Sequel to the Tomorrow War Announced

akula65

Rear Admiral
No sooner did 1C and CrioLand release The Tomorrow War, they announced a follow-up on this site ( http://www.games.1c.ru/zavtra_voina/?type=news ):

"29 December 2006 - The Tomorrow War: Factor K in Development

The firm 1C and the company CrioLand are announcing the development of a continuation of the space simulator "The Tomorrow War": "Factor K" ( http://games.1c.ru/factor_k/ ).

The plot of the game was created by the famous fantasy author Alexander Zorich and it continues the story told in the author's trilogy. Two months have passed since the end of the war with Concordia. The Global Security Agency is too concerned with the occupation of Concordia and with clashes with rebellious space marines to conduct exploration. And it is too much for them to discover the preparation for invasion from the icy depths of the galaxy which relies on technology unknown to the inhabitants of earth...

The game will not only continue the story told by Alexander Zorich, but it will offer the player a series of general improvements in graphics and the interface, it will give the possibilty to take upon oneself the control not only of a single flugger, but also a whole flight of fluggers and even a starship. In "Factor K", new fluggers, new enemies and new planetary systems await you.

The release date will be announced later."
 
Apparently the fluggers are smaller vessels capable of both local spaceflight and atmospheric operations while starships are larger vessels intended for intersystem operations. Remember that one of the hallmarks of The Tomorrow War series is the fact that you can transition from space flight to a landing anywhere on a planet and vice versa.

Here are some flugger screenshots from The Tomorrow War:

http://www.zavtravoina.ru/game/flu_on.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/game/flu_konk.html

Here are some starship screenshots from the same game:

http://www.zavtravoina.ru/game/zstar_on.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/game/zstar_konk.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/game/zstar_band.html

Note that the fluggers are more "aerodynamic."
 
i was actually very excited to see that the english version seems to have gotten a go ahead with a Q1 2007 release timeframe. I'm eager to pick this game up!
 
Um, I am so buying this when it comes out. Plus I want to post this news story all over the Egosoft X3 forums to tell them to stop whining about how "hard" it would be to make landable planets. Granted, I know that it must be a difficult challenge, but enough games have done it now that it is clearly not impossible. And what depth it adds...
 
Um, I am so buying this when it comes out. Plus I want to post this news story all over the Egosoft X3 forums to tell them to stop whining about how "hard" it would be to make landable planets. Granted, I know that it must be a difficult challenge, but enough games have done it now that it is clearly not impossible. And what depth it adds...
Are you talking about the modders or the devs? Cause' it's really not plausible for a modder to try to mod that into a game without any planetary loading docks, areas to represent planetary cities, etc.
 
Are you sure starrush and tomorrow war are the same?

I think I saw somewhere that starrush was the tomorrow war's prequel...
 
Um, I am so buying this when it comes out. Plus I want to post this news story all over the Egosoft X3 forums to tell them to stop whining about how "hard" it would be to make landable planets. Granted, I know that it must be a difficult challenge, but enough games have done it now that it is clearly not impossible. And what depth it adds...

Well, as you are probably well aware: already an old and today quite dusty Frontier: First Encounters posessed that feature and it was year 1995! It's ridiculous when 12 years later there are people who babble about it being "impossible" and/or "too much load for our HW". Everyone who played those old games and will play TW will know it for BS.
 
The mistake you're making is that you're assuming that technological progress means it's easier to have landable planets now than it was ten years ago. In fact, it's the exact opposite. Remember, ten years ago a building was an untextured box. Today, a building would be several hundred, even thousands of polygons, and it would have not only a texture, but also several different maps - bump maps, specular maps, etc. The same goes for terrain - instead of having a flat surface with pyramids serving as hills, games today tend to have a little more detail than that.

