Spring RTS Engine

I recently tried out the new Demigod demo:
http://www.gamershell.com/download_49080.shtml

I have to say it really is very fun and a nice alternation of standard RTS gameplay if you still want to call it a RTS game.Unfortunately I guess I won't be buying it. Reason for this is the yet again stupid decision of GPG to just implement a peer-to-peer networking system and nothing else. Especially in the case of Demigod that system also seems to have turned out pretty bad. While the system sure has some advantages (which I don't find that special anyway) it has a huge letdown in terms of bandwidth. So as a matter of fact with a 1Mbit connection (i.e. 128kbit upload) you'll just be able to play a 1on1 properly (if at all). Even with a standard 2MBit connection your upload still should be too shitty for a 2on2...

They really should have added an optional client-server-system as it wouldn't have been hard as you'd just need to route everything over a single peer not touching all the hard work of the actual netcode which seems to be not that great too. While I can play 16 player games in Spring just fine I start to lag in Demigod right from the beginning with just 6 Demigods around and nothing else (on a 1MBit connection). I seriously don't know how six characters on a map can eat up an entire 16Kbyte/sec upload...

So it turns out as a nice game with a nice look, nice sounds and nice graphics but with a fucked up networking system meaning its death as it pretty much contains no singleplayer mode at all (matches against AIs don't really count as singleplayer). It seems GPG thinks that every person on the world has a 16Mbit connection (as even 6Mbit are told to be not really sufficent for like 5on5s or something like that thanks to p2p system). It also totally kills any international gaming as you're restricted to just people near you because with just a single person having a high ping everyone else will lag too and you don't have like the host being halfway the distance players have to each other...

i torrented it a while back, its great fun, has alot of things that i wish DOTA had, and alot of things im glad DOTA doesn't.

It felt like a demo of a real game however, to little map selection heroes, and so on.


i really liked how they did abilities, they were well displayed, although most heroes has basically the same abilities, with a different effect

Knew it would suck.

i found the lack of heroes led to lack of replayability and a decent meta game.

Sure DOTA is only one map but the sheer amount of heroes and combo's leads to alot of replayability and a game with alot of depth with one of the biggest competitive communities in the world.

HoN Closed Beta (a Dota clone on its own engine) has 10000 + users on average online (ive seen 30000). DOTA is the king of the genre it practically invented and the only thing that will dethrone it is a superior stand alone dota this is my hope for HoN and its already hitting all the right targets.

So TLDR go play HoN

Would someone more "hip to the vibe", "down", and "yo" explain what HoN and DOTA are?

DOTA (= Defense of the Ancients) is a map for Warcraft III being some kind of mod at the same time focusing around two teams of heroes that fight each other just as some (spammed) AI controlled units. The main goal to win the game is to destroy the enemie's main building...

HoN (=Heroes of Newerth) is going to be a standalone game trying to mimick DOTA 1:1 (video)...

I've never seen a whisper on the road to anything before, let alone vengeance. Impressive.

Caydr wrote:Would someone more "hip to the vibe", "down", and "yo" explain what HoN and DOTA are?

nub to RTS's are we?

Spawn_Retard wrote:

Caydr wrote:Would someone more "hip to the vibe", "down", and "yo" explain what HoN and DOTA are?

nub to RTS's are we?

dota's only tie to rts is its engine and nothing else ~~

Denigod is fun. Haven't had any issues with the networking stuff. And Master's assessment of bandwidth needs is absurd.

Demigod, on the other hand...

Forboding Angel wrote:And Master's assessment of bandwidth needs is absurd.

Well go to the official forums and look it up for yourself. Things got a bit better with one of the latest patches shrinking upload needs by 35% or something like that. Still if you're using standard 1-2 MBit DSL connections (both usually having just 128 kBit upload) you're screwed to either 1on1s or 2on2s that lag in the endgame...

As said - 3on3 lags for me right from the very beginning of the match while in the lobby I have pings of 80-150 (not that this would mean much as Demigod is told to strangely work on a 350ms simulation basis - I can't really recall though what the dev said about that). When ingame then it works fine for like 2 seconds an then spikes up to like 1000ms where it stays for some seconds in order to go down again to lobby like pings in order to then pretty much immerdiately spike up again leading to a slow and "stuttery" game which is "playable" but well not really fun and it seems that in the retail version you usually get kicked for that by the players while for the demo you often find people tolerating that...

Demigod, on the other hand...

Demigod kinda shares the same basic structure. You choose from 8 heroes and spawn of a map (that consist of "lanes" rather than being a real terrain). There are a few game modes like getting a certain number of kills but the main mode probably is destroying an enemy's citadel. Well I'm not going to write down the entire gameplay as that would be a very long textwall (look up some videos on Youtube) but you can level up and get some hero specific abilities or upgrades (a bit like in Diablo). You also can buy items that improve your stats or let you teleport around or locks flags for a certain amount of time so they can't be conquered (capturing a flag gives a team a small bonus like increased health or access to a shop with expensive and great items)...

I just can say that I think it's very fun to play. In contrast to what I saw in HoN it's not so hectic and click intensive which is something I enjoy as mad click orgies are not to my liking. I just can't recommend it to anyone with just a 128 kBit upload...