• Company

  • News
  • Developer's Blog
  • Meet the Team

• Game Info

  • Overview
  • Characters
  • Regions

• Media

  • Concept Art
  • Screenshots
  • Videos
  • Wallpapers

• Technology

  • Overview

• Community

  • BRB!

Today we have some major news to announce.

Intel has acquired Offset Software. Yes, you read it correctly!

Project Offset is going strong and we are excited about things to come.

Stay tuned.

The site is going through some changes over the next few days so please bare with us as things come and go. For all you forum guys - the forums are going to be offline for awhile too.

Thanks,

We’re doubtful we’ll be able to recover the more recent updated forum data and so have unlocked the forums again.

I’m sorry if people lost posts and user accounts we did everything we could to get it back.

We’ve updated the site with a bunch of new info: concept art, gameplay info, screenshots, and technology info. We also have a brand new “developer’s blog” section where members of the team can post about their day to day activities at Offset. There’s some cool stuff up there already, including a snippet of storyboards from Project Offset.

Enjoy!

The guy who generously offered to host our forums got into a car accident a few weeks ago. We’ve been in contact with him through his family and he’s doing good and should be recovered in a few weeks. Our thoughts go out to him and his Family and we all hope he makes a full recovery.

Needless to say the forums will be in a state of disrepair (locked - no new users sorry) until we are able to retrieve the latest snapshot of the data - we’ll keep you posted.

We’re aware that the forums died sometime last week, we’re trying to get into contact with the host admin and see what we can do about getting it backup.

Please bare with us.

It has come to our attention that a video we made for internal purposes was leaked and is being spread around. Again, this video was for internal use only and we didn’t intend to release it publicly.

We’d like to request that news sites please not post this video.

Sam McGrath

We’ve updated our team page with a list of everyone who’s working full time on the project.

As you have probably noticed, we’ve been rather quiet lately but things are going great. We just passed a big milestone for our as-yet-unnanounced publisher. Everyone on the team is extremely motivated to make Project Offset the best game it can be, and we couldn’t be happier with the way things are working out. For people that have been begging us to provide some more information, videos, etc., all I can say is that we would love to spill the beans, but we need to be in “stealth mode” for a while until we feel it’s time to make our big “second debut”.

In other news, we now have a handful of licensees who are using our engine for their next gen projects. Further information will be available upon the official announcement of these games.

Finally all moved in! We are looking for talented programmers and artists to join our team. We are now backed by a major publisher but will not be disclosing the details just yet.

Forums are being moved to a new server. They should be up soon.

We have updated the downloads page with the realitime demo we did for GDC. Check out the vids here.

On a more personal note, my daughter Ashlyn Stringer was born on Easter Sunday. She is the first girl in a family of all boys. Wish me luck

This year’s Game Developers Conference went great. We put together a demo for GDC that was being shown by nVidia and Red 5 Studios, who recently licensed our engine. Red Bull provided drinks for everybody who came to the Red 5 booth, and on top of that, threw Offset a Party at the Fairmont hotel! We would like to give Red Bull a big thanks for doing that for us. Read more…

GDC officially starts next week - we’ll be heading over on Wednesday to check out the expo and to hang out with Red 5 at their booth.

So if you’re at GDC why don’t you swing by and say hello.

Atomic magazine has Project Offset as a feature article in this months issue.

It gives some great insite into some of the technical features behind the Offset Engine - check it out!

Red 5 Studios, a new game company formed by key developers and executives behind Blizzard Entertainment®’s hit game “World of Warcraft®” have chosen the Offset Engine to power their next generation MMO. The whole team here at Offset is really excited about what these guys are doing - be sure to check out their site at red5studios.com.

Read the full press release here.

We finally revamped the website. We have also added really great artwork which you can download as wallpaper. The artists who are responsible for these are the best we have ever worked with, but wish to be anonymous for now. We have some exciting stuff coming up, some of which we will be announcing next week.

Also in the news, we have a very cool article in the March issue of PSM. Get your copy today!

The tech page has been updated with a small video showing the engine rendering lots of characters at once.

I’d like to introduce Offset’s newest full time team members, Rod Green and Sharif Elcott.

Rod previously worked for Bioware and is now working here as our Technical Art Director. Check out the latest Game Developer magazine for an article he wrote!

Sharif was previously attending Cal Tech and is now working with me on the programming side.

Check out this month’s Game Developer for an article by Rod!

Checkout the December issue of Play Magazine featuring a 2 page article interviewing our very own Sam McGrath. In stores now.

We have received an amazing amount of talent applying for positions here at Offset. Our team size is growing and we hope to make an official announcement very shortly. In the meantime we have added a wallpaper section. This artwork was done by a guy who wishes to remain unnamed, but whose work we are very proud to show off.

