The first person shooter genre seems to keep expanding with new games being announced on a regular basis. Kreed, the upcoming sci-fi first-person shooter in the works at Russian developer Burut, seems to be very promising FPS and potential competitor for just revelaed DOOM III. Kreed utilizes very powerfull X-Tend engine and will require PIII 1000, 512 MB, Radeon 8500/GF3/GF4.


Plot of the game


Prologue

Since ancient times eyes of mankind were directed to stars. Epochs of prosperity of the earth civilization changed by long centuries of darkness and savagery, powerful nations disappeared from the Earth, were completely ruined in fire of wars, invasions and catastrophes. But at last people obtained a long waited possibility to penetrate in mysteries and puzzles of other worlds. Have been sure that Cosmos belong to mankind, people were in deep shock, when they found a great abundance of extraterrestrial civilizations, enormous starry imperious, stretched on many hundreds of parsec. However, general feature of people's character is stubbornness and persistence in achievement of the aim. Only 70 years have been passed after first contact and people of Earth have shown their new face - face of serious and strong adversary. All science and technical potential accumulated during centuries of military conflicts was released and created new hadn't seen before technologies and possibilities.


And then comes war: Race of aggressive reptiloids - Tiglaary - accomplished several attacks on colonies of people, reprimanded them the choice - to fight or to die. People were stronger in technologies, but they hadn't deserving fighters, which could resist to aliens. People understood, if they want to win Tiglaary bravery only isn't enough and they undertook attempts for genetic rebuilding of their bodies, and in some years later Tiglaary were unpleasantly surprised when they met on fields of battles enemies practically equal to them. Biologically modified warriors came under the banners of Legion - the main famous military organization, which always presents itself in the most dangerous regions.

Long and bloody war ended by unconditional capitulation of Tiglaary and people draw breath, their mother-planet was revenged. Rare conflicts on boundaries didn't require help of forces of Legion and soon attention of the government of Terran Hegemony was attracted to question about Legionnaires, which couldn't imagine their life without war and so they were considerable threat for the stability of society. Decision wasn't ordinary one. Legion was transformed into semi-religious organization with severe codex of honor and corresponding attributes. In this quality Legion existed until the middle of 27 century, when total expansion of Hegemony borders caused to significant increasing of commercial links between different colonized planets. Trade Guild had got practically unlimited power in all, what was related to the worlds within Perimeter. Trade operations very often were not safe and existed great risk, so all captains of spaceships wanted to have one or two Legionnaires in crew. They were live guarantee of successful expedition even in case of sudden attack. But nobody could suppose what will bring next flight:

The beginning

Spaceship "Aspero" with one of Legionnaires aboard during transient skirmish found itself in a "black hole" in Cosmos. "Black hole" is the place there breaks all technical equipment. After inquiry from the main computer navigator of "Aspero" elucidated that in this place recently disappeared other Terran spacecraft, it was heavy cruiser of Hegemony. And also he received information about extraterrestrial signals SOS, which have sending from this region during all history of space flights. Not only earth civilization has suffering from this damned place.

Player will meet with representatives of different civilizations, which were also prisoners of this cosmic trap, to help alive members of crew of "Aspero" to get out from here, to meet with other people, with soldiers of Hegemony, which found them in "black hole" for a such long time, that some of them practically lost their human appearance and health minding:

In the end of game Legionnaire must collide with those civilization, which is guilty in creation of this space prison and learn their nature, to understand what was the reason for creation of this "black hole".


About the Game

Kreed is high-tech 3d-action, in which player will become Legionnaire - one of the most trained and dangerous warriors of 3rd millennium. According to the storyline, gamer with small team of trade ship "Aspero" find himself in strange region of cosmic space. Nobody can go out from this zone, a lot of spacecrafts disappeared in this point of space. Player immerse in atmosphere of absolute hopeless, connection with outer world is broken and all around is only cemetery of spaceships - both new models and very old, which are here for thousand years.

Sudden attacks of alien living form, skirmishes with representatives of other civilizations, reveal other ships of Hegemony in sector, help them in group storm of fortifications of enemy, battles with different teams of soldiers, capture of space stations, tactic defense of borrowed positions, team command, which consists of soldiers of Hegemony, rescue hostages, diversion explosion the main objects, etc.

