Imagine a world where the villages of humans were scattered along mountaintops, and the world below was completely blocked off by an impassible wall of clouds. In a world like that, advancements in air travel would precede both land and sea. This is the kind of world that Aero Empire is set in. In this world, the player can rise through the ranks, from a lowly gunner manning a turret aboard an airship to the commander of several airships, ordering the crew of your own airship and the captains of the airships in your squad. Aero Empire is a cross-genre game, incorporating elements of role-playing games, shooters, flight simulators, and squad combat. Production on the game started November 25th, 2008, and is scheduled to release by the end of 2010, and a potential sequel focusing on nation management may come later. The single player version will be free to download and play, with no restrictions.
For our recent interview here: Indiedb.com , a new scene was created by placing a airship next to a marketplace with boatwood trees on top. Here are additional images of that scene that were not used in the interview.
Looks great! Are those shadows in real time?
Yes. Those shadows are rendered at high quality, which will only run real time on a good graphics card (it ran fine on my NVIDIA 280). The engine uses PSSM (parallel split shadow maps) with some tweaks and random sampling.