f13.net

Article (http://www.actiontrip.com/rei/comments_news.phtml?id=010807_8). Announced at CES. Wish my travel schedule would have allowed me to go this year. With every show redefining themselves once E3 changed, I think there'll be some goodies at EVERY show in 2007.

Anyway, MMOFPS, Unreal Engine 3 using the AGEIA PhysX card thing I'm sure everyone here bought already, right? RIGHT?!

Sounds like:

• Ranks to unlock new abilities.
• Destructible/deformable terrain.
• Actual Collision Detection. Really. They mean it

I like it. They may not be the best at creating compelling retention-based MMORPG, but the driving portion of AA was fun as heck. Maybe this can be that plus, like, a reason to stay after the free period.

Who TF is giving these guys money to make another game?

People who only played the driving portion of AA and the flying portion of JG :)

Wake me when the beta starts. Until then, it's all just pretty words.

YA RLY. Auto Assault wasn't enough of a debacle?

(insert War/Whoremonger joke here).

I like the premise a lot.

Kotaku's post regarding this leads me to believe it'll require one of those physics processors. If so, that stinks.

This premise is too good for NetDevil.

Edit: Also, Crecente & Co. couldn't tell the difference between their ass and a hole in the ground. It won't require a physics processor. Guaranteed. I'd bet on it.

They screwed up post apocalyptic cars lets see how they can screw up an fps.

Netdevil put all the hit detection on the client for Jumpgate.  Also, if you played on a really laggy connection people couldn't track you so you could fly up and hit someone over and over without being detected.  2 seconds later you start taking damage with no idea knowing who is hitting you.

Also, the original server for Jumpgate ran Windows 98.  (source on that = GreatBob).

Premise is too good for anyone at this time.

There is a reason why real-time deformable terrain is not done in mmorpgs - and that reason is bandwidth requirements between server and client and computational power required to render terrain real-time on client's side. I'd say this will not be feasible for another 10 years.

They say the third time's a charm.

Yay, at last I get to live in the world of General Energy and tell my own story alongside literally several other players!  I hate those PolyChem Oil bastards.

Actually, it sounds kinda fun.  But that's probably because I'm imagining some dreamy, teamworking, non-schizo version of MMOFPS reality where it's not either a zerg rush or a taxi to victory scenario.

That's gotta be a windup.

Still think Auto Assault could be mildly entertaining if free. I mean, Dungeon Runners fun (that kind of "mildly").

Don't derail this thread.  I want to hear more about taking cities block by block in Stalingrad Online.

Two is the wrong number of realms.

And I'm dubious that terrain will be as deformable as they imply in the end.

Other than that - hooray for content free releases.

Exactly. They took the greatest idea for a MMOG ever, one that couldn't possibly fail (CAR WARS WITH CYBORGS), and made it fail. Fool me once...

Sorry, but that's simply not true ;)

--if you are networking the entire terrain, sure networking performance is an issue. Instead, you network deformations, and have the clients apply those deformations to the base terrain(s) downloaded, and/or periodically synchronized base terrains updated when you log in.

--most terrain systems already render, and in fact generate on the fly the vertices to physically render. Even leading edge tech has a series of mechanisms where actual rendering of the geometry isn't your limiting factor.

I wrote a networked terrain deformation object for Torque's heightmap based terrain engine (TGE back in the day) before I was even an employee. It's been used in two games to date, and the theory has been applied to a couple more in development now.

EDIT: I went back and read the linked article, and from what they are describing they mean destructible environments not just terrains.

This is more difficult, especially once they realize just how difficult it is to keep clients synched when using hardware physics, but it's doable given an outstanding design and careful limitation of what is gameplay affecting and what isn't.

Sounds like they want everything gameplay affecting, so this will be interesting to see!

What makes anyone, including the functional rich retards who gave them the money to develop this, think that NetDevil can make a good fucking Pong MMOG, much less an MMOFPS? They made Webster's add another line in the dictionary for the definition of inept.

AA already has destroyable environments. They're just using their existing engine. The physics card just gives them more random debris. It's also an option when you customize a Dell.

