How many developers?

How big is the team of active developers for Gamestudio? jcl, are you the only one working on it full time? I found some posts where you stated that you will hire some new developers after Marco and Doug left the company but it seems like that never happened? What about Wlad? Is he gone too?

We're having currently 4 developers, and will have 6 by the end of the year.

You won't see much of Wlad or other developers in this Forum because, well, they are developers, and busy with developing.

I am not working full time on Gamestudio, but most of the others are.

Just curious: do you have seperate teams for
GALEP and gamestudio, or are they working on both product lines?

We have separate teams, only I'm the poor guy who has to work on both.

I appreciate you share the info with us . Thanks!

Yes, thanks for your answer. Who the team members are and who works on what would also be interesting to know though.

This thread makes my day!!

Are there some bigger projects going on in the background which will surprise us? :p What are the full time developers working on?

When looking on the beta page one could get the impression that Gamestudio is in some kind of minimal life support mode until more developers join the team. Most features listed there are mini features which don't sound like they take very long to implement. Except maybe GED but that gets developed by an external developer who isn't part of the official Gamestudio team or is he?

Is it still you, André Weiß, Wlad and his son? Or did anything changed in the past?

What tasks are you assigning to the new developers?

We are indeed preparing a bigger game project. For this reason, I'll be less often in the forum in the next time than I used to be. Some of our developers are assigned to preparing this task, and the two more in fall will be too. This project requires some new features of the engine and editors that might on the long run mean major changes for A7 in the sections of networking, server, physics, and content import. However, I'm not able to tell more at this point.

Good to hear, I always wanted to see what the devs can do with A7.

Yay Gamestudio will grow up to Unity and Torque!!

Sounds great

Skaphander Returns :P

Interesting.

JCL, is this an in-house motivated project or from a 3rd party? Will the game source be available later?

This thing makes me happy because I ever thought that you always needed a real project to face real gamedev problems and issues to make the engine benefit from it...

Best wishes for your project!
- Christian

You mean finally those guys who write the engine have to use it?
Thats maybe the best that could ever happen.

Can you say anything on the "type" of game that is being planned?
FPS, stragegy, RPG, other?
The more info the better, I understand some may be secret.

I'd like to see an FPS personally, but I don't think it's one. I could think of an RPG...

I'd love to see a FPS-RPG merger (like Fallout3) thats MMORPG also.
I think that would potentially be a cool game, as well as "stretching" the engine
in all the directions I want it to go.

Yeah, would be cool, but I don't think they are making a MMORPG. That would be too good...

JCL DID say networking, so let me dream, please?

And JCL DID say physics. Could it be PhysX??

And jcl DID say he cannot not give out more information.

Don't broke our dreams. :P

It's just too much fun.

yep, let us dream

well if we want the engine stretched lets hope it's a 2d/3d mmo-fps-rpg-rts-tbs-vehicle-puzzle-action-adventure game.

jcl isn't interested in normal computer games. It will be a philosophical game about some Hilbert's topic. :p

the best think they could do is to make a freeware game or something playable in a browser similar to what torque did with legions, a form of self advertising, just a game that shows acceptable graphics to todays AAA gamers and that has some cool effects and multiplayer would be a major plus.

Gamestudio wishlist:
1) Web-player.
2) PhysX.
3) Mac OSX export.
4) (Not important) iPhone export.

And after that, Gamestudio will be the best engine ever!!

5) better work with shaders

Yes, working with shaders is too low level in Gamestudio. Most competitors (Unity, C4,...) have moved on to some kind of higher level shader generators.

http://aras-p.info/blog/2009/05/05/shaders-must-die/
http://aras-p.info/blog/2009/05/07/shaders-must-die-part-2/
http://aras-p.info/blog/2009/05/10/shaders-must-die-part-3/

SimGod

No, seriously:

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=277293#Post277293

Then no one would make anything new. "too low level" is an ugly way to put it, though I can understand if you want some additional higher level options. HLSL with A7 (and especially with the extra functions from default.fx) is easier than Lite-C or C-Script, and indie developers in particular (who often lack the resources to go for a photo-real look [too many games go for that look anyway]) could do with some uniqueness in the graphics department.

I'm stoked they're working on an in-house project, but I think the main changes will be in the editors and workflow, with a few extra functions in Lite-C, because the programming side is already very nice: concise, simple, and powerful.

Jibb