Yet Another Space Shooter - Techdemo 3

[Ronin]

Hi everybody,

YASS is taking the next step. We just released the Techdemo 3 on our website: http://www.yass-engine.de


Here a short overview taken from our website:

Finally we have combined the space game elements from Techdemo I with the first person shooter elements from Techdemo II.

You start on the surface of earth, where you can participate in a hoovercraft race, play around with some basic ai features (basically the same as in Techdemo II) and get in a spacecraft to jump into earth orbit. In the earth orbit you can find a space station where a light carrier is docked to, just maneuver your spacecraft into the airlock of the carrier and send a radio message to activate it. Inside the carrier you can get out, walk around and play with some placed objects.

You can jump to all 8 planets of our solar system, the earth's moon and sirius, a binary solar system, which is 8.6 lightyears away from the sun. When you are in mars's orbit you can also jump down to its surface where you can find a crashed carrier and some emergency tents. The surface of mars is additionally connected with earth's surface through a teleporter, which you can use by foot.

In multiplayer you can currently only play on the earth surface, it is not possible to leave it. When you get shot by other players you will respawn immediately at the position you died.

Some blue boxes at certain places will provide you with worth knowing informations about gameplay elements in game, just step up to it and press SPACE.

It is the first time that we release an editor as well. Every content in the game is placed with it and hence you can modify and expand the three existing levels (earth, mars and space) and even create new ones from scratch.


We hope you'll enjoy playing and we're anxious to read your opinions and comments.

The YASS Development Team

[Vsk]

Realy good.
But a recomendation, put you signature in english. Even with some people over here understand German, I don't think most of them do it or should do it.
Downloading!.

[BlindSide]

Wow, that is so awesome, *Downloads*.

Wait this project is actually opensource?

Why do you still use MSVC .NET 2003?

EDIT: Just ran it, crashes on my PC in single player mode

Window XP Professional 32-bit
AMD Turon
ATI 200M

EDIT2: Just realised I dont have the DX dll, so I'm gonna download that and try to run it. (I recommend using a slightly older DX SDK version so end-users dont have to do this.)

EDIT3: Ok still crashes, maybe I need the PhysX drivers. Will get those and test it after.

[JP]

Well it sounds like a very impressive tech demo, in fact more than a tech demo!

But unfortunately i don't have the physx drivers on my work PC and can't install them without full admin rights so can't give it a whirl!

But anyway, the project sounds really cool and if you've got so much working well now then the final game should be really impressive!

[MasterGod]

I got it working just right but I don't understand how the hell can I enter a race or whatever..
And I get a very jumpy FPS with the highest config values and trust me my PC can, should handle it. (Dual core 2.6, Radeon hd 2600...)

[MasterD]

Hi there!

First: thanks for giving YASS TD3 a try

@BlindSide:
Opensource? Nope. We have decided to not open the sources. The 2 year old TD2 is available with sources, but don't look at them, they are not worth it, since the current engine is far away from that.
VS 2003: More like historical reasons and we didn't want to change IDE's before this release.
DX9, sorry I didn't realize that this was that new. But I thought most users would have more or less the latest version.
PhysX Drivers: Yep, you need them, do you had a look at that readme?

@JP: Thanks, please try it at home!

@MasterGod:
Did you read the info boxes? You can walk up to one of the blue boxes and hit space to read them. To start a race, walk up to one of the three hovercrafts outside of the main base and hit space and select enter hovercraft. Then drive up to the pole next to you with the label "start". If that doesn't work, please reply. (Btw. to get out of the main base you have to trigger that switch next to the tall ramp with the use key).
These jumpy FPS seem strange, can you please say at which rates they are jumping? Like from 10 to 40 FPS or something? When talking about highest config values, do you have stencil buffer enabled? Since this might get to something like a slideshow, when watching from the "right" angels/positions. If enabled, please try with a disabled stencil buffer again. Thanks!

[MasterGod]

Yes the stencil buffer causes the FPS to drop to about 6-9.

Sorry but the movement is making me mad. I can't control the little beast. Can't move right normally (if at all) and it makes me wanna throw me PC out of the room .
Sorry but I can't test stuff when I can't even move or leave the first area, it looks very cool but you must loosen up the controls or I'll blame you for killing the first person I see after running your game

[MasterD]

That sounds like you're quite a hot temper

Anyhow, I must admit that the controller of that spacecraft (assuming that this is the little beast) is currently intended to be used in space. But since we currently did not develop a better controller for atmosphere flight, we use the same here. The atmosphere flight controller is on the todo list for development.

But see: There is even more than flying in atmosphere with our little Techdemo

You can run around or use the hovercrafts. Have you yet tried the spaceflight? For this you don't need to fly somewhere with air and gravity around. Just enter a spacecraft, release the mouse (default: END) and hit the "Jump" button in the upper right. Soon you will be floating in space where you don't have the burden of gravity anymore

[MasterGod]

I got into space finally. The ambiance is pretty nice, cool space feel but there's nothing to do

[BlindSide]

cool space feel but there's nothing to do

Well it IS space, what did you expect?

I got it working after installing the PhysX drivers. Oh yeah I saw the Techdemo II sources thats why I thought it was open source

[Yoran]

looks great

[MasterD]

@MasterGod: Hope you have more fun with flloating through space than flying in air.

What to do in space:
#1 Fly and jump around through our solar system
#2 Dodge some asteroids
#3 Exit our solar system to the sirius system
#4 While in earth's orbit near the space station: Look for the docked carrier and enter it. Well that's more like a techy feature, than a gameplay element as of current.
#5 Travel above light speed: Switch to spectator mode (default: F4) and push NUM+ several times. But whatch out, that gets quite speedy! (About 10-14 times NUM+ is ok, above that the game might crash). Get back to your spacecraft again with F4.

[vermeer]

cool space feel but there's nothing to do

...then I may try it after all... feel nostalgic 'bout that old film...2001 something..

[MasterD]

As some of you have tried our Techdemo already, I want to ask for your system specs and the achieved performance.

Currently we now that a system spec of Athlon XP 3000+, 768 MB RAM, Geforce 4 /128MB is just not enough, getting a minimum framerate of 15 FPS at 1024x768, all switches off (like stencil buffer).

A thing we think of, is that we are not graphics limited, but CPU limited. This might change in the near future.

Please take the time and answer one or more of the following:
1. System spec and FPS + switches and time needed to load the first level (surface of earth). Please see below on how to get the FPS information.
2. Have you tried multiplayer? All working well? (As of current, there are two installations of YASS needed to play on the same computer. Just copy + paste the direcory into another location. But whatch out when deleting the folder afterwards, since the uninstall will not work, if the original dir is deleted.)

As already said in a previous post: The stencil buffer shadow is quite slow, so please don't post the results with stencil buffer on.

Thanks!

p.s.: How to get the FPS information?
While the level is loaded, release the mouse (default: END) and push the button "Show status report" in the lower left. Afterwards look in the upper left corner, within the opened window, for the FPS information.