If they have 10k subs on AutoAssault they're pulling in $120k a month. The real question is how much did it cost to begin with. If they are using their existing engine to bootstrap the new game they could have it done in much less time (or not) on a smaller budget.

They (as in NetDevil) aren't pulling in that much since NCsoft funded them and is presumably taking in the bulk of that money.

Grossing ~$120k. Who knows how much it cost initially ($2-5 million?) or if NCSoft is getting a %. AA uses Havok 2 and already supports the physics card so really nothing new here. 'Warmonger' seems to be some kind of quest in AA that they are carrying over to it's own game. The physics card company could be paying for the new game but I don't see any press releases to that effect.

It kinda sounds like a sub-game suggested for AA that is being spun off into a whole new game.

Also, to make the terrain deformation easier to deal with, I suppose they could instance or pseudo-instance the blocks - after all, once you've won a block, you probably won't be going back into it so it can remain static and closed.

Could be interesting.

I'm curious how would one go about introducing fully dynamic terrain environment, something that you can't just script in a form of 'big hole"/"small hole"/"trashed building" ?

Still do'able, but it depends on how cheesy they want to get. It's very possible there are only certain things that are destructible.. in which case they just have to send a 'this item now destroyed' packet to everyone rather than actually doing anything is destructible. This is how Auto Assault works anyways.

Right. You just cheat and say blow this item up. Everyone sees a different explosion but doesn't know it.

Sacrifice had deformable terrain in a networked environment (and so does Second Life?). You could cast a spell in Sacrifice and a volcano would grow up out of the ground.

All the difference in the world lies in if you want the effects of the environment destruction to have game play value.

Just about all players, and a vast majority of developers, go down this path of thought:

1) I have a phsyics solution/card!
2) I can blow things up and have them create new debris objects, that can then be used to do nifty stuff!
3) Since I have the same physics card on all clients, they can all see the same thing at the same time!
4) Since all clients (and the server) all see the same thing at the same time, we can do all sorts of nifty stuff, like have explosion create flying debris that knocks into players, and lands on the ground and forms new obstacles, and, and and!

The problem is that many modern physics libs (and right now I will put a big fat disclaimer up: I do not understand the details of how these cards solve their physics systems, just what I've been told by those that do know) do "total solutions" all at once--in other words, they don't solve a subset of the physics simulation a piece at a time, but generate a solution for the entire set of data at once (something to do with esoteric math from what I understand).

What this means in a practical sense is that if any of the data points within the simulation are even slightly different, the total solutions could wind up being drastically different. You can't simply say "do this type of explosion with these parameters" and expect your clients to see the same result unless your server and your clients are completely synchronized--which implies zero latency and nearly infinite bandwidth. In other words, it's not gonna happen.

The only real workable solution given today's capabilities is to have the server handle all gameplay affecting physics, and then ghost (network) down the resultant changes to the clients (normal game networking)...but that means that the client isn't going to be able to very accurately predict what is going on while the player is doing his reaction to the event, and therefore will see a short period of what the client predicts is going to be the result of the explosion, and then a correction period where the server tells the clients what actually happened. Due to the problem described above, the physics card cannot help with this at all on the client, and if you try, it makes the corrections worse, not better.

Unfortunately, that leaves us right back where we were--either limited due to networking bandwidth regarding exactly what can be game affecting, or what could be gross inaccuracies in player viewpoint until the network updates settle down. And that's just not what people (players, designers, developers) want.

Currently (and GG has put a lot of R&D into this), we're basically stuck with having client side physics cards able to do some amazing "eye candy" affects, and for single player games some really cool game play affects as well, but networked game play events are still limited in their total use of client side physics libraries, especially "total solution" libs/hardware.

I'm not saying it'll never be solved, and I'm sure that smoke and mirrors combined with some really accurate prediction algorithms can make it look pretty good, but today, networking and physics is like oil and water...

Not ideal, but it seems like a decently acceptable next step.  Specifically what I'm talking about is; when a destruction event occurs, hold off the animation until the responsible computer (I assume server, but I don't know if putting a physics card in a server makes sense) has computed and communicated the final solution.

But they never, ever will.

By definition, in a server authoritative setup (which you need for anti-cheat), the client is always lagging behind the server in world state, so to stay reactive to user input, it must predict where it thinks the server's updates are going to place objects, and start them along the way. Then, when the authoritative updates show up, it gently corrects them in accordance with the information in the update.

