Well it's about well over due for a new update for Project Warmonger for PSP. A lot has been going on in life so it's been hard to put something together properly. In today's update I'd thought I'd shed some light on some of the technology aspects of the game we're doing as well as some little news updates.

We are currently in the pre-production stage but are very close to starting full production. Right now we're working on getting most of the kinks out of our technology side of things. Something I can talk on right now is how the engine renders environments. Unfortunately right now I cannot give any media of our progress but I can say that some recent stress testing that we can render simple huge environments (without assets) within the engine and keep a stable smooth 60 fps and we have not even done any proper optimization (also note that the stress tests we're on demo maps we created specifically for testing, not actual game maps for the final product). Our goal in the end is to hit a stable 30 FPS considering we will have lots of action going on but we will try to hit above that mark when we actually start working on actual assets for the game.

If I we're to compare the environment that we testing to a current game I would probably say take the map "Blood Gulch" from the game Halo (a map everyone basically knows), now on its own Blood Gulch is a pretty large environment on its own but still manages to keep everything in sight, nothing really fades away due to short draw distance. What we're able to render is a map approximately 3 times the width and 2 times the height of Blood Gulch but still have everything in sight, meaning you can look at a structure at the other side of the map and not have it fade away or pop out. This is just the view distance, not even the actual size of the map; we can render maps much larger, you just won't be able to see that far, even still it's quite impressive!

"Blood Gulch" map from the game "Halo"

Now you're probably wondering with rendering such large environments we must be taking a great hit on the other graphical sides of things. I can safely say that this is not the case, with these large areas we're still able to have super sharp textures that keep detail and don't lose detail and a reasonable poly count for models. Graphically we can pull of a quality very similar to Quake 3 arena which for a PSP game (let alone a homebrew game) looks darn good.

So that's what we can say right now, again what I'm saying is not final since things can change from when we start till we finish. We are soon ahead on starting full production, once we get the last hitches going out then we can start hopefully mid to end of September. We're still shooting for this year but we may have to delay, again not final but we want to make it as best as we can before releasing it.

We hope you enjoyed this; we're trying to now be more frequent on the updates since we have been quiet for a while.

We are very pleased to announce our first title in development from Nexus Studios: Warmonger (working title). Warmonger marks the first time of a third-person shooter homebrew game on the PSP that takes you on an epic story driven experience. Using only the best in 3D homebrew engine technology we plan to bring upon an unsurpassed graphical quality and gameplay experience that is sure to impress.

We're not releasing any information yet on the story but expect something very shortly in our next update.

Warmonger will be released 2007 for all homebrew enabled PSP systems.

Check our current projects page for future updates on this title.