There is a great difference between styles of passage in tasks. In some situations it's necessary to make one's way through patrols of enemy, automatic systems of security (shadow cameras, traps, energetic barriers, automatic systems of guns), in other cases player must quickly and dynamic break through lines of enemies, fire of assault rifles, rumble of rocket launchers, explosions of grenades, destroying blaze of flame-throwers - all this actions will be necessary to survive in such fights.

In majority of cases player can choose, what manner he wants to use in concrete situation - to barge ahead with all team or invisible fulfill mission himself.

Tasks will be done during development events by different manners including conferences with another characters, pre-recorded script scenes with the main participants, radio communication with other participants of game, own decisions of player, following from situation, etc.

Every object is unique from viewpoint of its inhabitants and their enemies. Different events and logic of behavior of enemies such as rebel soldiers of Hegemony, anarchy ship of cosmic pirates, deserted to the first look spacecraft of aliens: By the way, theory and logic of aliens security and their patrols are strong differing than people's equivalents. Every race have own viewpoint on this question.

For maximum flexible system of instructions of characters logic use unique inner script language which is the part of X-TEND Game Engine, which allow to model practically any situation, practically any behavior of computer characters taking into consideration big quantity of information such as geometry of level, characteristics of concrete hero, his weapon, general force of the group, possible points of attacks, etc.

A lot of levels are connected with others and there is possibility to come in the next level by some ways, which will be different in styles and methods of game.

Game engine allows real physics of ricochets: bullets jump away from obstacles and impact the aims with changed energy, which is raised or dropped depend on trajectory of movement.

Multiplayer mode allows to play over LAN or Internet. There are a lot of different multi-user modes of the game, including DeathMatch, Cooperative, Capture the Flag and Team Assault.

The game itself is built upon a powerful X-Tend engine, which supports majority of modern mainstream technologies. It consists of several parts; those the most important of them are renderer, main engine, AI-scripting state machine and audio unit.

Rendering unit is an advanced Direct3D8-based 3D engine that works with any Direct3D8-compliant card with GPU equipped. It gains the best performance with 6th generation GPUs (GeForce3 for instance) due to intensive usage of mainstream technologies in real-time 3D rendering.

Character skeleton animation unit supports up to 120 bones per character, providing separate animation sequences for different body parts. Character movement speed depends on its animation, thus making impossible unpleasant 'foot slipping' issue. Dynamic 'level-of-detail'-based rendering technology allows to noticeably reducing skeleton computations when the model gets far away from the camera.

Enhanced portals technology reduces the computations required to render level geometry, making few hundred thousand vertices per level possible.

Audio engine supports all common 3d-sound modes: A3D, EAX and DirectSound3D.


When will be Kreed released?

Kreed is slated for release in fourth quarter 2002, but they plan to present the playable demo-version of Kreed on the end of 2002 summer.

Key Features:

• Various game design including interiors of tens spaceships both past and modern. Spaceships of Terran Hegemony, common commercial ships, spacecrafts created by alien lifeforms
• An atmosphere of descent team battles in a far future. Synchronous operation of different classes such as: grunts, snipers, flame-thrower soldiers, pioneer teams, medics
• Abundance of various enemies: not only known human types, but also terrifying and dangerous representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations. Various types of insects and psi-forms of life
• Missions include not only individual sallies but also team skirmishes
• Advanced algorithm of artificial intellect of enemies and extraterrestrial beings and their behavior is brought maximum close to reality thanks to prototyping such feelings as sight, ear and smell
• A lot of unique types of weapons that are completely different in appearance
• Different modes of shooting which influence on such characteristics as accuracy, distance, rate-of-fire etc.
• Realistic physical model, describing interaction of material objects, calculation of collisions and ricochets.
• Particle systems that generate fire, smoke, steam, atmosphere effects, volumetric and layered fog
• Realistic projection of shadows from dynamic light sources, which are cast on every element of geometry, including models of characters and weapons· Highly detailed models of characters: up to 4000 polygons per model
• Accurate skeleton animation (up to 120 bones per model) of parts of body including animation of mimic.
• Various modes of multiplayer: Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Assault.