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It seems that nowadays any big game beta seems to have some problems, and they usually include a problem with the framerates. It seems that the latest Hitman game’s no exception to this rule.
The people at Gaming Bolt have been putting the beta of the assassin game through its paces in the last few days before they lose access to it (the access being a bonus of pre-ordering the game) and the results are… well, not great.
Running the game on a Radeon R9290 4GB GPU along with an AMD FX 8350, they’re reporting that during the opening training mission the game is failing to maintain even a steady 30FPS. Other tests done seem to confirm this, with an hour spent on the training mission ship using two 980 TIs it’s hard to get a steady 60FPS. Admittedly the beta isn’t configured for dual GPU set-ups, but even on a single 980 the framerates drop. And this is on quite good hardware too, so you can imagine the issues more affordable hardware could have with it.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the NPC crowds that do it. Less populated areas run faster as there’s a lot less on screen to process and keep track of. Since this is a game about murdering targets that are generally located in very populated areas though, you have to hope that IO Interactive is planning some further tightening of the game’s optimization before the full release.
Mind you, there’s a good track record because Hitman:Absolution was apparently well received on its PC port. So there is hope that IO will have it sorted by launch. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Welcome to your weekly update in interesting things going on in the world of Kickstarter campaigns.
As always I’m starting with news to do with previously covered projects and we’ll start with the bad news first. Space Revolver did not reach its funding target in time, although the developers have said that they are still planning to release the game onto Steam Early Access soon with multiplayer, but a smaller set of weapons and other things that they plan to add to over time. The funding for Ghost Theory was also cancelled a few days ago as they were running far short of their goal. For now the developers are debating whether to approach publishers to get the game made, or to revise their campaign and relaunch it in a few months. Either way, the game is not dead.
Other not so good news comes from the fact that a handful of other games are looking like they won’t be reaching their targets in time, including Project Elliott (and I was really hoping that this one would get made), Dread Bot Factory and Mission to Mars.
However there is some good news to report this week. Invisigun Heroes managed to beat its target with a “huge surge” of attention that pushed it past the goal in the last day or so of the campaign, as well as Poison Bottles having comfortably surpassed its target with 12 more days remaining as of writing. Which Friend and MachiaVillain are also doing well, although both still have a little way to go yet to reach the set funding goals.
Now a note before I go into this – this is not a game. It is however a fairly interesting looking game builder, so I’ve decided to break the rules for once because dammit, it’s my article.
GameSpawner is designed to be a game creation tool that allows for more than one person to work on a game at the same time, using real time updating for teams who might not all be in the same location. It’s built for those who aren’t good at coding and includes a lot of free and editable content to help construct the games. There’s also a hope that GameSpawner can be implemented as a learning tool for colleges and other course that require it.
GameSpawner is looking to make £7,000, and has made £225 already with 27 days to go.
Next up is a game that we actually got a press release through for and has launched only recently.
Wounded is a story of a search. You and your daughter Lisa have had a terrible accident and now you are looking for Lisa, in a world of horror and nightmares. Gather clues to avoid falling into the darkness and giving into your terror. The only way to end the nightmare is “to find Lisa and escape or to die. Horribly.” It’s also got people working on it with credits from games like Watch Dogs, Assassin’s Creed and Outlast.
Wounded has 29 days left to go and has made €106 of its €15,000 goal so far.
Now we have the card game of the week, and its another drinking one, albeit this time crossed over with some hero/RPG elements.
Beer Hero requires you to assemble a team of heroes with stats that vary based on how intoxicated they are. It also requires you as the player to stay sober enough to continue playing. Some heroes fight better drunk, some need to be sober and others have a sweet spot in between. All of this can be altered through playable cards that can raise and lower all stats including intoxication levels. And in case you aren’t a big drinker, they’re planning to have Lite and Dry versions of the game too!
Beer Hero has made $505 so far of its $7,500 goal and has 29 more days to go on its campaign.
The final game for this week is a sandbox adventure game that is said to take inspiration from Sunless Sea and Majora’s Mask.
Set in a city that seems alive, A Place for the Unwilling is the developers attempting to remedy that issue they find with most adventure-filled open-world games – a lot of space that seems empty and devoid of life. So this game will see them fill the urban landscape with characters to meet and engage with as you play.
A Place for the Unwilling has a target set of €20,000 and has 23 days left. So far it has made €7,831.
AMD have been surprisingly quiet in recent weeks, seemingly pinning much of its business plan this year on its upcoming Zen line of processors; but it seems the time is being spent very deliberately and cleverly, with a heavy focus on Research and Development to improve its CPU Technology further. And if the most recent leak, which comes courtesy a CERN engineer who gave a talk at the IT Technical Forum on market trends concerning data centres, is to be believed, it may be about to pay off in a spectacular fashion.