In short, allowing a transition from space to planetary surface in an engine is not the issue, it never has been. The real issue is content. If you're going to have a landable planet, you have to have a planetary surface. if you're going to have a planetary surface, it has to be as detailed as the rest of the game - that is to say, if you fly around fighting high-detail spaceships, or visiting large, high-detail space stations, you're going to be sorely disappointed if you visit a planet that has buildings in the shape of boxes, and flat textures instead of trees - and the game reviewers will halve the game's graphics score. But that's all that could possibly be done - the amount of time and money it would take to create even one planet that would actually be worth visiting by today's standards is beyond your imagination.

If this game has landable planets, you can rest assured that they will either be shit, or they will be restricted to a very, very small chunk of the world, maybe ten by ten kilometres or something. Whatever the case may be, there's one thing you can be absolutely certain of - the planets will be nothing to write home about.
 
...If this game has landable planets, you can rest assured that they will either be shit, or they will be restricted to a very, very small chunk of the world, maybe ten by ten kilometres or something. Whatever the case may be, there's one thing you can be absolutely certain of - the planets will be nothing to write home about.

Well, it's obvious you didn't even take an effort to visit the game's website.

http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2006.05.29/0007.jpg&12&index.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2006.05.19/0006.jpg&30&index.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2006.05.19/0007.jpg&30&index.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2006.05.19/0015.jpg&30&index.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2006.02.13/0004.jpg&42&index.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2006.02.13/0008.jpg&42&index.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2006.02.13/0012.jpg&42&index.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2006.02.13/0016.jpg&42&index.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2006.02.13/0013.jpg&42&index.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2006.02.13/0029.jpg&42&index.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2005.09.13/0009.jpg&9&/gal/arhiv/sshots_08.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2005.09.14/0003.jpg&9&/gal/arhiv/sshots_07.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2006.02.13/0015.jpg&42&index.html
http://www.zavtravoina.ru/gal/show.html?/ssh_images/2005.09.14/0001.jpg&17&/gal/arhiv/sshots_07.html

There's plenty of pictures that promise (if not tell us, how the game itself will cope with the very transition and what will be the final look on our screens) a space-planet transition and atmospheric flight above the WHOLE surface of the planet (not only some x times y km). According to game developers you should be able to land anywhere, not only established spaceports. Well, it might not be what we are used to from todays top class flight simulators, but hell -- for me it's more than sufficient. I always wished for a space sim, that would have real (or quasi-real) flight physics and allow you to enter planet's atmosphere and would be at the same time a Privateer-like game. IMO this project at least deserves some attention for possibility of having all those features.
 
Well, it's obvious you didn't even take an effort to visit the game's website.
Of course I didn't - I don't need to see their attempt to know that the general idea is impossible. Looking at these screenshots now, it seems that they chose option a - planets that look like shit.

What you're seeing on the ground of those planetary shots (just on the ground, mind you - I'm not talking about the game's graphics in general) is ugly, lifeless, and painfully generic. The planets, even the ones that are clearly inhabitable, are going to be virtually devoid of life. At best, they'll have a few symbollic cities that look exactly like what you had in those screenshots - a few low-detail buildings thrown together at random.

Granted, this level of detail might make some people happy - just as I'm sure some people were happy to have so many different places to visit in Freelancer. Personally, I don't see anything to celebrate - Freelancer's huge, detailed universe sucked because at the end of the day, every station was the same and you got tired of conversations about how "we don't really run this place but we have an arrangement with the people who do", and the planets in this game are gonna suck in the same way... or worse, because not only will they look generic, but in all likelihood, they'll be populated by people as exciting and diverse as the folks you met in Freelancer.

Just so we're clear on this, though - I'm not saying the game itself will suck. All that space stuff certainly looks good (though it's nothing extraordinary - just good), and the game as far as I know may well be the best space-sim in years. Could be - but no matter how great the other features of the game will be, those landable planets are going to be a sore disappointment.


I'll be very happy when the "let's make a big, big universe" fad finally wears off and somebody decides to make a space sim that tries to blow people away with quality instead of quantity. And when that happens, maybe we'll finally see a space sim that gets purchased by more than five people worldwide.
 
There are a lot of space games in russian only.. Not knowing if one of them will be availible to north america and european market.
 
As I mentioned in the front page update, they are translating the first one. It's too early for an English version of the second.
 
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