This basically means that with a player making constant inputs, the client side simulation will never be 100% sychronized with the server side simulation--it's a constant tug of war between where the client thinks everything is and where the server tells the client where everything was a bit ago in the past...

Can you please explain why having exactly same explosion is important? You blow something up, you get a lot of eye candy and then server updates your client (oh btw you got killed by flying anvil) with results. Big explosions take some time to 'play out', you might have enough time to update clients with significant outcome. That and you can tell client to show all or most possible outcomes that will end up as false positives ('eye candy' effects) when server updates with real data.

I don't think it matters - as long as the end result is the same for everyone.

The problem is that that's not a true 'deformable environment' if the destructible stuff is predefined.

The problem is that the side of the building which just cleaved off is now part of the terrain.  If it falls straight down on one client, but tumbles then lands twenty feet away on another client, synch them back is going to look very strange for someone.  If the server decides something else, it is going to look odd for everyone.  Instead of people sliding across the landscape, the landscape itself is jumping all over the place.

One way they could hide some of the predicition and synching is by producing a lot of smoke, eye-candy debris, dust, and fireworks.  Really though, the obfuscation would have to be overdone and a significant portion of using the physics card would be lost.  (At least the explosions would be pretty.)

Hey I will take smoke and mirrors, or even scripted destruction, over what we have now - nearly nothing.

Too much smoke and mirrors means three feet of visibility when anything significant happens.  It would get old fast.

Maybe if they have somehow designed a procedurally generated terrain deformation (Help, I sound like that Morgan fellow!) which tweaks the physics involved it could happen.  I cannot imagine an easy to reproduce algorithm that allows lots of freedom in what you can destroy.  I remain wary.

NetDevil may not have ensnared the hearts of millions in either of their two earlier projects, but I'm not against the idea of a MMOFPS being made by a company with past experience.  Auto Assault's gameplay may not have impressed, but it was a pretty solid game on a technical level, delivering some fairly good content on a massively multiplayer scale.

Now, the question is if NetDevil can make an entertaining game or not.   It's kinda hard to screw up a MMOFPS, even Planetside has it's moments and it's basically just a striped down Tribes.  If they can make a game of the sophistication of Tribes 2, Battlefield 2, or Battlezone 2, and take it massively multiplayer, I'll give it a spin.  If they can surpass my expectation and make something even better, Huxley has some competition.

Don't worry I have a graph.

(http://www.msf.lu/images/bilan_graph2.gif)

Maybe folks should work out the issues of deformable gameplay-affecting terrain in single player games, work it up to limited multiplayer and then worry about how to do it to a bunch of clients.

Or zomg!mmo.
Sacrifice had the best spells evar. Volcano and Tornado set the bar that's yet to be matched in any game I've seen. If it weren't for the stupid manawhores, it's be on my hard drive still. It got a lot of mileage on our LAN but got old because of having to dick around with manawhores. Wait, that didn't sound right.

I wonder if they're attempting to use procedural generation to get around the problems of synchronization of elements. You'd lose a lot of the pluses of having a physics engine in your card, but if you could ensure that for a given state every client will generate the exact same result (AKA: I make a creature in Spore -- it walks the same for everyone who d/ls it as it does for me, but no one downloads a "how the creature walks" description) -- maybe you could do it.

But it'd probably look pretty crappy compared to what people are used to in single-player games.

Or maybe they're just using it as a meaningless buzzword.

I got back late to the discussion today, but this is exactly the issue.

Or to make it even more obvious:

Put two "destructable" walls 5 feet away from each other and parallel. Put a moving vehicle (player driven, marked as A) rushing at the wall, and put a hapless victim on the far side:


A ---> ||...|| X

Now, let's have some common networking scenarios in an MMO environment:

Client A has bad packet loss :

--let's say that client A sees the wall at the last minute, and on his computer, he swerves to avoid the wall. On his simulation, no contact occurs.

