Penumbra (The Hatch) Demo Released!

[Haddd]

Greate, great job. The gameplay is...fantastic!!

How did you do the motion blur effect?

[Assembler]

lol, you're right. Playing an hour or so for trying to find ONE bug seems to be a bit... boring,right.

I don't only ask because of the blur. Also I sometimes feel, that i can see better after some time in the dark room. But that might be because of the glow stick

you should add more levels, the story is absolutely cool, i want to know how's going on.


Is that your voice in the Intro? I noticed it is a different one as in the older videos.

Do you use Shadow Mapping or Stencil Shadows, or did you invent the newest, worlds fastest system ?

[Yezide]

Haddd:

I use two types of motion blur.

- One "false" that is used when you encounter the enmey for example. This is done by letting the previous renderings show throw the current.

- The other is the one you can turn on in options. This is done with the technique shown in the Nvidia SDK demo and http://developer.nvidia.com/docs/IO/8230/GDC2003_OpenGLShaderTricks.pdf


Assembler:

The voice in the first demo was made witha voice synthesizer The intro voice in this demo is made by a guy that have done voices for some other games aswell (Tactical Operations I think).

I use stencil shadows but have made a special edge detection code so that it can support nonclosed meshes.

[Assembler]

Haddd:

The voice in the first demo was made witha voice synthesizer

lol, that's why it sounded so machine like^^

[BigB]

Its very very good, i'm quite surprised this didn't win.,
Any chance you can point us to the winners of this competition ? I'm curious to see the winners.

[aidave2]

After I saw the winner I realized why it didnt win. That winner had very colorful graphics and it looked geared towards a fantasy action type game. This is the age of WOW and LOTR computer games so thats the most popular these days, just like DOOM clones had their day.

However Penumbra is an excellent game I think it has commercial potential, if it is developed into a full fledged plot, long mission, complete story, etc.

I cant figure out how to kill the flying guy. I put acid on him but that didnt work. I threw those picks at him, and dynamite, but he kept flying around. Do you have to kill that guy? I just ran around him.

I tried putting acid on the lock but that didnt work either. Sorry I dont have tooo much patience to try everything! If you could PM me a hint or tips or something that would be appreciated.

[Yezide]

BigB:

Winners:
http://www.excitera.nu/sga/

Nominees:
http://www.excitera.nu/sga/?p=cms/showPage&pageID=368

aidave2:

The flying thing is almost unkillable. You need a good hit with several dynamites. It is better to run and hide. To open the locker u need to combine the two jars and then you will have an acid.

[Haddd]

Thanks for the info. I'm using now the DX technique that appears at the SDK, but i will give a chance to this implementation....

[Mike]

Wow this game is absolutely fantastic!!! I can't wait for the full version. I got a crash after exiting the computer room. Don't know if anybody had this?

My most memorable moment:
I was running away from the flying guy, I stood in front of the door so he couldn't get in. He kept yelling and banging on the door. I managed to pull a box and jam the door. But the dude kept banging until he broke the door and then I rushed to the switch and fryed the ugly mother-f*****!

[Yezide]

For those unable to play penumbra I just wanted to say that a patch has been released with support for GF3/4 and Radeon 8500 - 9200. The patch also contains bugfixes and support for more languages (spanish, german, italian and french to be exact).

Hope this helps someone

[CarlKenner]

Any chance you could lower the system requirements??

Surely its not that hard to get a game to run on a GeForce 2.

Good programmers make games that can scale down their effects to suit their hardware.

[The unProfessional]

Code: Select all

Any chance you could lower the system requirements??

Surely its not that hard to get a game to run on a GeForce 2.

Good programmers make games that can scale down their effects to suit their hardware.

Haddd's building a next-gen engine, designed specifically to take advantage of modern hardware. "Scaling" down to a geforce 2 would likely mean re-working major parts of the lighting model and probably dumping pixel shaders altogether. It'd be a complete waste of time (LOTS of time), especially since the majority of gamers are Geforce 3+, and wish to take advantage of modern rendering techniques.

There are still plenty of great games out there (older games) that run fine on a GF2. It really isn't fair to tell us that "Good" programmers always support all hardware, because that isn't true. Go pull any new game off the shelf and try to run it on a Geforce2 (Oblivion, Prey, etc). It isn't practical to support every piece of hardware out there that somebody might have, while taking full advantage of new hardware... if large studios can't make the time to do it, how do you expect Indie teams to?

You can pick up some pretty awesome video cards for ~$100-$150. You can buy shader model 3.0 cards for < $200 (7600GT for example).

[SnprBoB86]

Very cool stuff! I enjoyed it a lot.

A sugestion, if I may: lose those load times! Maybe load connected areas into memory in the background or just optimize the hell out of the loading behavior.

[CarlKenner]

Yep, no pixel shaders on a GeForce 2.

But what's wrong with just rendering the geometry like normal? I'd have thought it was a no-brainer just to disable all the shaders if the card doesn't support them.

Doom 3 plays fine on my system.

Code: Select all

Any chance you could lower the system requirements??

Surely its not that hard to get a game to run on a GeForce 2.

Good programmers make games that can scale down their effects to suit their hardware.

Haddd's building a next-gen engine, designed specifically to take advantage of modern hardware. "Scaling" down to a geforce 2 would likely mean re-working major parts of the lighting model and probably dumping pixel shaders altogether. It'd be a complete waste of time (LOTS of time), especially since the majority of gamers are Geforce 3+, and wish to take advantage of modern rendering techniques.

There are still plenty of great games out there (older games) that run fine on a GF2. It really isn't fair to tell us that "Good" programmers always support all hardware, because that isn't true. Go pull any new game off the shelf and try to run it on a Geforce2 (Oblivion, Prey, etc). It isn't practical to support every piece of hardware out there that somebody might have, while taking full advantage of new hardware... if large studios can't make the time to do it, how do you expect Indie teams to?

You can pick up some pretty awesome video cards for ~$100-$150. You can buy shader model 3.0 cards for < $200 (7600GT for example).

[MiggyE]

Penumbra on Gamespot. Pretty cool stuff!

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/penumbra/index.html