Knights: New Teaser Video, Technology and Fundraiser, We need help!
Mar 11 2011
So a few major things to talk about. New Technology, New Video, our fundraiser and our team! Lets start with the most exciting of it all! Our new video! Its simple, its short and sweet and hopefully amusing. Here it is.
Next, the new Technology!
Yes as I am sure, Everybody knows UDK just made two major announcements! one about an increased royalty threshold for developers, which is fantastic, Epic is giving every developer a better chance at getting off the ground, properly, with less hands in your pockets taking your money! This is fantastic, and actually amounts to a lot of money we get to hang on to.
UDK also just released a new build with DX11 Support! This is BIG news for knights, Our goals of being a NEXT generation game on the PC is now much more possible.
Here is a snippet of some of the new features in UDK and the new royalty threshold.
"Important DirectX features now shipping with UDK include:
- Tessellation and displacement;
- Geometry shaders;
- Multisampled textures; and
- Shader Model 5.
High-end rendering features include:
- Image-based reflections that allow surfaces of any shape to reflect an approximate version of scenes, with varying glossiness across surfaces, anisotropic HDR highlights and anti-aliasing;
- Subsurface scattering (SSS) that simulates the light that scatters inside semi-translucent materials, making character skin come alive;
- Anti-aliased masked materials that super sample the edges of masked and alpha-tested materials, making character hair more look realistic than ever before;
- Deferred rendering with MSAA support;
- Bokeh depth of field providing close to film-quality DOF, with artist-controllable Bokeh; and
- High-quality dynamic shadows from many lights on the environment, such as shadows for point lights and other light sources.
NVIDIA’s APEX technology has also been integrated into the engine and ships with UDK.
In addition, Epic has raised the royalty-free revenue threshold for UDK commercial developers. Under the new license agreement, developers don’t pay any royalties until their total revenue exceeds $50,000 (US). Beyond that, developers keep 75 percent of each dollar they receive and Epic receives 25 percent.
What a fantastic time to be a UDK developer!
Next up for discussion is the Kickstarter.com Fundraiser for Knights: Spiral Islands. Things are going good, we are at 30 backers! but we only have one month to raise 8500 dollars! We really do need your help to make this happen! Please do what you can to drum up some support for us, Talk to Youtube Channel operators, People with massive Twitter followings, News sites, whatever you can to help us reach our goal. Knights is young, its new, We do not have much of a following, and that makes the fund raising quite difficult when our audience is so small. We have had support in the 500 dollar range, as well as the typical pledge of 50 dollars, Which is fantastic! we just need more volume, more hits, more more more.
Okay Onto our team! We have One new member, who is infact an old member, He was a 3d artist on Eon with us back in 2004, and he is now a professional Flash programmer, so he will be doing our Scaleform UI and Menues as well as 3d art, So Welcome Billy Kurilko to our small but expanding team of Myself, Roman, Brad and John. This gives us a solid development team with all aspects covered! But that still leaves us entirely overwhelmed! so please, if you know a programmer, technical artist, artist, Level Designer, musician, sound tech or anything looking for a project to support, please, send him my way. Now is the time to start expanding our team, now that our development is picking up speed. Interested in helping?
Take care, and thank you for reading and i hope you enjoy the video!
