's about stories and characters.  Those two points would suffer if we started allocating a large amount of network bandwidth to fluid simulation (not to mention the programming time given that we're still running this project on a surprisingly small team).

In a perfect world, if everyone had awesome cable connections (and if we had a bit more dev budget), I think we'd do fluids, but we're not 2d, and in 3d this is a very hard problem.

[PTTG??]

How about steam pipe pressure systems? It's thematic, for one thing, and if the steam is confined to pipes, then it flows in predictable ways- ideally, it simplifies to a set of points and connections, instead of a huge matrix of cellular automata cells. I'm far from concerned about it, but having steam pipes all over my colony and potentially looping them in absurd networks for the purpose of creating a steam-powered difference engine appeals to me. It has much of the fun of water flows without many of the technical challenges.

[Gaslamp-Daniel]

I think I mentioned earlier in the thread that I've been incredibly skeptical that putting steam pipes in the settlements would end up looking and feeling good.  My worry was that we'd end up with "Pipe Dreams" just overlaid over the game.  That said, I do love the idea, and we've been discussing it since the beginning.

Currently, it's likely that there will be a pipe system for distributing certain commodities, and we're likely to use an agent-based system, similar to the one that SimCity uses for garbage travelling along their roads.  Since the system is entirely secondary to just having units carry commodities, we haven't had time to test it yet so who knows, but I think our current vision of the system is a great one.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

Our lighting is still very much in-progress.  We will have all sorts of those newfangled whiz-bangs that they have in Diablo 3 and whatnot.  Thankfully adding some of these rendering processes is actually quite simple, as they're solved and documented problems, or we wouldn't put too much effort into it.

well i for one would like a game i could run on a laptop integrated gfx card, so i'm hoping all of that would be optional

[Gaslamp-Daniel]

If it has vertex shaders, you *should* be okay.

[PTTG??]

Currently, it's likely that there will be a pipe system for distributing certain commodities, and we're likely to use an agent-based system, similar to the one that SimCity uses for garbage traveling along their roads.  Since the system is entirely secondary to just having units carry commodities, we haven't had time to test it yet so who knows, but I think our current vision of the system is a great one.

Works for me!

[Viken]

You really don't need a full fluid dynamics system for water simulation and the like, so long as you know what you want to do in specific terrain areas, ala waterfalls and buildable dams.  Instead, you can just have terrain 'hooks' in the engine that once a certain criteria is met, the existing waterflow and system changes to reflect it, like if a water source dries up and the waterfall stops pouring water or a dam is built and the water rises.  From there is more of a rendering issue than a full simulation done behind the scenes.