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[DEMO ON] Evochron Renegades: The Next Freespace?NSF 56k
TychoCelchuuu
PIGEONRegistered User regular
PIGEONRegistered User regular
Who's heard of Evochron Renegades? Nobody? That's what I thought. Welcome to this thread.
What is Evochron Renegades?
I'm glad you asked! Evochron Renegades is the sequel to Evochron Alliance, which was apparently a pretty awesome space shooter. I wouldn't know because I never played it but whatever. Renegades at least is a freeform space shooter/trading/exploration game. It's new, it's hot, and the demo just came out.
I could bother downloading the demo and playing it before I tell you all about it, but I don't have that kind of time. In fact, I don't even have much time to describe it before I play the demo. I have so little time I'm going to steal the feature list from their website. It's long, but it's also cool. Yoink:
Phew. Time for a picture.
So yeah, the engine has new effects! Everyone likes new effects. I barely even pause to look at a game these days unless it has new effects.
I'm sure everyone who has a soul has felt pretty starved for space shooters since, oh, about when Freelancer came out sans joystick support. Well, no, X3 came out after that. And Tarr Chronicles or whatever just released a demo. But hey, this thing sounds pretty awesome. The demo is only 25 megs, which is cool although it might also be a little worrying.
In any case, I'm definitely going to try it out. Can't get enough of the space simming. Great stuff. Has anyone played the original Evochron? Any good?
What is Evochron Renegades?
I'm glad you asked! Evochron Renegades is the sequel to Evochron Alliance, which was apparently a pretty awesome space shooter. I wouldn't know because I never played it but whatever. Renegades at least is a freeform space shooter/trading/exploration game. It's new, it's hot, and the demo just came out.
I could bother downloading the demo and playing it before I tell you all about it, but I don't have that kind of time. In fact, I don't even have much time to describe it before I play the demo. I have so little time I'm going to steal the feature list from their website. It's long, but it's also cool. Yoink:
- True freeform gameplay without plot restrictions, conditions, or limitations. Experience ultimate gameplay freedom and play the game the way you want to.
- Diverse gameplay choices and activities far beyond just combat and trading. Design and build a ship for speed, then compete in races for quick credits. Install a tractor beam that can be used to clean large solar arrays. Recover particles from stars and emissive nebulae, convert them into fuel, then sell the fuel for a large profit. Clear shipping paths of asteroids. Recover lost items and return them to nearby stations. There are many ways to make money and advance in the game.
- A vast seamless universe that lets you fly anywhere without loading screens or sudden environment flipping. Fly from planet to planet, star to star, solar system to solar system seamlessly.
- Interactive training mode to provide the necessary basics for flying your ship, managing its systems, and surviving in combat.
- For the first time in the series, join other players in cooperative contract objectives with the new enhanced multiplayer mode and share in the rewards.
- Unified gameplay architecture lets you keep the ship, upgrades, equipment, money, weapons, crew, and commodities you acquire in the game for use in both single player and multiplayer.
- Clan ID linking system lets players establish their indicated threat levels with other players in multiplayer. Players sharing a common ID in their callsigns are linked together as friendly contacts while different ID's are indicated as hostile.
- Challenge other players to multiplayer ship-vs-ship races and place the race course where you want in space.
- Seamless planet descents that can include weather effects such as rain, snow, and turbulence. Explore planets for hidden benefits, trade at city stations, mine their surfaces for valuable materials, or hide in their atmospheres... they are an important part of the game's interactive universe.
- New ship-to-ship trading and cargo system. Ship and trade weapons, upgrades, and equipment in addition to commodities. You can even load items from your cargo bay onto your ship, letting you carry more weapons, upgrades, and equipment beyond what you can install on your ship.
- Customizable universe that lets you move objects in space, replace them, remove them, and change the local environment.
- New high detail 3D cockpit with tiltable gauges and enhanced structures.
- Enhanced 3D game engine with new effects, objects, textures, and performance.
- Dynamic economy with realistic variable item availability.
- Beam weapons, a new class of cannons, are available for the player's ship in addition to traditional particle cannons and secondary weapons.
- Explore for hidden commodity and weapon storage containers which offer free reloading, upgrades, and other valuable items.
- Use your wealth to design and build a new ship, buy better weapons, hire crew members, recruit other ships, install upgrades, load commodities, and more.
- All new Shipyard lets you design and customize your ship for the role you want to play. Optimize your ship for defense, exploration, combat, racing, or transporting... the choice is yours. You can also position and scale each component to give your ship a unique appearance.
- No required trade lanes or warp gates to hold you back. The game's universe is yours to explore with an open space navigation system and built-in jump drives. Optional warp gates are available for faster long distance travel and you can also install new gates in desired locations with the game's customizable universe.
- Realistic zero gravity inertia based 'Newtonian' style flight model including complete 3-way rotation and 3-way direction control with optional variable input. An advanced inertial dampening system helps keep flight control simple in space, atmospheres, and gravity fields.
- Realistic environment interaction far beyond the genre's typical 'background wallpaper'. Nebula clouds, asteroid fields, planet atmospheres, moons, and more all provide unique options for shelter and strategy. Such environment elements include changes in gravity, fuel consumption, physics, sensor range, and visibility.
- Quick one-key access to jump drive navigation and inventory management. You control all system travel and inventory decisions right from the cockpit.
- Explore the game's massive universe with several secret locations to discover, hundreds of planets, and many unique objects/obstacles to encounter including black holes, asteroid caves, wormholes, and stars. Create your own custom systems to further populate the Evochron universe.
- Clue-based integrated story you can continue at virtually any time. Follow the beacons, solve the clues and voyage through many systems in a quest to discover the mystery of what happened to the Renegades. Players who take on the challenge of the story quest and succeed will discover a very beneficial feature.
