Deep Shadows have posted 2 new screenshots of
Xenus on their
website, showing the implementation of roads and mountains in their 3D FPS RPG in early development.
The game begins when the main hero, Kevin Myers, receives a call from a magazine his sister works for. He is told that she hasn't contacted them more than 10 days and that they are afraid she turned up missing in Colombia during a journalistic investigation. Kevin departs to this country to find her. Having arrived he finds himself in a world of violence where 70 out of 100 hundreds people are killed each year. The scenery that looks banal in the beginning step-by-step gets mixed up and finally becomes semi-mystic. Thanks to a variety of counter forces in the game it becomes possible to add a strong RPG element to the game. When you help one of the sides in the game, you inevitably spoil your relations with others. In the world of Xenus everything costs money. Therefore you have to purchase weapons, ammo, armaments, car rentals, etc. All actions take place on a huge territory 25x25km and there are no traditional "locations" in the game. You may freely move on the territory. All vehicles (helicopters, different kinds of cars, tanks) are drivable.
There are six sides in the game: officials, guerrilla, narco mafia, Indian, bandits, CIA. As I've already said fulfilling the missions for one of the side you inevitably spoil your relations with some others. Xenus is not shoot-them-all game. Your goal is to find the sister, so you need to talk with many people to gather necessary information. And these people will not always be friendly to you. Money is the thing that will help you. You lack money at the start of the game and they (the six sides) will not help you in any situations ;-).
Engine features:
Unique technology of rendering huge (but very detailed) territory 50x50km
Skeleton animation with blending between up to 3 bones
Facial animation
Multilayered textures 512x512
5000 faces per character
Lightmaps
View-independent progressive mesh for models and view-dependent progressive mesh for level geometry
Rigid body physics comparable with Math Engine (a set of predefined models: car, helicopter, box, player)