I can hardly wait to see what 1.6 b4 and the final will do...I was going to buy a new video card this summer to take advantage of DA...but now...instead I'll have some extra cash to but another game...any recommendations, Frogboy?
Make sure you have Company of Heroes. Awesome game!
As for the fantasy strategy game we're working on -- the 3D engine in it has to be really advanced and able to handle a lot of detail because of what we're doing in it.
Let me put it another way -- if you guys were making a fantasy strategy game, wouldn't you want to make a world that really felt organic? Where you could zoom out and see the entire world or zoom in and look at individual leaves on individual trees in a particular forest that might have things living in it? Part of the actual game play will be the ability to interact with the world in a very minute way (i.e. imagine events liek you have in GalCiv but instead ones that you can trigger by selecting different things living in the woods or mountainains or swamps or whatever.
Anyway, the point being, we had to do a lot of research to come up with a very new way of displaying graphics. Since it's turn based, we can have much more detail than real time games like Crysis or Spore and such would have.
So in this next beta, we're bringing some of that engine into GalCiv II: DA. Bringing the entire engine wouldn't make any sense since GalCiv's requirements aren't that strenuous (displaying planets, ships, asteroids, etc. not that big of a deal).
(on the other hand, if in GalCiv you could zoom into an asteroid field down to seeing an individual man on the asteroid field and instruct him to check out a small glowing object not far from him in order to trigger a new optional event that might be a different thing all together).
