Interview with Jamie McNeely of StrategyFirst Part 2

Interviewer: Steve Lieb
Jamie McNeely, Executive Producer, StrategyFirst

1)    Looking at the screenshots, the "carrier destroyed" one especially strikes me as very Babylon5-ish.  Same with the 4-engine fighters. Since the (disappointing) cancellation of that much-anticipated game, any thoughts to maybe offering almost immediately a mod based on that series?  There were (at least at the time of cancellation) a boatload of disappointed fans.

You’re asking a lot of us! J For the next few months we will continue to put our full efforts into O.R.B. in order to get it done.

Leaving copyright issues aside, this is one of the major reasons why the development team designed the game to be modifiable. When O.R.B. ships it will be the sum of the development team’s creative vision. I am really looking forward to seeing what others can do with the game system we have created. I hope that they can take it to places we never thought of.

  2)    You talk about importing custom meshes into the game - that's very cool, and a wise thing to enable.  What sort of per-ship poly limits are you expecting?  It appears that the ships are currently pretty boxy, but is that more a result of engine-limit or artist/developer time limit?  What about scene-total polys?  I guess I'm trying to figure out where this engine lands in the rendering department – how many polygons typically come from your average asteroid field and how would this have an impact on max number of ships in 3d view?  How does the engine handle curves - better than, say, q2? I'd vote for EMBM, since it a) is relatively easy to implement - just another texture pass, basically. b) looks very cool, and would add realism to the asteroids especially without a performance hit. c) is supported by my Matrox g400 :) I'm not sure how hard it is to implement in the rendering, but dynamic lens flares in space games seem to really make the games look a lot, well, sexier.

There are currently no in-game restrictions to the number of polygons a ship can have (typical models have between 150 and 2000 polys).  All units of a given race follow a particular theme.  We wanted to make sure that all races were as different as possible so it would be easier to differentiate them from one another.  The fact that some of the Malus ships are boxier is because they are more heavily armored and slightly lower tech than their Alyssian counterparts.  There are also more advanced races in the game that have much sleeker designs and a completely different look. 

There are no limits the amount of polygons displayable in a scene since the engine was designed to be entirely scalable.  A typical scene with absolutely no optimizations can very easily have more than 50000 polys.  Currently, with all optimizations enabled, this number hovers around the 5000-12000 polys range. 

There is an in-game squad system that limits the number of smaller units that can be built.  Furthermore, units past a certain distance can be set to be iconized thus reducing the overall number of polygons in a given scene.  The engine handles curves much in the same way any other upcoming 3D space sim/RTS engine does ;).

Although EMBM is a very nice feature, we are sticking to our plan to support features common to the broadest variety of D3D compatible cards. It would be a considerable art effort to make all those bump maps for the 100 or so different meshes in the game. On a more positive note, dynamic lens flares as well as planetoid shadowing are supported.

3)    Ship to ship or ship to base ramming - legitimate tactic or trollish nonsense?

We have implemented ramming and “kamikaze” style attacks for all units in the game as a tactic, but whether we include it in the final version is yet to be determined.

4)      Weapons - what sort of weapons will there be?  I'm assuming missiles and beams, but what about guns, mines, captor mines, etc.?  Ground (er, asteroid-) based defenses?

O.R.B. features multiple weapon types. In the screen shots we provided you can see that the most predominant weapons are energy weapons – beams and blasters. Fighters tend to carry blasters and capital ships tend to carry beam weapons.

Some fighters and most capital ships also carry missiles. Fighters carry only a limited number of missiles that must be replenished by docking with the spaceport, carrier vessels or asteroid bases. Missiles on capital ships are limited by their slow rate of fire. We also have torpedoes in the game. Torpedoes are significantly more powerful but move slower than missiles. They are excellent for taking out installations like asteroid bases and spaceports.

Mine layers may be used to create minefields. Minefields are difficult to detect so they can be used effectively in a defensive role or as part of an ambush.

The “ground” defenses for installations like mining platforms and bases are turrets that are towed into position. Once in place they are geo-stationary relative to the body they are defending.

As for the rest of the weapons, we still have some surprises to reveal. ;)