Unfortunately, his packet doesn't make it to the server in time, and the server (who is authoritative remember) determines that the vehicle does in fact hit the wall. Assume for a moment that he was driving directly at the wall, and we see that the collision "explodes" the first wall, and given enough force, the flying bricks from the first wall then destroy the second wall, and the fliying bricks from that wall kill player X. All of these are world changing effects, and can't be "unwound" once client's A's laggy move finally shows up at the server. Not only that, but since Client A's simulation is (normally) not aware that it's de-synched from the server excessively, once the update packets from the collisions (and the resultant wall destructions) make it back to Client A, he gets a "WTFBBQ!" immersion breaking re-wind.

Client B has a very high latency and/or high packet loss connection:

--same scenario,except client A is able to swerve, and the server confirms, and sends out those updates (of client A's vehicle) to Client X. Unfortunately, let's assume that only the update from the very first swerve control input makes it to Client X...meaning that while on the server the vechicle swerves enough to miss completely, on Client X it swerves just enough to destroy the first wall, but the force given to the brick debris is not enough to destroy the second wall. Remember that for realistic gameplay, Client X has to predict what is going to occur, and modify their simulation approporiately.

Now, Client X hears the explosion on the other side of the wall, and triggers a bomb he has placed against the second wall, blowing it up. His simulation blows up the second wall, the first wall was already destroyed so the bricks go flying everywhere, ending up on top and around Client A's vehicle. He then runs across and up the vehicle.

However, of course on the server the first wall isn't actually destroyed--so the bricks...well, you get the picture I hope!

It's simply not trivial, no matter how much hardware you throw at it. And it gets much worse if you try to not network all the individual bricks, but instead use client side hardware to do the physics themselves, since they de-synch so rapidly.

You could bake a physics simulation done on the server as a straight animation or script and just send that to the clients.

---

But hold up. Doesn't Second Life do synchronized physics? They aren't calculated on the clients. Which is why they can only have 40 users per server? If they were using a newer version of Havok I bet their servers might be able to benefit from the physics card.

And doesn't EVE do physics or is EVE purely fake client side physics collision detection?

Server side physics (of any sort) combined with networking the results of the physics, and interpolating/predicting said results on the client is relatively trivial--it just carries the normal bandwidth restrictions inherent in mmo's in the first place.

The problem is that like I mentioned at first, and the press release implies, designers think they can get more, easily, by throwing hardware around, without really studying the low level issues.

I'm confused.  What I read you saying earlier was that the final solution was calculated first, then the individual cards decided how the pixels look getting to that state.

Apparently my reading skills suck.

I guess my question is: why can't you do it that way?  Have final solution be calculated on the server side, and have the players cards fill in how wold state gets from pre-destruction to post-destruction?  If some folks are laggy, they will like see quick or "instant" destruction (not ideal, but as someone else said, better then we have now), but all machines will agree on end state.

Auto Assault was not technically inept, it is actually pretty well done.   They just guessed wrong to the questions "Who wants to be car?", "Is dark brown a good look for an MMO?", and "Is 'some post-apocalyptic something or other' enough hook?"

I tend to agree. There's a big difference between being able to code a stable backend, engine, and client, and designing a fun game. You need both. If you keep the coders but replace the designers, you might have a winner.

Two things: user lag perception, and real network lag.

user lag perception: if the client does no prediction at all, you'd press a button and it could take up to 300-500 milliseconds (standard network) before your character would even move if the client relied completely on server "final solutions" before doing anything.

real network lag: if the server has to calculate the entire solution (not so slow), but then network each and every object that was modified back to each and every client connected, that's a huge amount of network update information to be transmitted.

I'll give an example with Torque since I know it the most:

One of the big reasons that Torque's networking is so strong, and user perception of lag is so low, is that we pack the update information to be sent into the absolute most compacted bitstream possible...whenever a developer can, he uses bits instead of bytes to deliver information. Network update packets are delivered to clients every 200 milliseconds (stock)--and that is actually a long time between updates when you think about it. We get away with this with strong, determinstic prediction and interpolation physics, which almost by definition are anti-physics, as in physics solution packages...and the reason for that is because we need to be able to interpolate/predict with the minimum amount of information transmitted, which completely precludes use of total solution solver physics systems.

