[MikeRozak]

CircumReality is a multiplayer game that I’ve been writing. It’s a cross between interactive fiction (lots of narration and talking), an adventure game (inspiration from Myst), a CRPG (NPCs from Oblivion/Fallout), and an MMORPG (multiplayer). Gameplay is NOT about killing monsters (though they exist), but about “social puzzles”. You advance in the game befriending non-player characters (NPCs). Being unique individuals, every NPC is befriended differently (puzzles).

CircumReality isn’t a pure adventure game, but I thought some people here might still be interested.

I would appreciate feedback. After working on the game so long, I have become myopic to its many faults. By the way, “It sucks...” feedback is fine (and expected :-) ), but please make the feedback actionable: “It sucks because of A, B, and C.” Please post feedback on this forum or E-mail me.

You can download the software from http://www.CircumReality.com. The web site contains more images and some YouTube videos.




Video, part A - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=048xG-jCrps
Video, part B - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjEKKrke21w


PS - You can use CircumReality to create your own worlds. More information on creating your own world is available from my web site.

[therabidfrog]

I'll check it out tonight when I have some more free time.

[MikeRozak]

Originally Posted by therabidfrog

I'll check it out tonight when I have some more free time.

Please do. And please Email/post feedback to me. I've been working on this so long that it's hard for me to see the forest from the trees. You'll probably play it for 5 minutes and come up with a list of problems that I've never noticed, or which I've gotten so used to they don't bother me.

[Xerilon]

Hi Mike!

I have seen both of the youtube videos and I must say your idea is really good and original, and have lots of potential for online adventuregaming
Also the graphics looks consistent and very beautiful!

Here is my crits:

-On the videos it looked a little slow on the framerate
and some hardware accelleration should smoothen out some pixles

-The camera angle may be a little too wide (nausea is possible)

-Skip the text to speech all together and focus on something else (many adventuregames works just fine with text only, even mmorpgs)

-Get more people on your team This production is big

Very good work, the world of adventuregames might need something like this!

[MikeRozak]

Originally Posted by Xerilon

-On the videos it looked a little slow on the framerate
and some hardware accelleration should smoothen out some pixles

I'm afraid I'll never make it in the movie industry, although I'll remember your feedback for my next go at making a video for the game (in a few months).

Originally Posted by Xerilon

-The camera angle may be a little too wide (nausea is possible)

Is that in-game? Did you find the "zoom in/out" menu item when you click on the 360 image, and/or using the mouse-wheel? Both of them affect the field-of-view. (If you didn't discover these features then I may need to tweak the UI.)

Also, if your character is a rat or a roo, with eyes on the sides of their heads, I automagically use a fish-eye lense and wide FOV.

Originally Posted by Xerilon

-Skip the text to speech all together and focus on something else (many adventuregames works just fine with text only, even mmorpgs)
!

Did you find the feature to turn off text-to-speech? It's supposed to be easy to find; tell me if it wasn't. Turning off TTS fills the right third of the screen with a scrolling text, just like IF/MUDs.

Originally Posted by Xerilon

-Get more people on your team This production is big

Very good work, the world of adventuregames might need something like this!

Thanks.

I have a bit of a "blog" on http://www.mXac.com.au/drt. It's not interactive though. I may follow up on your suggestion with official blog software.

My game comes with an engine so people can create their own worlds. I hope to create a "team" though that.

But, I won't get people wanting to create their own CircumReality games until my own content is fun enough... and I don't think it's fun for enough people yet. Too many try it for a few minutes and then quit, which is one of the reasons I'm seeking feedback, so I can figure out why.

[Xerilon]

Hmm.. I decided to try downloading.. (earlier I only watched the videos)

Well, as I said before, the concept is really good and complex, but it is very slow, even on my computer and that made me loose patience.
Making the game faster and smoother ex. when panning with the mouse and redrawing the 360s would have a huge impact positively

I take back what I said about the camera, it worked fine, it was the videos that made it look suspicious

[MikeRozak]

Originally Posted by Xerilon

Well, as I said before, the concept is really good and complex, but it is very slow, even on my computer and that made me loose patience.
Making the game faster and smoother ex. when panning with the mouse and redrawing the 360s would have a huge impact positively

I take back what I said about the camera, it worked fine, it was the videos that made it look suspicious

Slow - I've been struggling with that for awhile. It's slow because it's rendering the images (and generating the textures) on your computer. Doing this allows for a much smaller download. If I didn't have any TTS voices at all, the download would be around 15 megabytes.

Myst IV, which uses 360 images, is several CD-ROMs because all the images are included. I could have an image server, and download images as necessary, but then (a) broadband would be required, and (b) you'd end up downloading 4-8 gigabytes over the course of a game... which is a lot. And even with broadband, a large image still takes many seconds to download.

I'm still working on a good solution.

Camera in videos - I had problems when recording the videos. The video capture software was only capturing 10-ish frames per second.

[Xerilon]

How about going full real time? Like GK3?

It doesn't actually show in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npbqX...eature=related but the camera can stay behind the character and you can switch to first person view...

I guess people today are more interested in a big download for the setup file than a heavy calculation for each render

[MikeRozak]

Originally Posted by Xerilon

How about going full real time? Like GK3?

It doesn't actually show in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npbqX...eature=related but the camera can stay behind the character and you can switch to first person view...

I guess people today are more interested in a big download for the setup file than a heavy calculation for each render

I've been very tempted to use real-time 3D. There are two main problems with real-time, like in the gabriel knight video:

1) As soon as players can wander around the world in full 3D, they expect all sorts of animation... the easiest being waving grass and trees... and the hardest being characters. Animation gets very expensive very quickly, which is why most 3D games limit animation as much as possible (to 5 different attack animations, an idle animation, etc.), despite having $10M+ budgets. One of the goals of CircumReality has been that a single author (aka: skilled player) can create their own world. As soon as I add animation, this becomes impossible.

2) Also related to "a single author creating a world": 3D accelerator cards are fast because they use all sorts of little tricks. For these tricks to work, the person creating the 3D models and textures, and writing the content, must know about the tricks... which requires more skill on the author's part... which hurts the single-author goal (I can only expect so much from authors). Example trick: In cities designed for 3D accelerators, the buildings are placed so that players can never see very far in the city, since the further they see, the more buildings that have to be drawn, the fewer frames-per-second that get drawn. PLUS, all the textures for the city have to fit into 64 meg, or 128 meg, etc. The way I'm doing rendering, a poorly optimized city will still draw, but only marginally slower.


However, I was just experimenting today. A high-quality 360-degree image is 8000 x 4000 pixels, or 4 megabytes jpeg. 4000x2000 = 1.2 meg. 2000x1000 = 350k. 1000x500 = 100k.

Average internet speeds in 1st world countries are around 6 megabits now, or 750 kbytes/sec. So, downloading a 2000x1000 or 4000x2000 image isn't that unreasonable... so long as the player isn't on metered bandwidth.

... I'm thinking.