new!
Apolyton All News RSS Feed
MEIER AND BRIGGS ATTENDING
(1 March 2003, 23:47 | Misc) Sid Meier and Jeff Briggs, Director of Creative Development and President/Chief Executive Officer of Firaxis Games respectively, are two of the special guests to attend the three-day "PhillyClassic 4" event for East Coast Classic Gamer. The event will take place at the Valley Forge Convention Center in Pennsylvania from March 28-30. Passes range in price from $20US to $60US depending upon the number of days and associated access privileges.
Thanks to CivFanatics for the news tip. - DanQ
`CIV` TO GO?
(1 March 2003, 23:39 | Misc) RedShift (RS), a Hungarian group specialized in developing games for mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), has a petition going to convince Infogrames (IG) to give their permission to allow the said group to port the original Civilization to the said platforms. IG is the legal entity that holds the Civilization trademark.
RS is targetting game development for both the Nokia Communinator and Palm platforms. Thanks to m_m_x for the heads-up. - DanQ
`PTW` V1.21F PATCH: U.S. ONLY
(1 March 2003, 01:47 | Civ3) Patch v1.21f for Civilization III: Play The World was unleashed to affected netizens to upgrade their copy of the product yesterday if so desired. Note that this patch, 11.2MB in size, is designed for the United States version only and is therefore incompatible with any European version of the game. Twelve changes with half as many additions and more than twice as many fixes constitute this latest release. It is unknown at this time if this will be the file update for CivIII: PTW.
This file is also being mirrored here at Apolyton CS. - DanQ
EARLY EDITOR RELEASE
(1 March 2003, 01:38 | MoO3 | 23 comments) It has only been publicly available for a little over twenty-four hours as of the time of this news posting, but "MoO3Edit" by `Twostep` has already been downloaded more than 140 times from Apolyton CS` Master of Orion III forums. This now, in `Twostep``s own words, now minimally functional utility for the said game, presently allows users to (a) view images within .mob files and (b) view and edit text files. Alongside a recommendation to back-up your MoO3 installation data, he also states:
Known bugs: Lots, I`m sure. I`ve only tested this on my work machine, which runs [Windows]XP Pro[fessional], so I have no idea if it runs on other systems. I don`t know if it works on foreign language systems, it is *not* unicode compliant, so it won`t work on Japanese/Chinese systems. It should work for you Europeans.
The file in question is 280KB in size. - DanQ
REVIEW LIGHT FROM `GAMESPOT`
(1 March 2003, 01:31 | MoO3) A full review of Master of Orion III is not yet available from GameSpot, but a one-page hands-on impression written by the site`s Sam Parker is. It was posted this past Thursday. Parker also captured and has made available six screenshots to view.
[This game] has received a lot of attention for being the follow-up to a well-known turn-based strategy series, but it`s definitely not a game for those who are unfamiliar with 4X space strategy games or are unwilling to spend quite a bit of time to figure it out, Parker begins.
Onto more specifics:
Quicksilver [Software (QS), MoO3`s developers] put a lot of effort into creating extensive AI automation to reduce micromanagement, and allow you to focus on high-level decisions and ship movements. [..] [It] distinguishes itself from its predecessors in more ways than just this automation system, and certainly the scale of the game is larger than ever... [t]here is no such thing as a short game [here].
Parker closes about by noting that MoO3`s release scheduled release in December of last year was put back to February 25th because, as QS reportered, the company was working on developing the game`s multiplayer components. Now that the game is readily available, we can actually get a good sense of the game`s multiplayer potential, he says, and certainly the rest of this third generation Master of Orion title as well. - DanQ
BEHIND THE CINEMATIC
(1 March 2003, 00:31 | RoN) You may or may not have downloaded the opening cinematic trailer to Rise of Nations, but you have likely not read a "Behind The Scenes" account of its creation. Yesterday, Big Huge Games (BHG) -- the company in part behind the sixty-five second clip and the producers of RoN -- posted such a report on their website. Below is an excerpt from the introduction written by Dave Inscore, BHG` Vice-President of Graphics:
After completing the animatic Microsoft [Game Studios (MGS), RoN`s publishers] invited [us] in for further brainstorm sessions. Ideas and sketches were exchanged through numerous emails and phone calls, combining each of our own visions into a shared game plan. Here`s a sampling of some of our early notes... [..]
Armed with the notes and animatic [we] and M[GS] set out to find just the right animation house to deliver the final product. [..] The next step involved storyboards. [..] After hanging the sketches on the playtest lab wall the [collective] team finalized revision suggestions and settled on what would be the final blueprint, paving the way for the character and environment modeling to begin. This is where it gets really interesting!
A page full of storyboards, fifty-four in all, are followed by fourteen pieces of concept art and seventeen image renderings. - DanQ
