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Linux Gamers Command 90% Of Initial Unigine OilRush Sales

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  • #21
    Originally posted by binstream View Post
    so true.

    Our demos were running in public NVIDIA booth, we decided to skip GDC this year due to high load. However there was a Unigine booth previous year.

    But anyway you are right, we are more concentrated on development rather than marketing.

    PS: Unigine engine is fine with multi-core systems, don't worry =)
    You need to do some marketing gimmick or something

    Like I mentioned in one of the recent threads, you could open up your flash implementation and call it Unigine Flash Player. Flash is in need of a good alternative interpreter, and if one were to appear, it would produce quite a stir, in my opinion; this would raise the Unigine brand awareness. If the flash player turns out to be better than the original (not a very tall order, honestly), it might even start to replace it on many PCs. Since flash is installed on like 95% of computers, that's a lot of eyeballs being exposed to the Unigine brand. People might start wondering what is this Unigine is, google it, and voila! find out about OilRush.

    Yeah... Or, once the initial interest in OilRush fades, you could contact Humble Indie Bundle and become part of their next pay what you want giveaway. These have proven to be quite profitable and, at the same time, popular. Who doesn't like the idea халява?

    As I understand, OilRush is not just a game for Unigine; it's a game that advertises the Unigine engine at the same time. The more popular the game is, the more likely customers are to buy licenses for the engine, so popularity gimmicks are something Unigine should focus on (IMHO).

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    • #22
      In other news...

      Minor game company whining about too few sales.

      Nothing to see here, move along.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by elanthis View Post
        That's not naive at all. Entertainment titles -- movies, music, games, and game hardware -- are often measured by their opening day or opening weekend sales figures. Interest for an entertainment item is always highest when it's first released. The sales figures most often only go down from release date.

        Of course this is a pre-order, not an actual release, but it's still very indicative of sales to come. If pre-order interest is low that usually means that release date interest will be low, which in turn means that overall sales will be low.



        And that's part of the problem with the sales for this game, I think. The ONLY place I have ever heard of Unigine or Oil Rush is on Phoronix... and I'm in the games industry.

        They aren't doing much marketing of either their engine or their game to consumers or even to tech people. (I'm not at GDC this year, which is currently running right now, so maybe they're doing all their engine marketing this week and developer interest will explode in the weeks to come.)

        It's not surprising for sales or pre-orders to be low if nobody even knows they exist.

        For most commercial titles, marketing is budgeted at about 30% of the development costs. So for a $10,000,000 game that means $3,000,000 should be spent on marketing. I don't think Unigine has spent much of anything on marketing yet, so far as I know.



        This is normal. ALSA does nothing interesting for sound other than get it to the card. Nobody in the games industry is going to code against ALSA directly; nobody in any segment of audio programming is going to code against ALSA directly, unless they're writing a low-level sound API library or daemon.

        OpenAL is an actual sound API that's moderately decent for games. It's still only 1/100th of fmod, though, which is unfortunate as fmod is not FOSS and there is nothing even remotely equivalent to it in the FOSS world. On the upside, fmod is free to use for free games and has Linux support.



        Also expected. You should always have a complete 32-bit user space library install if you plan on running many proprietary applications, particularly cross-platform ones. The Windows world is still catching on to 64-bit and a lot of apps just don't have any 64-bit support because of that, unlike most native Linux and even OS X applications.

        Unfortunate for games, as the larger address space makes a lot of memory management issues disappear. And memory management is one area where games are still heavily optimizing things while everyone else is moving to generic garbage collectors and using general purpose memory allocators with no thought towards allocation patterns, deallocation/reallocation performance, or cache behavior.

        I personally consider it yet another misdesign of the common Linux distro that their libraries aren't automatically shipped in dual architecture support in the native packages (or build scripts, for things like Gentoo). Hard drives are massive, bandwidth is cheap, and adding a few hundred extra KB to extra lib package/install hurts nobody (but a few very special case users that should stick to special case distros) but reduces confusion and compatibility problems for the rest of us.

        Granted, I also think it's stupid that many Linux distros still default to shipping x86 install CDs, or that they even _have_ x86 install CDs. And Woe to those distros that still don't support x86-64. The third world can bite me, the rest of us have moved on and want systems that actually take advantage of our hardware we bought and paid for.

        I'm equally irritated at all the PC vendors who still offer or even default to 32-bit Windows. And irritated at Microsoft for even having a 32-bit version of Windows 7.

