USA Games News 9/7/2013
USA Games News
Sep. 7, 2013
Introduction
Welcome gamers to the USA Games News. We know that it has been a very long time since our last news letter, and we felt it was a good time to send out a new one. So here we are with news and information about USA Games and our products.
First, we would like to thank all of you who participated in our informal survey regarding the USA Games Evolution Engine a few days ago. We really valued your comments and suggestions, and your responses really helped give us some direction regarding our engine. More on that later.
Second, I would like to state that I am personally doing a lot better than I have been for a long time. Just to recap last year I had a number of health related issues from the common cold to a more serious situation where I fell down while getting out of the bathtub and seriously injured my neck. After many months of rest and therapy I am now doing better than I have been in months. Although, I am n ot 100% back to normal I am able to get up and do some programming, and am slowly but surely getting our development back on some sort of schedule. I can not say for sure when any of our products will be ready for release, but it should be enough to know I am once again working on them.
Evolution 3D
A couple of days ago I sent out an informal survey regarding the future of the Evolution Engine. The basic point of the survey was to figure out if potential third-party game developers wanted it to remain primarily a C++ based engine as it is now, or if they wanted us to branch out into .NET or Python. The majority of you felt keeping it as a C++ library was the best option, and that it was not really in our best interests to put out a .NET or Python based engine at this time. This has really helped us feel satisfied that the direction we are heading is a good one for us and our customers, and for the foreseeable future we will continue to keep the Evolution Engine as a C++ library and will likely license it more as a C++ API rather than an engine as such.
There are of course many good reasons to keep it as a C++ based library rather than rewrite it as a .NET library or as a Python module. The main one is we have already put more than two years into development, the engine library is stable, and rewriting it would only delay its release. For that reason alone it makes sense to keep what we have and license that. The other reasons include easier access to libraries and APIs for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Most libraries out there are designed for C or C++, and while there are usually wrappers for .NET or Python that is not always the case. In cases where there aren't available wrappers we would have to spend time writing them to make them available to our .NET or Python engine when they are instantly available to an engine written in C++. Factor in better performance, better security, and less dependencies need to be installed we are prett y sure the community is right. Keeping our engine written in C++ has many advantages and few disadvantages. The only downside to this is that it has a higher learning curve for new developers, but that could be overcome with some decent guides and documentation.
After all, one of the purposes of writing the Evolution Engine was to simplify access to things like speech, input, sound, and so forth. All of those things are wrapped using wrapper classes that make it simple to get a basic game up and running in a few ours in C++ as all the low-level code for things like DirectInput, DirectSound, Sapi, etc is wrapped up in quick and easy to use classes. While not quite as easy as BGT, for example, it still would not be nearly as hard as doing it all from scratch.
As many of you probably know all of our commercial games like Tomb Hunter and Raceway are written using the Evolution Engine, and it is fairly stable. So I think once we figure out a few things we may begin licensing it to potential third-parties sometime in the not too distant future.
Tomb Hunter
It has been several months since we have released a beta or any news on the progress of this game, and we decided to just give everyone a quick update on the progress of this game. We are in the process of updating the games story line, adding some new levels, but we would prefer to keep certain aspects quiet until we have something final for everyone to download and play.
What we can say right now is that one of the reasons we have been slow to release this title is there are a couple of long standing bugs we have been trying to resolve. As these are definite show stoppers they must get fixed before we can release the game to the public. We are hoping that it won't take too long to get these bugs fixed and we can put out a new beta in the next couple of months or so. We definitely plan to release the new updated beta sometime this fall if at all possible.
Something else we will mention here is we have finally decided to switch to SAPI output once and for all. In our prior betas of Tomb Hunter we were prerecording wav files of Acapela Heather which sounded good, but technically wasn't legal for us to do unless we licensed the voices for that purpose. We certainly could have, but that would only set us further back financially. The other reason we made this change is that when we were doing beta testing of prior betas people complained the voice was too fast, the voice was too slow, they didn't like the voice, etc. This made us consider that using a static voice was not ideal for our end users and what we needed was a speech output system that could be sped up, slowed down, or changed per the end user's preference. Thus using SAPI was really the only way to take care of that issue for everyone involved. So that is what we did.
As usual we won't make any statements exactly when we will release the new Tomb Hunter beta, bu t let us just say we hope it will be sometime this fall. We have something very playable besides the bugs and we really want to get our flagship product out there and in the hands of gamers once again.
WWE: Slam
For a few months now I have been dropping hints about a wrestling game in the works named "WWE: Slam," which was sort of based on the Dos wrestling games like Piledriver and Wrestling League Simulator. At first we developed it in Python, intended to release it as a text based game, but have since reconsidered the wisdom of that choice. We know we can release something better than that, and have decided to go back to square one and rewrite it as a full fledged audio game using the Evolution Engine including DirectX for input, audio, and SAPI for speech output. The advantages of course will be many.
The first is that you, the gamer, will have direct event driven keyboard input. Meaning you will have first letter key navigation, scrolling menus, hot keys, and all the other hallmarks of a modern Windows game. Instead of having to type the ID code for a wrestler into the edit box and press enter you can simply arrow up or down through the menu or list of performers and press enter on the one you want. Much simpler by far.
The second is SAPI output. Instead of having to review the screen with the Jaws cursor, Window-Eyes mouse cursor, or NVDA review Cursor it will automatically be spoken out loud by your SAPI voice. This is one of the advantages of Jim Kitchen's games, and we have decided to follow his lead by using SAPI speech instead of forcing the end user to rely on his or her screen reader to review the screen.
Finally, a superior audio environment. In our original version we were using Pygame Mixer to play the sound effects, and it is such a simplistic API that while it worked we could not provide a very realistic or detailed audio environment. So we have decided to use say DirectSound on Windows and OpenAL on Mac and Linux releases to get the best quality audio environment possible. Most of the sound effects right now is crowd ambiance, entrance music, ringing bells, but later on we hope to ad grunts, the sound of punches, kicks, slams, and so forth as the performers perform moves. Having a realistic sounding environment is just one of many reasons why we are now rewriting the game.
Now, we know some of you are probably going to worry about how long it will take to rewrite the game. No doubt it will take some time to do, but not as much time as you may think. We already have a lot of the logic figured out, have text messages, etc. We just need to rewrite it in C++ and thanks to our Evolution Engine we might have something playable in a month or so. that's not such a real issue as some might think.
As to when we will release it that is hard to say. We have a lot of irons in the fire, and until it is rewritten we can't really guess at a release date, nor woul d we try at this point. We'll just keep you updated as we near something you can download and play.
Sincerely,
Thomas Ward
USA Games Interactive
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=147636#p147636
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