We also only ever send packets that are roughly 200 bytes of data--and that's not a lot of data available at all when you are talking about hundreds and hundreds of objects. When an update packet is full, it's shipped off immediately, even if some object updates didn't make it into that packet. Any updates that got "skipped" will gain a bit of priority for the next update packet to be delivered, eventually assuring over time that all updates necessary are eventually delivered to the clients.

To sum:

Torque networking (an example, many other networking systems are similar) is optimized for user reaction, minimum bandwidth, and low network cost client/server simulation synchronization.

Physics solver systems require not just a lot of information, but all of the information to remain synchronized and accurate. There isn't any real capability for "rough interpolation that will be corrected soon", or prediction of client control object response to user input for accurate player control.

The biggest challenges any developers have when trying to integrate a physics solution with MMO-style networking is just about by definition the two are incompatible...so you need to find the middle ground where your networked physics don't cause rediculous bandwidth and user perception of responsiveness--yet still give the shiney "real world physics!!!11!one1!" that so many people think they want.

I disagree. AA didn't work because it was Just Another Diku. That's fine, I like Diku (see: subscriptions, EQ2 (lapsed), WoW) but I don't need fifteen Dikus on my hard drive. People read between the lines of their press releases and thought deep in their lizard brains, "Oooohhhhhhh.... car that heals means PRIEST." I think the setting was just a small slice of it, though I (sadly) think it was part of it.

And that's why I don't trust them. They're saying it's going to be different when I don't think it can be.

AA sucked ass, it tried to be a diku when it should've been more like driving one of those Marauders in Planetside.

The trouble with moving away from the diku method is that you get MCO: when skill counts more, eight people win all the races and everyone else's permanent loserhood becomes obvious.

They didn't have to do that. Twisted Metal was hell on wheels fun that wasn't difficult to master. Add in some die rolling mechanics beneath the hood to fudge it just a little bit and you have your game. That's not to say that AA was going to sell a million copies off the bat or anything; I tend to think that if it were good you would have an EVE situation where word of mouth turned it into a hit after people got over the weird premise.

That's a very limited example, since races are very win/lose based gameplay. In games like UO and Planetside, even complete retards and newbies can add positively to gameplay. Then again, I'm a non-competitive type and like games that don't punish with death penalties and whatnot, because for me the gameplay is the thing, not the win.

Thanks, that's clear.

I guess in my head I was assuming that the actual terrain would be fixed, and buildings/walls/stuff would be dynamic (which is not what you were talking about, my bad) and a "vector" would be communicated to each client that was a lookup for a solution for that building.  So I guess I was assuming a certain level of "cheating".

Well, Wish is a low budget MMORPG and they seems to have a good example of deformable terrain. So why not?

Because Wish closed two years ago?

And sucked a whole army of goats?

They are talking of doing all these physics things with destructable terrain - yet they could not get the physics correct on the main object of play in Auto-Assault!

The reason I didn't buy it (in both senses of the word 'buy') is half the game felt like 'god mode'.   You could turn the wheel sharp to the side and the car would just make a wider turn - not flip over or skid.

You could drive off a cliff at top speed and slam into a granite wall - and gently land on the ground and drive off.   OK so they are simulating magic or super-tech cars --- but then how can a guy in shirt-sleeves with a 38 pistol damage my car?   Or how can running into that guy (if its higher level) damage my car?

I don't expect a perfect real world model, but I do expect some consitent model!

Necroing this thread to say:

NetDevil have updated the site regarding release date (this year), price (free) and with movies / screenshots (http://www.warmongergame.com/).

I live for dynamic cloth.

Is this similar to BF2 or 2142 in it's multiplayer gaming?

Thank you, I learned alot.

Did anyone else think that video mostly looked like dogshit? A few of the buildings disintegrating due to shooting were cool, but the models were assy.

umm...i do not read anything that says its an MMO, looks like a FPS to me, and thats what they say it is.

Networked deformable terrain? Lots of examples of that...

Netdevil.

I know but that doesn't mean they only do MMO's... (even if thats all they have done)

Don't you think MMOFPS would be all over the press releases ETC?

Netdevil.

What are you trying to tell me here?

Heck, that actually looks pretty fun. Whether it'll be any good remains to be seen. AA without the useless ground game (and free) woulda been ok for a bit as a car-FPS-lite maybe.