        Sigh.



        I'd be surprised if they asked for help. You're unlikely to get the debug symbols you need to help do anything useful because they would aid too much in reverse engineering. Proprietary software doesn't work that way. Which is one of the primary weakness of proprietary software, of course. They might appreciate you sending in a coredump, though then only if you're using a standard distro with an easy-to-reproduce runtime environment (because the libraries all come from the same set of compiled binary packages, rather than being tweaked and customized like Gentoo does).



        If better be. Otherwise their engine is a piece of crap not fit for use in 2011. Even new phones are dual-core, and the Xbox360 has been tri-core since release. Any game engine that's not capable of scaling up with the number of cores is dead weight technology. Like Bethesda's engine.

        About my first point - you really have the point there. I did my part, tried to get the news to a few Linux/geek related sites. Hopefully thing will get popular. All my nerdy friends heard a lot from me about this game anyway



        Regarding SMP - it does support SMP, checked processor utilisation, it uses quite a few cores allright I have my suspicions, that processor utilization was quite low because of threads actually, so on demand policy was setting low energy consumption state, but this is speculation.

        Regarding being tester: HoN, had HUGHE beta testing circle, where 90%(i guess, around 25 or so thousands of beta testers participated, which is still big chunk compared to all players out there). Heck, i'd sign up(electronically) a document(and still would pay for the game) to be beta tester. I bet a few Linux users would do that too.

        Regarding openAL, same HoN was using ALSA and NOT openAL, than Amnesia was using ALA if not mistaking, than ETQW was using ALSA a few other ID games wer eusing ALSA, or atleast gave choice of using it. Not that I mind openAL, it just may give issues to other users.

        Since Developers of Unigine are here, will final version have amd64 platform support?(for those unaware, that includes Intel processors too)

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        • #24
          the Linux gaming community hasn't seen a major, shiny, tier-one native game release in quite a while
          "OilRush" is a tier-one title? I really don't think so.

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          • #25
            a bit offtopic, but

            Since Developers of Unigine are here, will final version have amd64 platform support?(for those unaware, that includes Intel 64 bit processors too)

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            • #26
              My friend and I, just pre order that Oilrush and we are quit happy ! So we know it's still beta, I wasn't able to complete quick missions, maybe some bug are related to nvidia driver. We try multiplayer mode and we were able to get connect togheter (need to foward port 60070). Multiplayer room chat worked but game crash on host a soon as you click start.

              Good job guys

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              • #27
                Spreading the word.

                Something that might help in generating interest would be to post videos of playing the game on video sites like Youtube. I for one, usually like seeing how the games are played, and how the players behave while playing it.

                (After a quick search I have found xvidcap/gvidcap and recordmydesktop [with pygtk/pyqt4 frontends]. Unfortunately, as I have just looked them up, I don't know much more about them. Hopefully this can help someone do this from Linux.)

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                • #28
                  It says on the startscreen "confidential information, for internal use only", I hope this is not true and people are allowed to spread screenshots?

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                  • #29
                    I ordered my copy last night... downloaded it and went to bed. I checked it out this morning. I installed it by running the downloaded file, forget the name, but ./OilRushinstall.run went into the folder and ran the ./1920x1080 sh script it created. I had awesome video and sound without tuning anything.

                    Only thing now... I have no idea how to play it. I created 12 little biker/jetski guys that went round and round my base. I couldn't figure out how to make them go anywhere or expand to the nearby oil platforms. I did create a few rocket launcher turret things.

                    I'll have to play with it tonight when I get home.

                    I saw the question earlier, but didn't see an answer. Hopefully one of the devs will answer. If we buy a copy of the game, will it not include both the Linux and windows versions? I know the download preorder was just the linux version.

                    Also, if we are allowed to post pics and videos, I'll post some screenshots and video clips, so... let us know if that's allowed please.

                    Thanks,

                    Skeet

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by skeetre View Post
                      Only thing now... I have no idea how to play it. I created 12 little biker/jetski guys that went round and round my base. I couldn't figure out how to make them go anywhere or expand to the nearby oil platforms. I did create a few rocket launcher turret things.
                      Play the tutorials You control your units by selecting the platform they're circling, then right clicking on the destination platform IIRC. I've been playing the Tower Defence map in the Campaign, which is actually quite a lot of fun..

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