Despite how silent things may seem here, lots is happening. To prove it, here's another _Torrent_ soundbite!
Quite a few bugs were fixed and new features added since the previous soundbite. Here are a few examples. * Ship navigation is more physics-based with drag simulation. Sure, there isn't any air to create drag in space, but there's no sound in space, either. * Collision alerts. When a target is five or fewer seconds from colliding, a collision alert sound overlays its positional cue. After all, being told that you're going to collide is no good if you aren't sure *what* is about to hit you. The alert system doesn't just look at current positions but extrapolates into the future as well, so if you and an asteroid will collide soon regardless of your current positions, the alert is triggered. * The embedded screen-reader is complete. It's complex enough to support dialogues, sliders, buttons, checkboxes and text fields. When sampled speech isn't available, text-to-speech kicks in. * Licensing is hardware-specific but almost instantaneous. Enter your name and email address and either be redirected to a purchase page or have a new key generated on the fly, all from within the game. Waits of hours or days for key generation are non-existent for _Surreal Horizons_ games. * But perhaps the most interesting feature is the addition of aliens. These vicious creatures pursue you relentlessly, navigating the asteroid fields and swarming upon you from all directions. Included is a soundbite of an alien swarm level. The aliens still need some tuning as they manage to hold their own quite well against me, and I might have had a more difficult time had one not collided with another and destroyed itself, but this gives some idea of how they will behave. Much of the explanation from the previous soundbite still applies, though the sound index is again demonstrated. One interesting addition is the speaking state machine. While it might take a second or more to audibly note that an alien is retreating, it seems like it would be instantly visually obvious. As such, when the aliens change states from attacking to retreating, messages are spoken making it instantly obvious. This seems to offer numerous emersive possibilities for future games--speech cues tied into state machine changes might eventually provide a narrative flow of agents' actions to accompany the sound effects of those actions. But, enough talk. [Listen for yourself][1]. [1]: http://surrealhorizons.com/assets/2007/1/19/torrent-aliens.mp3 Just a few more notes. I'm very close to seeking testers for a closed beta. If interested, join the [mailing lists][2] and look for further announcements there. [2]: http://lists.surrealhorizons.com Also, news updates are available as an [atom feed][3], with accompanying audio as attachments. You can subscribe to _Surreal Horizons_ updates via your news aggregator, and even have accompanied soundbites delivered as podcasts! [3]: http://surrealhorizons.com/feed/atom.xml Enjoy. _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. [email protected] To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
