26,610 damage on the soaker, and 6,468 damage per second.  Not bad at all!

I've found it beneficial in the late-game to quick-switch between the sniper rifle and the assault rifle.  When the sniper rifle runs out of ammo, I switch to the assault rifle and lob two grenades.  I then switch back to the sniper rifle which has miraculously reloaded itself.  If your aim is good, you can get ~3,200 x4 damage with the level 6 sniper rifle and ~6,000 x2 damage with the level 6 assault rifle grenades in a tight crowd.

Have you guys come across any decent strategies?

Also, I see what Stewie is saying about endless games.  I got through wave 40 at 100% core health before I threw in the towel.  I'm sure you guys have gone a lot further, but I don't have the attention span for that!   


-b0b
(...thinks it's a great title.)

Ha we play this at work cause the guys voice is so annoyingly condescending. Also this tech is just fancy voxels, which have been around for a while (minecraft) 

The drawbacks to this tech and you can see in the demo:

No animation:
Moving "billions" of atoms like that in a manner fluid enough to fool the eye is a monumental task.

Dynamic lighting:
Can this system employ all these sweet lighting effects that people have come to expect of their games.

Each point is stored with its position and color value. Can they store reflectivity, transparency, and glossiness? Then we would be getting some good effects. Taking a scan of a pretty rock that's scanned in a dry, evenly lit environment does not make that a cool looking rock in a rainy scene.

Instancing: Most of those points in that scene had to be instanced, which is why the "island" looked so repetitive.

Storage:
Having literally trillions of points of unique geometry is a mind boggling amount of information. I saw someones back of the envelope computation putting it at petabytes of info if each "atom" is a byte of information. I imagine their engine would cull out points that we would not see. At 30 meters it could only draw a point every centimeter because the eye wouldn't notice because of the resolution of the screen image.

But still, that information, whether or not its in realtime, would have to be stored.

Content creation:

Creating a totally unique island at that resolution would cost a TON of money. That is so much artist creation time. A photo-realistic character modeled from start to finish can take a good artist 16-20 days. Doing square kilometers? Better hire a Chinese 3d army.

Also this guy seems to think "more polygons" sell games. I don't look at a game and say: "man this game has 10% more polygons that that other game... I'm sold!"

It's much much more.

So in conclusion:

This guy is prolly drumming up investor excitement for his product. Its very cool for visualization purposes, and it definitely has merit for some parts of some games.... but creating an entire game with this technology is not feasible. Maybe when DNA computing hits or something.

So yea, haven't played with it, its cool, but it won't be used in Call of Duty MW4 anytime soon

Briney, I hope you don't mind, but I cross-posted your comment anonymously to AR15.com.  Thanks for the incredibly thorough and detailed response.  In particular, your comments on storage and IO made a ton of sense.  It sounds like even top-notch occlusion isn't going to make that feasible any time in the foreseeable future.

Regarding Sanctum, I'm definitely up for a game.  If you have some free time and you see me on Steam, send me a message and we'll play.


-b0b
(...loved it.)

Yes, We should have one. I would love to host, but I'm in Canton... soo it'd be up to you guys. Also, i wouldnt mind playing some SC2 with you bob, i have it as well.

Having the LAN in canton would work for me!

Although, with how much bob bitched about just bringing his computer down stairs I kind of doubt him showing up.

I also have a fold out couch if someone needs to crash after a LAN in canton...just saying.

Yay Patrick and Craig! Although Craig has it easy... lol

I've got room for crashing, etc. September or October sometime sound good for folk?

I played the demo of Warhammer 40,000L Space Marine this morning and was quite impressed.  It definitely has a Gears of War feel, but it's definitely Warhammer through and through.

Here are a couple of screenshots...