Interstellar Flames?

[Robotbeat]

Enough of this pseudo-3d Argentum crap! let's get the real goods goin'! 3d full throttle! When's Interstellar Flames coming out?

[simonjacobs]

I think the graphics in Argentum look very cool actually

Interstellar Flames is coming along very well. It wont be released until it is finished because we want it to be a great playable game rather than just a very impressive 3d demo.

I seem to be useless at predicting release dates but here goes:

10'th of June.

I'll hopefully put up some more information on the game soon. The screenshots you have seen so far are from an outdated version.

Some people have asked how fast it runs. The answer is 30 fps fullscreen on a 200 MHz ARM device (eg. iPaq).

The game type is action shoot-em-up, more like StarFox than Wing Commander or Elite basically.

Simon.

[sponge]

Simon, knowing what (little?) we know about XScale's preformance, what type of speed increase do you expect with Interstellar Flame? Surely not 60FPS right?

[hasen]

Cool stuff Si, just before my Birthday as well.

[simonjacobs]

There will be a big speed boost from xscale, but not mainly from the 2x clock rate increase. A big bottleneck for software 3d rendering is the memory bandwidth, put a 400 mhz StrongARM in an iPaq (theoretically speaking ) and I dont think the framerate of Interstellar Flames would go up too much.

However the XScale has a much bigger data cache than the strongarm used in pocket pc's which is great news.

Theres no point having the game running faster than around 30fps though, what will happen is that I will add extra graphical features to the 3d engine which will only activate on an xscale machine. That way everyone can play the game at the same fast speed but it will look better on faster machines. I've got quite a few ideas for features to add such as mipmapping but thats all in the future

Simon.

[sponge]

Disabling the options is a must (I'm sure your aware of this) Some people like me would much rather have smooth 60fps gameplay if possible. Could you allow these options to be enabled on 206mhz? Just to drool at a slideshow :P

[Robotbeat]

Yeah! Me, too! I would rather have sweet graphics at 15 fps than so-so graphics at 30 fps.

BTW, my comment about Argentum: War Metal (refered herein as the GAME) was not a realistic representation of my opinion of the quality of the graphics and/or the graphics engine in the stated GAME.

[simonjacobs]

There'll be options for stuff, dont worry.

I promise you that the normal graphics certainly wont be 'so-so', they'll be some of the most impressive graphics on the pocket pc.

Simon.

[sponge]

*cough*Beta release! :P
Do what Pocket-G did with Pocket Snooker. You know you want to!

[Chris Edwards]

I think I read somewhere that the current screens in Pocket PC's only support like 28fps or something silly like that. There wouldn't be much of a point of having a game going 60fps if the screen could only display ~30fps.

[sponge]

Really? I never heard of that one.. The only game where this is a possibility is RocketElite, but I'm not sure if I've seen much of a diff between 40 and 60+ fps.

[randall]

Thats kind of the point. You can't really tell a difference anyway. Full production films run at 30 FPS and Animated features run at 24 FPS- these are straight off the reel in a movie theatre, not restrictions imposed by DIVX, or Media player or something.

People will always welcome the options- they can't seem to get enough customisation.

[hasen]

Thats kind of the point. You can't really tell a difference anyway. Full production films run at 30 FPS and Animated features run at 24 FPS- these are straight off the reel in a movie theatre, not restrictions imposed by DIVX, or Media player or something.

People will always welcome the options- they can't seem to get enough customisation.

Try playing Unreal Tournament at 30FPS and then at 60FPS - there's a big difference! I agree that there should be the option to tailor which graphical 'bells and whistles' you want in exchange for speed.

[Mike Bannick]

Try playing it at 99 fps

[simonjacobs]

Er, on the desktop maybe. But if the ppc screen only updates at 30fps (which is something I also have heard) it will make ZERO difference on the ppc!!!

Trust me, the game is perfectly playable even at 20fps.

Look at the original StarFox, very playable but it seemed to me it didnt run at a massive framerate when I was watching it.