Maybe it's because I'm on a extreme-mod COD2 binge, but having destructible buildings would radically change things, like those nuts that go for the turrets just outta view and are too far away for grenades.

(http://theducks.org/pictures/do-not-want-dog.jpg)

I think that he's trying to say Netdevil.

Most FPS i play have an on line component, dosn't mean its a MMO.

Point being, i think the OP has made an assumption here. Like i said, its it was a MMOFPS, it would be all over the press releases ETC.. Its not from what i have looked at.

That's a good point. Looking at this eight months later, it does read more like an online FPS rather than a persistent environment ala Huxley MMOFPS. Not sure why I immediately thought MMO in January except maybe because all I knew then of Netdevil was Jumpgate and AA (Lego wasn't even known then iirc).

You may still be missing the overall point. Netdevil. As in 'we fucked up cars with guns.'

Jesus it took too long. Thank you Modern Angel.

This cars (http://www.warmongergame.com/dynimg/w=800/media/screenshots/Warmonger-scr-lrg-0007.jpg) are straight from Auto Assault.
I can't force myself to read the lore. Is it a AA spinoff or just art recycling?

SOE was more than EQ1. Blizzard was more than Starcraft. Netdevil has another shot they're more than just AA. Considering they've got the cash to move the graphics vamp from Jumpgate into an entirely new game (which Evolutions now is), and they have the Lego thing, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Like Funcom.

But yea, the more they screw up, the harder it'll be to recover.

I can give Funcom the benefit of the doubt because we know they have good designers.

Somewhere.

Where are they at Netdevil?

The original jump gate was quite enjoyable, and if you read anything about the new evolution game, they are quite aware, and are very open about things they learned from AA and the OG jump gate. Thats a sign of a good designer.

I too, give them the benefit of the doubt...

I also think AA was just to odd for MMO players who have been beaten over the head with elves. (Though i did not play it ;) )

I thought AA was fine until the avatar game got strapped on. I always wondered what it would have been like as a f2p car wars game with match-making and a different way of customizing your vehicle.

It still would have been shit, because the car game was Everquest with CARS, instead of cars with pew pew.

^^^^^^^^^^

This idea that AA was just too OUT THERE creatively, that it broke the mold, that it was on the moon, man, THE MOON, and that's why it failed is just one of the biggest loads of bunk any company's perpetrated in the industry lately. What Haemish said: it fucking sucked because it was the same. fucking. thing. except with bugs galore and not even a pretense of an endgame. There was absolutely nothing creative about the game except that the mobs screamed more when you killed them

Wish, Horizons, Seed, and Tabula Rasa are calling. They want their titles back.

I'm talking about the AA I played at the E3 prior to them adding avatars. It did not feel like throwing spreadsheets around like EQ1. It had a decidedly action-y feel to it, driving around, rotating cannons, firing while moving, all that sort of thing. They slapped on a lot of DIKU components, from the leveling to the gear to the XP to the general stats with all of it. But the game I played, the one where you drove around blowing crap up in a destructible environment while others did the same in that instance, that was fun.

What they launched was a big departure. You could still see some of the roots there, but it was getting harder to see it through all the bandaids.

The thing about AA that insulted my intelligence a little more was this pervasive "oh, the market's just not MATURE enough for an action MMO" that they and their fans had going. A game that's just obviously not finished or that sucks but doesn't claim to be the opposite of what it is (we made a shitty hardcore diku and we may fail but by god we're a shitty hardcore diku!) doesn't insult my intelligence the same way.

And I have no doubt it may have made a drastic change in development, Darniaq. These frigging companies are always on the verge of doing something so right before someone gets cold feet and demands some standard diku/rts/licensed fps/whatever trite formula nonsense.

Seed was interesting... But the independent company that made it had bad investors that wants "OMG MMO MONEY NOW!". Forced them to release early, and well..that was that.

If / when TR flops, it will have a clear shot at that title due to the amount of time and big name talent that went into making such aggressive mediocrity.

Seed was just another pipe dream. A 5 year old can piss out INTERESTING stuff. Means NUSSING.

