With Poisonville the Hamburg game developers and publishers Bigpoint wants to offer a browser game that should be able to compete graphically and in gameplay with console games. At the Games Convention Online in Leipzig the provider presented the game the first time to the public.
As for the comic-based graphics and the game concept Poisonville seems inspired Poisonville by games like the "Grand Theft Auto series" (GTA) by Rockstar Games. The player moves in a 3d displayed imaginary city where there are several missions to perform and fights to win. He can join a gang, and can work on a virtual criminal career by different actions.
The special is: The game is written in Java and is therefore able to be played in any browsers. Up to 5000 players at the same time can fight against each other per instance.
Poisonville may be only used as an online version which is not unusal for a browser game. It has a data range from 200 to 300 megabytes, but causes only very minor traffic. The developers promise that an ISDN network (64Kbit/s) is already sufficent to play the game fluently once the actual game has been downloaded.
According to Bigpoint a normal pc system that is currently used will be enough to run the java program fluently. a dual core processor with an OpenGL-compatible graphics card (low budget about 30
I'm back from the exhibition which was kinda small (compared to previous GCs) but successful since i see you all have already been reading about it somewhere Been pretty busy lately as you can imagine so pardon my absence. The pictures taken by the press at the gco are all pretty poor since half the time all the effects were disabled. i thought i share a few untouched JME screens with some effects (dynamic shadows, depth of field and bloom) - still not all (normal maps and atmospheric fog missing) and everything is untweaked.
Maybe i'll find the time to capture a short video at the weekend, i think some physics and driving might be interesting ;)
I'll be back soon - comments and questions are appreciated as always. Sorry for the short post but i need to catch up on a lot of sleep :)
I found another cool article via Bigpoint’s site, that speaks more directly about the game’s impressive graphics (I can read german fairly well, but not well enough to translate). So, if anyone could be nice enough to translate this article as well, it would act as a very nice supplement to the previous one.
I will tone it down on the Poisonville hype from here on though, and leave that to the developers themselves ;D
If a German speaker who’s also fluent in English could make a translation of this article and send it to me (credits!) this would go right up on the blog as a spotlight.
Normally the development of browser games costs from 50,000 to 100,000 euros. For Poisonville the Hamburg company Bigpoint invests about a round million. The result: no strategy or adventure based on bitmaps as any other browser games - instead, the player walks around in a 3D city - and can like in Grand Theft Auto cruise in stolen cars on the roads, fly helicopters across the city, use water skis and motorcycle.
About 30 programmers have been working for over a year on Poisonville that will start its open beta in August 2009 and will be released before the end of the year. Poisonville will be playable without client and without any additional software on all major browsers running Java and OpenGL; also required downloads are so small that the game is playable even with slow Internet connections - such as ISDN - and without long waiting times .
Visitors of the Games Convetion Online in Leipzig could play an early version already. The graphically already makes a good impression, thanks to high resolutions, the city in detail, the movements of the animated characters are very detailed - no wonder, according to Bigpoint it is the first browser game that used Motioncapturing for the animations. The graphics according to current console games is however not yet reached, especially the textures of the cars were of very poor detail.
Poisonville is named after a fictional town in the USA. There, four gangs fighting for glory, power and honor. Several tens of thousands of players per instance will be able to play simultanously in real time, like in GTA, they have a lot of freedoms. The player can start to decide whether or not he is part of the Latin Thugs, The 420 Street, Eightballs or The Company - each reigning one district. Apart from car chases and shootings, the player can also visit Strip Clubs, rob jewelers or buy clothes. Bigpoint indicates that Poison Ville for players aged 16 years or more.
Like all of Bigpoint browser games Poisonville is also playable for free. However, if you want to achieve goals more quickly, you must pay real money for virtual goods.
For marketing, the manufacturer entirely on viral techniques in social networks: Poisonville automatically generates on demand records about your successes in the game in Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
thanks once again ttrocha! Article is now updated. I'll also announce this in the game developers group on LinkedIn (thousands of readers). I'd encourage everyone to spread the word if they can, spinning up as much free publicity for Poisonville and jME as possible.
thanks once again ttrocha! Article is now updated. I'll also announce this in the game developers group on LinkedIn (thousands of readers). I'd encourage everyone to spread the word if they can, spinning up as much free publicity for Poisonville and jME as possible.
very nice :)
sbook said:
That main character looks like a badass :D
seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, eh denzer?
hehe that light is still far away but its pretty bright ;)
This is absolutely fantastic! :-o I wish you all the best of lucks with this game… I just hope jME will get more visibility, and less shortsighted criticisms about its applicability to real games after this.
This is absolutely fantastic! :-o I wish you all the best of lucks with this game
thanks, we're working hard to make it good looking fun :)
Quote:
I just hope jME will get more visibility, and less shortsighted criticisms about its applicability to real games after this.
i'm positive it will - although we coded a lot from scratch, JME is sure capable to handle more mature tasks than ppl probably expect. i think poisonville will just be one of the first projects showing this :)
More out-of-the-box advanced features for making games, or at least rapidly prototyping them, is growing subject on the forum right now, as you can read about here, which has suggestions similar to this ‘componentized
again it's been a while since my last post so sharing some new screenshots might be a good idea though it's actually rendered in cinema again but with ingame material as usual. whenever i do target renderings, i always use settings matching java opengl capabilities. the following renderings are using 512/1024px textures (diffuse/normal) and 3 lights where just one light is casting shadows. i'll post a screenshot of the same model (perhaps with 256/512px textures too to compare as well) rendered in jme later next week.
i hope the following pictures are showing more the visual quality we're are aiming for, than the outdated looking ingame character screens you've seen before - visuals are the last thing we're working on, gameplay first
a new website is going online next week as well, with more infos, forum, gallery, devblog and maybe an application form for a closed beta.
erlend_sh installed a jme blog for poisonville for coding related topics, i hope we can start posting there around next week too (if i get my coders to post there or at least give me some interesting infos :)).
cheers and have a nice sunday,
denzer
ps: sorry if it takes a while till i answer a pm, im not that frequent on the forum - just every now and then.
erlend_sh said:
Maybe you have some thoughts to share on the matter?
i'll jump in when i got the time, right now every millisecond is dedicated to the poisonville development :)
thanks, had a lot of fun texturing them and can't wait to seem them in action :D we already did some normal mapping tests but this week it's more specific. it seems like jme has a bug (don't nail me on that, right now it's just a guess) when it comes to normal maps and different shadow techniques...have to ask in detail what the coder meant but he already found a workaround, sadly it costs a bit of performance - maybe he can post his experience on the jme poisonville devblog.
JackNeil said:
Perhaps one more vertex at the tip of the nose? ;)
hehe yeh the nose is a bit pointy but it's not the latest mesh - we already fixed a lot like the backside of the head, the ears and the eyes, i think the nose as well ;)
Been pretty busy lately as you can imagine so pardon my absence. The pictures taken by the press at the gco are all pretty poor since half the time all the effects were disabled. i thought i share a few untouched JME screens with some effects (dynamic shadows, depth of field and bloom) - still not all (normal maps and atmospheric fog missing) and everything is untweaked.
