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Mother-ship Carrier Harbinger - Large Terran Carrier (Tier 9) Concept New view and Planet stuff
Blog RSS Feed Report abuse Latest News: Start of Beta3, Gameplay Changes and Kickstarter

0 comments by TheD3X on Mar 13th, 2013

Hello followers and stray viewers!This is the GNS on Air again! My Name is Dex and I'm the lead developer for Sirius Online: Empires Rising. A long time has passed since the last news, the SUP-Episodes stopped quite a long time ago and the latest comment was about "inspired" spaceships from EVE. So, now as a brand new start of the next BETA, the so called BETA3, I want to inform you about the lot of changes that are coming up.

As most of you expected the first Beta 3 Update on 1st of February, you probably just were disappointed as this profile remained silent. No words from Kickstarter, nothing new anyhow. These issues and concerns I want to adress here. We had long staff meetings, about the game itself, how to manifest a steady position in the market. We had meetups with the german governmental funding agency. We had a lot of interesting discussions about new stuff.First, we decided about the realistic approach and finally come to the conclusion that third person view, like in this big idol - Freelancer - is the key for a better game feeling and scalability.With this in mind I restarted developing the graphical part on the new gameplay.
Up next we finished the final cover art, which you will see in several licensed, exclusive stores. Any preorderer so far will get his own special edition with a Boxart of a Planet of his choice and signed by the dev and team.


With this change in mind and the new approach to the game, we also decided to move over to the Guild-Wars Model of "Pay once for the game, play free", with a fluff item shop. We adjusted the Boxed Edition and Digital Key prices to 10€*/5€, with the boxed edition containing 500 Elitium, the ingame store currency.So there were a lot of changes in the past six weeks, but we hope our long absence here hasn't left big harm in you looking forward to this project.

*Additional Shipping Cost, depending on Country.

While I was doing some code-maintenance anyways, I decided to step more indepth and am happy to announce new additions to the DDX7.5-Engine, called Stencil-Shading and Dot3-Bumpmapping. We still have to evaluate and balance on the performance part of this powerful feature for a directX7-Based Engine.

  • Dot3-Bumpmapping for more Detail
  • Stencil-Shading for model-accurate Shades on any surfaces
  • 3rd-Person-camera for more space beauty
  • realistic planet transfer
  • revised gating system
  • greatly reduced texture size
  • new patcher downloads and patches your game automatically

New view and Planet stuffNew view and Planet stuffCargo Ship tier1Sirius Online 0.64 Footage

Oh yes, about that... we are still grappling all our videos together to make an interesting pitch video. Our initial goal is to achieve 10.000$. This would cover the initial startup cost. However the more funding we receive, the more merits are in for you. More when Kickstarter actually launches.

On another note, to get you introduced to our team, we will do two-weekly team portraits, where a member of the team introduces himself and tells you about what he did the past two weeks. As initiator of this its my turn to begin with.
Okay, as you may eventually know, my real name's Rene, I'm almost 25 now, and I live in Wilhelmshaven, a medium sized town at the north sea. I started developing at the age of seven on my trustworthy Amiga Plus 4. Actually my dad helped me into it by showing me how to make games - and that was it. I was magnetically attached to coding, back then with Ami BASIC, later with Q BASIC and now with DDX7.5. When I'm not counting all the pauses in between the first stones of Sirius were set in 2001, with a barely playable alpha which still embarrasses me, because its still somewhere in the web (but I won't point you there).I'm currently unemployed (in a City like this there are next to no jobs in game industry and I cant move away from here.), so I'm doing this project as full time and try to get my life's dream done with Sirius.When I'm not at the computer I challenge Sheldon from BBT as being the biggest Nerd in history by watching stars through my telescope, try to disprove relativity theory or do more nerdy stuff.
The last two weeks were a lot of business meetings about founding and funding a company, attending several meetings with advisories, with personal trainers and more.
You can ask me more in the comments, I will for sure answer!

Every week a news post, and a new Q&A section.
New Video.
More about the new system.

If you can't wait for Kickstarter (date unknown) or just have a few spare bucks over for this project, we'd be happy to get generous donations. All donators doing this over paypal will get the same rewards as later kickstarter backers + plus a secret bonus. Also all backers and donators will be named in the credits until otherwise wanted.

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Sirius Online 0.64 w/o Patcher

Sirius Online 0.64 w/o Patcher

Jan 16, 2013 Full Version 0 comments

Last Beta2 Full release - as promised. the patcher will follow soon and deliver you a nice and relaxed patch atmosphere.