G4 posted my “Attack of the Show” segment online. You can check it out here:

http://www.g4tv.com/mediaplayer/index.aspx?video_key=9858

I was interviewed yesterday for a segment about Project Offset on “Attack of the Show” on the G4 channel. It was a bit nerve wracking, especially since the show airs live, but it went pretty smoothly, and I got to demo the engine during the segment and answer some questions about our company and game.

We’ll try and get a clip of the segment we can post online, so stay tuned.

A few weeks back we visited the Computer Gaming World offices, and they wrote up a cool 2 page article about us. You can check it out in the November issue of CGW, available in news stands now. There’s even a (really terrible) picture of the three of us in the article, as well as an exclusive new screenshot, so check it out!

We also have an article in the official French Xbox magazine, for those Offset Francophiles. (-:

We have been talking to publishers and things are going great. We are now looking to expand our team.

We’ve already found some great people, but still want to hear from talented and motivated individuals, so give us a shout!

Forums are back up.

We just came back from a road trip to the Bay Area, meeting with publishers and other companies. We’ve had a significant interest from many people, which is really encouraging. We’re trying to take our next steps carefully, but the future is looking bright for PO!

Our forums are down. We have had some malicious attacks on our forums with the intent to crash the server (seriously wth?) Glendon is doing his best to get them up and running. Thanks for your patience.

Our Sneak Peek #2 video is finished and is available for download!

Thanks to all the people who have offered mirrors. We’ve sent off an email to all of you and will be posting your links on our downloads page as we get them.

Also, a special thanks to all the people who have sent donations to us over the past couple of months. We really appreciate it, and we’ve been throwing around some ideas about how to reward you in the future.

We are planning on setting up a forum this week, so watch for that. Additionally, our game design page will be updated soon with more in depth information about Project Offset.

Trevor’s son, Christian Lee Stringer, was born today at around 8pm. Naturally, Trevor will be taking a couple of days off from Offset work. Congrats Trevor!

We are looking for mirrors to host our upcoming “Sneak Peak #2″ video. People who host our video get to see it before everyone else. (-:

In the meantime, here’s a little preview of what you’ll be seeing in the video. This is a screenshot directly from the engine, NOT prerendered.

Medium Resolution (800×1000)
High Resolution (1382×1882)
Printable Resolution

Special thanks to Martin Lisec for helping us out with the sky texture.

Due to the outrageous amount of traffic that has been coming to the site over the past week, our ISP decided to drop us. (With no warning. Wasn’t that nice of them?)

So, we’ve moved to a dedicated server with a new provider, and things should be smooth sailing now. The donation money contributed by a few awesome individuals (who you can find listed on our team page) is being put to good use to help pay for the server costs.

We apologize for the downtime caused by this. Due to the DNS propogation, the site may still not be visible for everyone yet, but in another 12 hours or so it should be fully synced up.

Keep those emails coming. I’m sorry I can’t respond to every one, but I read them all.

The very first preview article has been posted about Project Offset:

http://www.armchairempire.com/Previews/multi-platform/project-offset.htm

We’ve been getting an amazing response to our tech demo video and new website. It seems people are really excited about both the technology and game concept.

We have to upgrade to a dedicated web server with our service provider, because we exceeded our entire bandwidth quota for the month in only two days! In the last three days we’ve had over 30,000 downloads of the video directly from our site (thus exceeding our quota by two or three times), and we’ve seen it popping up on several other websites.Thankfully, the donations we’ve received so far will help pay for the web server. We can’t thank the people who have donated enough, and we’ve updated our team page for now with the name of those who have donated. If the list gets bigger, we’ll make a dedicated page for it. If you want to donate, the info on how to do so is in the same place.

I’ve been inundated with emails since the update, and I’m doing my best to get to most of them, but I can’t promise to answer every one.

In the meantime, we have been planning another update. I won’t make any promises as to when it will be, but stay tuned.

Sam McGrath

p.s. A Linux compatible version of the tech video is in the works. It will likely be encoded with Divx or Xvid, based on the recommendations of my Linux friends.

Wow, we got some free press out of our recent update on Blues News and Shack News. Good thing too, because we can’t really afford a real press release! We’re really happy to hear the enthusiastic responses to our promo video.

A couple of things I’d like to clarify briefly:

“Project Offset” is our working title for the game, not the actual name.

We are using a new engine that I started development on about a year ago, not an existing solution.

Lastly, and most important: we have no intention of developing the entire game with just the 3 of us!

Thanks to everyone for checking out our latest update, and keep us bookmarked for future updates.