Deck13 are one of the longest-running commercial users of Ogre in the game industry, having completed 3 full retail games using it now. They have 2 more in the works, and one is Venetica, an action-RPG; and it’s looking really nice. I uploaded a bunch of screenshots to our gallery recently which were passed on to me direct, but they have more on their website too, like the one shown here. It actually reminds me a little of Fable 2, which is praise indeed.
As you can see, they’ve made good use of HDR and post-processing effects (I particularly like the fluid simulation they used for the ‘spectral effects’), some nice dynamic texture shadows and their animation pipeline (skeletal and facial) which served them so well in previous games make a welcome return too. It’s worth watching the trailer on the game site to see what I mean there.
Venetica is one of the games I’ll be featuring in my talk at FMX/09 in May, where I’ll talk about a few of the technical details and show a longer video from their beta, which shows off the animation and effects even better.
Once again some great work from Deck13; these days they have a little more company at the upper end of the eye candy scale of OGRE game development (from people like Nimblebit and KING Art, who will also be featuring in my talk), but there’s one thing for sure, they never cease to impress.
March 27th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Heh. I happened to notice the sexy screenshots on ogre3d.org just a second ago! I have the gallery in another tab right now.
Looks like Ogre3D is starting to climb the ranks of the big leagues when it comes to cutting-edge game graphics…
March 27th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Yeah, I noticed them yesterday.
They look beautifulllllllll.
March 30th, 2009 at 2:56 am
I take it you have done some consulting work for them?
March 30th, 2009 at 10:04 am
@Joseph: a while ago yeah, but not on Venetica. But I still have good contacts with them and they’ve told me what they’ve been doing.
April 8th, 2009 at 7:03 am
Steve ( Sindbad ) did a great job developing OGRE3D, also his team members did a wonderful job making it platform independent, Now I expect the people who uses OGRE3D to release the games for all major platforms like Linux, Deck13 has released Ankh for Linux and I am sure they must be happy with their that decision.
Deck13 please do not use any Dirctx Specific libraries so not to restrict to windows only. There are many open source Sound and Media libraries which they can use with Ogre3D to achieve the same effect, even they physics library. So please please don’t restrict your games to only a single platform, and release every game for Linux and Mac also windows.
I will be the first who will support you for this.
Thank you
April 10th, 2009 at 7:13 am
Steve, are they planning to support Linux for all the future games they might release? Were you able to have a chat with them about that.