Basing his claims on what evidently seems to be information supplied to CERN by AMD themselves, the engineer stated that Zen CPUs will benefit from Symmetrical Multi-Threading, which would seem to be AMD’s own version of Intel’s Hyper-Threading. More shocking, however, is that CPUs in the Zen line will apparently feature up to 32 physical cores in a single package, though this is spread over two 16-core modules within the same die – effectively two chips in one.
If that wasn’t enough, Zen will also apparently support 8-channel DDR4, meaning a computer with one of these monsters installed could feature 8 separate RAM cards. Assuming an 8GB card in each slot, this means a potential maximum of 64 Gigabytes of DDR4 RAM.. excuse me while I pick my jaw off the floor.
The CERN engineer also reiterated previously leaked information about the Zen CPUs, which mainly focused on the point that these new CPUs are said to be able to handle 40% more instructions per clock than the current Excavator cores. Sadly, this was really all the information there was to glean from this leak – there is no news of a release date for any processor within the Zen line; and it is reasonable to assume that this monster processor is likely to wait to later in the launch cycle. For the first processor out of the gate, it is suggested that the line will start with the FX desktop CPUs – which are only expected to come in the now-standard 4, 6 and 8-core variants.
AMD appear to be seriously upping the game for CPU manufacturers and going far beyond anything done before if the claims are to be believe (and if you can’t trust an engineer at one of the major centres for scientific and technological research, who CAN you trust?). Could this spark some rivalry with the other major player in the scene, Intel? One thing’s for sure – this should only be good news for the processor market and its customers.
For their new game, Ubisoft constructed a game engine they called Snowdrop. It’s supposed to help support its lobby-free multiplayer functions along with the open-world, dynamic weathers and so on. Now we could see it being used for some of Ubi’s other IPs in the future.
Head of IP at Ubisoft Massive, Martin Hultberg, was interviewed and revealed that Snowdrop could be seen in other franchises in future.
“Internally we try to share as much technology as possible between the studios. It’s just more efficient that way. In our case we developed the Snowdrop Engine from the ground-up because we needed middleware that could run on the new consoles and PC, while doing everything we wanted to do with the open world, the weather, time of day and such features. Now we’ve made that engine available to other studios, and not just the Clancy teams. Any Ubisoft team can use Snowdrop now.”
Also, the Division’s ‘Dark Zone’ could see the functionality traveling across to other teams under Ubisoft’s umbrella as well in future. “I think that feature could definitely be incorporated into other Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed. It’s a really immersive feature that I think fits with pretty much all Ubisoft’s IPs.”
Ubisoft have recently announced their intention not to make a new Assassin’s Creed game in 2016, so I wonder if a desire to build their next game in that series upon this game engine is a part of that? It’ll be interesting to see if that theory holds water when the next one is announced.
As I’ve noted many times in my Kickstarter articles, the crowd-funding of games doesn’t always go smoothly. Some games even fail to reach target even with well known names attached, and one such game was the spiritual successor to Giants: Citizen Kabuto – First Wonder. Now the developers having exhausted other funding options have decided to shelf the project for the time.
An e-mail sent to backers of the failed Kickstarter has been posted to Reddit and in it the developer details the journey since the failure of their campaign.
“After the kickstarter failed we looked for other opportunities and partnerships to keep the development going. While your donations helped we were still self-funding 95% of the project directly out of pocket. The amount of investment needed to get the game to the next stage was too large for us to handle by ourselves. We had some interesting conversations but regardless of how excited some were for the project it came down to numbers and risk. For publishers, the kickstarter showed we just didn’t have or couldn’t find the audience.”
So for now the developer Rogue Rocket is going dormant while the team seek out work and focus on “other projects and jobs”. On the subject of donations towards the game the devs say it’s important that they sort out that, either through refunds or in the form of keys for the First Wonder demo or Gunpowder which was their previous release – if you’ve made a donation you can choose which option you’d prefer.
“I’m still very passionate about making games like these” the email concludes. “I always will be. They are unique and therefore rather hard to sell but once we get a foot hold I think they’ll be here to stay. I remain undeterred but it’s clearly been too many years since Giants and MDK and If I want to build games like First Wonder then I have to start off much smaller, simpler and grow a new audience. I have such a game in mind.”
So, it seems that despite setback First Wonder might even one day become a thing. It’s nice to see small developers not giving up on something they love.
