Interview with D. Rosenthal

Singularity's David Rosenthal

FiringSquad: Do you have any plans to implement S3TC (Savage 4 technology) or Bump-mapping (G400/G400MAX) in the game.?

David Rosenthal: Really it all comes down to who send us video cards. We are expecting a G400 in the mail soon from Matrox. We spent a while looking at their demo at GDC and we think that the bump-mapping can really spice up our graphics. The water effect that we do now can definitely be improved with per-pixel environment mapping done in hardware. Plus, we have a few more tricks up our sleeves that we think will work out well :) As for S3TC: it probably won't help much. We do some very cool caching work on the landscape and can comfortably quadruple all of the texture resolutions and still keep the video card's texture memory 30% free (note that this usage is invariant of landscape size.)

Shields bloom up to protect buildings as an aircraft dodges missiles

FS: Plans for more units or tweaking the current units? Ships and water units? Plans on running a beta test a la Starcraft to play balance?

DR: More units? Maybe when we split the units along "race" lines a la Starcraft. This is something that needs to be done a little bit later in the play balancing process. As for water units, they have been in and out of the game in various testing phases. They look real nice but we couldn't find out a good way to work them into gameplay.

We are planning on doing a public beta program through a publisher (which we don't have yet: hint, hint.) Right now we have some great people just starting on making Fire and Darkness have *killer* gameplay. Zileas (of Starcraft fame) is working closely with us and he's got some great ideas for making the game more fun/easy to learn. You have to remember that Fire and Darkness was created by a bunch of us first-time developers. At the start of the project we assumed nothing. We had no legacy deadweight code holding us down. Our general philosophy was to put in five features and take out the worst four (sometimes five :) Anyways, the point of this long description was to explain why some parts of the game just don't have that polish that the networking and graphics code has.

Firing from a distance