They had a lot more things coming into that game they they didnt get time for.. part of why people playing it were like "WTF is the point?". And they were correct, with out the other parts, there was no point.

NECRO!

Warmonger is out and it's free. About 492 MB download and requires Gamespy Comrade installed to play the multiplayer (well, you probably could set up servers yourself, but you know what I mean).

I played about 3 games of it the other day. I don't have an Ageia card and still haven't got everything set so I don't lag badly when playing (plus I think the ping code is a bit wonky - no way did I have a ping of 95 - 100 with some of the lag I was seeing), so this may not be the most informative summary.

SUMMARY:

 - I've got no idea if the original ranking system idea that unlocks things even exists.

 - There are something like 5 weapons and six maps. Starting weapons are limited by 'class'. The default weapons are pickaxe and pistol; you can choose to start with either an assault rifle, chaingun or RPG. Every weapon has a secondary fire option - the pistol fires a 3 shot burst, the assault rifle fires a grenade, the chaingun pulls up a protective shield that freezes you in place and the RPG gets a scope.

 - I've found that if you get caught in any kind of enemy fire, you don't last long. Respawning is quick and you can change classes as you see fit.

 - The maps look great, but I found myself constantly sticking to things or finding I couldn't jump over what I wanted to jump over.

 - I am a huge fan of destructible terrain and yes, it's kinda fun. But I don't think everything is destructible, given that I was able to blow a hole in the wall with my chaingun, but couldn't blow open the door. Plus, it's a secondary thing - your focus is still on killing your opponents and most property destruction was happening by accident. This may change if enough players learn the 'best' things to blow holes in.

 - BUGS: I hit two. The first one turned my screen black (the UI was still there) and I couldn't do anything until someone killed me. That took away my sound as well. The second was that I got knocked out of the game by a 'helpful' Windows prompt and could not get back into Warmonger, nor did I have full control over my desktop. I had to restart my machine to be able to fix things.

However, compared to my other recent free online FPS experience - Exteel - Warmonger probably holds more for the FPS fan.

Netdevil made a game that failed and then brought out a free MMOG? How do they make money? Are there ads in game?

I think it was originally meant to be an MMOFPS, but now it's just an online FPS with map caps of 32 players. As I said, I don't think it tracks rankings.

In many ways, Warmonger is a completely free tech demo that is a playable FPS. It's novelty is being able to blow holes in walls and the like, but it's just an FPS that plays like, say, Quake 3.

What mmog was that?

... This one.

This isn't a mmog. Its just a FPS.

I'll just file your response under "discussions no one needs to have again."

Ok...

On another note, where did you read they bought this from somewhere?

You are an odd one, I'll say that.

Dam... I'm dumb before my first cup of coffee, and some would argue...after. But thats another topic, needless to say, i read that all wrong.

Carry on.

Hey, Captain Nested Quotes, stop doing that.

What?

Come on. You knew it was just who was going to do it first.

I had something to contribute but I was mesmerized by the square hyno-disc.  :ye_gods:

I think I just had a seizure.

Hows that?

Nothing that chucking an enchanted disc in won't solve.

Well, i got around to playing it this weekend, Itsa good, the weapions are slightly unique and the environments are really well done, the deconstructions and deformations are also rather solid.

The only down side is, i played on a quad core with an 8800, but no physX card...so performance was rather sluggish.

What, the new Jumpgate?

Funny thing, I went to their webpage and I see this splattered on the front of it.

(http://www.netdevil.com//assets/images/games/lego/banner-full.jpg)

"Lego Universe".  Lego themed MMORPG.

Theoretically awesome. Most likely going to be bad. Let's hope for awesome.

March called (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9544.0)... eh, you know the rest  :-)

Oh, yea, the news is most definitely old. And there really isn't enough news on it for this to be a good game in 2008. I hope it's fucking awesome though. :|

@geldonyetich2: No, the Non-MMO Warmonger from netdevil was what i was posting about.

I figured that out a tad late by doing something as daring as reading the rest of the thread. :P

Looked like an interesting game (the non-MMO Warmonger) but I'm hesitant to bother with it because apparently it's a physics card toy.

The PhisX card is basicly required, but from what i WAS able to play... It would only improve the carnage.

Yes.