Eh, maybe, just don’t see why anyone would bother spending time downloading something so resource-intensive for the same payoff as watching a youtube vid.
I mean really, what’s the real difference between watching a video of an in-engine cutscene and watching an in-engine cutscene in-engine?
I really don’t get the point of the free version even existing in the first place at the moment.
Actually, the difference is HUGE like a Universe - since the interactive real-time Engine-Demo shows an actual Engine’s capabilities. Today, any little studio may bring tonnes of incredibly beautiful details and FX in the prerendered demo(made with the help of the real-time engines, like UE or CE), while the actual engine and game will never allow such a level of details and FX.
The real-time rendering Engine-Demo gives the people idea - how really good and beautiful the Game will be. And, what is the most importantly - it gives people real evidence that company who’s asking for a pledges, really has has actually working engine that can do all these things that are promised on paper.
Allow panning the cammera a little and bang … its a difference to a video, wich could be fake.
No real difference though.
Also. Its 55 days to GDC … I don’t know if we are in Feature kreep territory jet.
An on rails demo would probably be cracked to enable free camera movement anyway.
I agree, a free camera rotation would enhance the immersion and make it worth to download instead of just watching on Youtube.
It’s certainly a better idea than benchmark, which could even backfire a little bit. Most people don’t care about framerate as long as they don’t know the actual number… then they compare it and it’s like penis sizes 
I say let someone crack it. The cracked version would essentially amount to free publicity. I highly doubt very many people who would chip into the demo tier of the Kickstarter would avoid doing so if a cracked version of the free demo began to circulate through unofficial channels. The demo isn’t the point of the kickstarter, after all.
I agree. My point was there’s no need to beg for free camera movement because we’ll probably get it anyway.
I guess it’s going to be on rails because of bugs that I-Novae don’t want to show. People who download the crack and subsequently see terrain bugs etc. would probably be enthusiasts anyway and appreciate that bugs are just bugs and not evidence of fundamental issues.
This summarizes why we’re releasing the demo pretty much exactly - it will show people that we can do what we say we can do. It will not allow free movement of the camera and it has nothing to do with hiding artifacts. As I mention in my blog post this is because we just want it to be a teaser, people who pledge our Kickstarter at the appropriate pledge tier will get an interactive version as soon as we can get it to them. If somebody can crack the teaser demo more power to them, we aren’t going to be doing anything to prevent cracking.
It’s not so much that this assumption is false that’s a problem, it’s that people are going to be assuming it anyway. Oh well.
Also, why’s everyone always got to rag on Outerra? I know it doesn’t have terrain shadow or anything close to accurate looking terrain weathering. Sure that they totally cheated for hightmaps by stealing them off Google-earth. I get that the pop-in on smaller details is way too close and utterly horrible, and the forced online requirement and download/render-times if you move about too fast are nasty; but hey, even with just the free version, it’s a whole 1-1 scale planet to explore. (I bought the full version because flightsims are awesome).
Five years of waiting just to watch the game die.
I don’t mean to be an ass but i’m a little disappointed if im honest.
I have know about this game ever since I was a child (as if im still not one today) and I have been dreaming ever since of all the possibilities this game would bring. Creating colonies and wars, cities and fleets the sheer scale of both space and creativity made me keep checking up.
I understand, its not like you have a infini money supply, however how will this game differ from the other 4-5 coming out.
I have been constantly checking up as stated before, yet my friend told me not to bother, he said it would wash away. I never stopped checking and hoping that this yer, this year we might get more than a annual report. Well the year came and it brought with it the news of a clone.
Don’t get be wrong, for ~three guys you have amazing levels of skill and determination to make a engine so powerful, however something that was once unique no longer stands so isolated and if the game of which I dreamt were to be released, I fear it would either be too late, or by someone else.
I wish you all the best, even though you < / 3
Fly safe.
I feel insulted.
No idea what you are talking about … can’t see how you can judge that without any of those 4-5 as comparison … and you don’t even know what is planned for battlescape exactly.
Come back in 5 weeks and we can discuss this properly,
Why?
The only thing that could possibly be construed as insulting is questioning how Battlescape will compare to the others.
Otherwise, it’s just a genuine expression of disappointment. How can you not be disappointed that the game this community was built on seems no closer than it was 5 years ago?
Equally, how can we not wonder how BS will compare to Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous?
All three will have pros and cons. We will have to wait and see which delivers better gameplay. I sincerely hope (and expect @bee does too) that Battlescape will be insanely successful and that in 3+ years we’ll be backing Infinity the MMO.
Where have you been for the last 10 years? Expressing a dissenting, legitimately subjective, personal opinion is now aggressive and insulting behaviour. You need to get with the times, man!
I was slightly being sarcastic, but I’m getting sick of these “in my personal bitchy opinion (don’t feel offended!)” essays.
Bitchy? Essay? Yes there have been such posts in the past, but bee’s isn’t one.
Okay. Okay. -__-
Thanks for the update! I’ll be there day one with a pledge.
On the topic of “proving it works”…
The non-interactive demo is a brilliant idea - even if people can’t be bothered to download a potentially large client when they can just jump on youtube to see the same thing, youtube will in this manner be able to show what it looks like on plausibly hundreds of different hardware configurations. May I suggest adding a splash-screen at the start or end stating that it’s “not fully optimized and if you’re watching this on youtube some sort of capture software may have been further reducing performance - if this is the level of quality you want, you can probably get it for half the price this computer costs now by release”?
Beyond that, I was thinking; if you called on all friends and relatives of the current team, how many ships could you have actually being controlled in real-time by actual humans on the Kickstarter video? I’m not asking you to answer that here, just give it some thought and decide whether the hassle might be worth it. I’m assuming you’ll have some sort of netcode, probably buggy as all hell (otherwise, why wouldn’t we be playing it already? :P) but dedicate a night to it and I’m sure you could manage at least a couple minutes without a crash.
We don’t currently have any net code in place. The Kickstarter video will contain a gameplay teaser that will be in-engine and real-time but scripted. Shipping the KS campaign + video is currently consuming all of our time.