GUI Modpack

GUI Modpack

Nov 17, 2012 GUIs 0 comments

Download, Modify, plug in as GUI3/4/5/whatevernumberyoulike, edit settings.ini to resemble your chosen GUI ID and have fun!

Post comment Comments  (0 - 10 of 27)
VasQuarde
VasQuarde Dec 17 2012, 11:03am says:

Excuse me for pointing this out, But the Dragonuv looks
suspiciously like the recently added Venture from the
latest expansion for Eve Online. Is this a coincidence or
intended inspiration? Obvious difference is the top
mounted guns, which do look nice. Eve Online version
in the link below so you can compare.

Cdn.overclock.net

+3 votes     reply to comment
TheD3X
TheD3X Dec 17 2012, 1:10pm replied:

Yes, we admit, EVE Online is a big inspiration for us, because their designers are geniuses and their general game design is quite awesome. But to clarify things, to avoid getting a c&d from CCP hf. we reworked the Dragunov and you can see the current version in our gallery.

+2 votes     reply to comment
Insolent.
Insolent. Nov 18 2012, 7:23pm says:

I love games like this! I'm curious, will there be trade? Missions?

+5 votes     reply to comment
TheD3X
TheD3X Nov 18 2012, 8:07pm replied:

Both. While we try to avoid all static dungeon/mission things, we came up with the idea of "Invasions", spawing a group of enemies on accepting a mission, based on the amount of players in the group. Trade and Economy will be fully in players hand, because players decide on prices and such.

+3 votes     reply to comment
Insolent.
Insolent. Nov 18 2012, 8:11pm replied:

Cool! That sounds like a very natural way to handle both the economy and missions.

+5 votes     reply to comment
Neo007
Neo007 Oct 17 2012, 2:09am says:

No 3rd Person cam?

+4 votes     reply to comment
TheD3X
TheD3X Oct 18 2012, 5:41am replied:

No, because Sirius Online relies on your Player skill and Field Of View - and in real life you can't switch to 3rd person view either. You are supposed to use your own skills in this games, not on what the camera can see.
As an example - a player sneaks up in the shadows of asteroids on you in an asteroid Belt - if you can just use your Camera with a bigger FOV, you could see him "around the edges", which would give you an unfair advantage and would take the thrill out.

+7 votes     reply to comment
Insolent.
Insolent. Nov 18 2012, 7:15pm replied:

True enough, and I like that you're trying to make the game challenging and realistic. One exception to the rule against third person views, though, would be a camera drone that you release that provides the pilot with its view on his HUD or helmet visor. If it tailed the ship, it could provide a third person view, and it could scout around as well.

In reality, you wouldn't want a transparent cockpit at all, as it would be too weak and susceptible to breaking. You'd want an armored hull (especially on the front of the ship) with a camera that shows you the outside. Then, only if all your cameras broke, you might want to open up an armored cover to reveal a windshield, so you could see.

+6 votes     reply to comment
Neo007
Neo007 Oct 21 2012, 12:16am replied:

Oh!! Thanks for the reply. And nice progress. Waiting eagerly!

+3 votes     reply to comment
CGO
CGO Oct 15 2012, 12:09pm says:

Things are coming together nicely. Keep your eyes on this page.

+4 votes     reply to comment
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Sirius Online
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Windows
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veKtor Studios eK
Engine
DirectD3X 7.5
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@RealStephano I've been asking this myself for the past two days...

May 13 2013, 5:33am by vektor_thed3x

@RealStephano Tampon also is a turkish word for Car Bumper

May 13 2013, 4:57am by vektor_thed3x

@Maatish Klingt nach Supporthotline.

May 10 2013, 4:39pm by vektor_thed3x

@CCP_Sisyphus CPU/GPU/SPU/PSU-Fans sadly have to be replaced as is, so new GPU/SPU/PSU or new CPU cooling unit.

May 10 2013, 4:31pm by vektor_thed3x

@CCP_Sisyphus *insert success meme* Dependa on the location of the fan, you can just unplug it from the mainboard. Look for the 3-pin molex

May 10 2013, 4:25pm by vektor_thed3x

@CCP_Sisyphus Its just a damaged fan, perhaps?

May 10 2013, 2:45am by vektor_thed3x

@CCP_karkur Now its feasting with Thor in Valhalla

May 9 2013, 1:40pm by vektor_thed3x

@miramour great new picture ;)

May 9 2013, 11:34am by vektor_thed3x

@EVE_WOLFPACKED Wait what why?

May 8 2013, 1:56pm by vektor_thed3x

@RealStephano It would have been wierder when i said "I loved myself." but it would've been fun adding grumpycat: "and it was horrible."

May 8 2013, 10:26am by vektor_thed3x

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