hello everyone,
thank you for all your kind words and support. I really appreciate your understanding over this. After all, how couldn't you? you're game developers yourselves.
However, Nitro is right on this one and i guess i do owe an apology. If we were a proffesional company, I guess we'd let the PR guy, or girl, do their normal advertising routine, getting people exciting but not really announce anything and i guess we'd be also follow a strict design schedule from beginning to end. But we're not. We're three people; only started to work under the same roof this summer and occasionally hiring people for artwork.
Intense Series started with the idea of ripping parts out of a project called "Vain" and giving it away to the community, either for a price or freeware. I released Intense Dialogues from Vain's code in 4 or 5 months time and started working on ripping the Ai code next, about 2 years ago. Vain's Ai used a finite state machine, a buggy pathfinding system and wasn't really configurable from Wed, so i guess i practically designed everything from scratch.
About one year later i made a demo as a release canditate which included FSM still, Walser's A* pathfinding which was solid but 2 dimensional and terribly slow and some basic take cover techniques. Still, you'd need to be a programmer to apply this to your project.
I got mixed reviews out of that demo so i decided to hold on from releasing anything. Of course, i had already promised several release dates by then which i guess i shouldn't. But at that time i truly belived i would have something ready by then, so i thought i would share the good news to the community.
Anyway, i'm glad i didn't. And you should be glad too since you'll be getting a much better value for your money now. Intense Ai has evolved to a complete Game creation system which just happens to use 3d GameStudio. Some of the features we're working on right now are completely beyond the bounds of Ai but i'm sure most of the people we'll be really glad to have them.
For example, you can now define through WED that every weapon will emit a different sound, depending on the material it hits. Also, i might be releasing three additional engines with the Commercial version which have nothing to do with Ai: Music Engine (2 mixers which play a certain track on request, fading out any current music playing), a cutscene camera engine and a script engine. This engines might require minimal programming for now, but i will think of doing a WED interface for them as well in the future.
That suff has nothing to do with Ai any more, but while we were making our own Intense Ai demo, we had to figure out what makes games like Doom 3, Far Cry and Fear to stand out from indie games and have that overwhelming feeling that they do. And then we realised that these games would be nothing if they didn't had a scripting engine for example. Think of Max Payne 1 and 2. The Ai was reactive of course like Intense Ai is(if you shoot a bad guy, he'll shoot back or take cover, whatever.. no scripting there..) but if you take all the scripted events from that game, you would end up with a plain level where you move around and shoot bad guys. But since they could script stuff like having the worker guy at the beginning of Max Payne 2 to lead you to where the noise was heard and turned out he was one of the burglars himself leading you to a trap, that put the game in a whole new level(and made it a success). Now, you'll be able to do stuff like that too with IAI and we're building the demo to prove it.
I honestly believe that there will be a lot of games released (first person shooters or other types) in a very short period, just by using Intense Ai, which can be as overwhelming and..intense
as any AAA game out there. We may not be able to compete on the graphics level just yet, but i'm hoping that the demo we're making will show that we're almost on par on the gameplay level. So our work is almost done now, and it's up to this community to create some impressive projects with it.
So to cut this short (or i guess it's too late for that), i am sorry i didn't deliver on my deadlines but i can't really say i regret doing so. I hope you'll all feel the same way when you do get to see the final result.
And to give you a little tip before i stop this humongous post, we really...really wish to get this demo on jcl's goodies folder for the new gamestudio cd. and the deadline for that is on 15th of september or something..
Cheers everyone. Thanks for waiting,
Aris