- Supports keyboard, mouse, gamepad, and joystick flight control. Use the controls you prefer to play the game. Force feedback control is also supported.
- Supports Natural Point's TrackIR 3D head control system for managing the viewpoint from the cockpit with all six degrees of movement.
Phew. Time for a picture.
So yeah, the engine has new effects! Everyone likes new effects. I barely even pause to look at a game these days unless it has new effects.
I'm sure everyone who has a soul has felt pretty starved for space shooters since, oh, about when Freelancer came out sans joystick support. Well, no, X3 came out after that. And Tarr Chronicles or whatever just released a demo. But hey, this thing sounds pretty awesome. The demo is only 25 megs, which is cool although it might also be a little worrying.
In any case, I'm definitely going to try it out. Can't get enough of the space simming. Great stuff. Has anyone played the original Evochron? Any good?
TychoCelchuuu on
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That feature list sounds REALLY tasty though. I'ma get that demo when I get off work later. I spent way too much time in Freelancer, and hopefully this will make up for the non-dynamic parts of that game.
Yeah, the system requirements are real low. To be perfectly honest though, space sim graphics don't matter as much as other games. The difference between Freespace 2, which is a few generations behind, and any new space sim (current gen) is sorta big, but when you're in the blackness of space firing at spaceships it doesn't make a difference if the texture's a little blurrier than it could be.
Big awesome explosions are always nice though.
Hell, as long as I can tell what I'm shooting at, and there's no slow down, I'm perfectly happy with the graphics in any space sim. I'm just wondering how they managed to fit all this game in 25 megabytes.
If the guys who made kkrieger could squeeze a functional and not that bad looking FPS into 96kb, then I'd say 25mb is plenty for a space sim.
hax
OnTopic: Yay. Space shooter games.
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Will this game have a plot or is it completly freeform?
Can I get carrier type ships, in order to start my pirate empire?
Man you drew a comparison to Freespace right in the title, you'd best be able to back up them words, or we shall be having words.
Then I tried playing the actual demo. I took a mission destroying asteroids (which I also mined some of!). After I finished, I tried jumping to the station I started at, but jumped into a planet and promptly exploded instead. I kind of wish there was some computer warning that could tell you you were jumping into a stellar body.
What do you think this is, the future or something?!
This looks awesome and everything, but looking at this just gave me the biggest hit of nostalga that I've experienced ever, of an old agme from the 90s or so, something along the lines of Star Quest IV or some such. AOL Games had the demo, and I used to play the fuck out of it as a kid. Zipping around at Warp 4, diving into planet atmospheres and having the background go all blue or red, and then blowing them the fuck up because of some wierd programming quirk while leaving all the buildings in place in space.
Jesus.
But anyway, yeah, this looks great, installing now.
That, uh, sounds like some sort of evil programming language.
"Prepare to have your soul devoured by my newest creation, DarkBASIC!!"
10 PAIN
20 GO TO 10
Anyway, yeah thanks for the heads up. I need a fix of space sim
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Fools, I will write a coding system where YOU CANNOT INSERT COMMENTS AT ALLLLLL!!!!
The developers had some nice ideas when they started this project: being able to jump from point to point and system to system without the use of some hokey device like a wormhole or a jumpgate is something I've been wanting in games like this for a long time, as is the ability to pick-and-choose different components to improve the capabilities of your ship instead of having to buy a new one every few missions or so. I'm sure I'm not the only one miffed by a game when you're forced to abandon a sleek-lookin' ship for something ugly designed itself because it has more armor and cargo space besides being the same basic dimension, so being able to (in concept) choose your favorite chassis and kit it out with all kinds of fun and awesome stuff to make it match that ugly tub of shit is refreshing.
The idea of being able to piece together your ship from bits and pieces is also rather neat; being able to actually shrink or expand the various pieces on the ship model and adjust where they're located is also a very cool concept, though the gameplay effects worry me somewhat (such as someone scrunching up their ship all the way to reduce its hitbox or something). Not being able to set a color scheme is a shame, though (god damn BROWN!).
There are a lot of things that I found getting at me as I played, however, and they piled up so much and drtracted from the game so that it didn't turn out nearly as well as the concept sounds. For example, the interface is really hit or miss: while it's very functional in the ship construction screen, it's very clunky and detracting when used for just about anything else dock-oriented, and there's really no excuse for why they didn't try using similar setups for purchasing and equipping weapons and utilities and whatnot, purchasing and selling cargo and perusing the available contracts. The general inventory of equipment and goods carried by docks, for that matter, is really hit or miss as well, literily: you can jump from station to station to station and not find so much as a humble tractor beam or cargo scanner, and it seems that the docks carry only one of the items they list, never mind the laughability of such. There're also other things: the navigation screen feels too cramped and the zoom inadequate, so trying to pin down a set of coordinates is all but impossible on the first try, for example.
What kind of annoys me the most is that just about everything except the universe data is all packed into the .exe and a few other tiny files, so there's probably no way you could get an effective mod community going. This is truely a pity; if the rest of the game data (equipment/missions/ships/etc) are coded in the same simple manner as the universe data (or fuck, even like Freelancer's or Vega Strike's ship/goods/mission data) then you could get some absolutly fantastic mission/faction/ship/equipment sets out of this game.
Long post short, the concepts are awesome, but the architecture and execution really borked the game up, so it's probably best to just stick with Freelancer and some of the better mods.
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You could email the dude directly or something. That's a little weird.
No, it wasn't an error, they actually say you can't pay by credit card with a free email address. I was willing to buy it because it was cheap and easy to do so. I could use one of the other methods of payment but that would be more work and to be honest I don't need another game to take up the time I should be spending on work so this gives me the reason I need not to get it.
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