Hey everyone,
We're overwhelmed by the response to the early work in progress screenshots and video and are really appreciative of all of your feedback and questions. The announcement just went live this week with some early details and video of what the Robot Arena team has been working on for the past several months. We thought we would take some time from our development schedule to answer some of the more frequently asked questions.
This may sound a bit like a marketing statement, but the truth is we do need your support. One of the easiest ways to support the success of RA III is to select the Follow button on our RA III Steam page and subscribe to our mailing list on robotarena.com. If you already subscribe through robotarena.com you may have noticed we have answered other questions that were posed to us before we launched our Steam page.
We would like to try and make this a regular weekly post in the Steam community forums with an update on our progress and answers to your questions. While we would like to answer all of the questions, please don't take it personally if we don't answer yours. It doesn't mean it isn't a good question, it just means we may have missed it or may not have a good answer for you just yet.
Here goes!
>Will there be mod support?
Yes, our initial mod support will be through Steam Workshop, for bot blueprints. Bot blueprints are what you create in the botlab, be it a full blown bot, just a chassis, or a partial bot for others to add on to. We know that access to modifying components, arenas, sounds, physics, and UI are important to the mod community as well, but we want to be careful about how we introduce them as some of those changes may break the balance of the game. While these are not part of our initial plans for Steam Workshop, we have built the components/weapons and arenas in such a way that they can be modified and new ones created. Without the dedication of the mod community for RA 2 we wouldn't have an RA III.
>What engine are you using?
We're using using Unity 5. We looked at other engines, and while they all could have done the job nicely, Unity 5 gave us the best balance today.
>Why DirectX 9.0c in the system requirements?
We want to make RA III compatible for the widest amount of hardware out there that we can. We know not everyone has a DirectX 11 or 12 compatible GPU so the DirectX 9.0c requirement is to reach as wide an audience of fans of RA 2 as possible. RA 2 was never a visual tour de force in its day but it did what it needed to. That's not to say RA III is going to slack in the visual department, it just means that we want to spend more of our energy on other areas, at least at first!
>What physics are you using?
With Unity 5 we have PhysX. Apologies to the Havok fans, we know that it's a great solution and was our solution for RA 2 in the early days of physics solutions. Physics is important and tricky to get right and we believe that PhysX is the right solution for us. There have been some really great physics based games created in Unity and while it is always a challenge to get physics just right, the tools in Unity give us good access to what we need.
>Will there be multiplayer?
Yes. We will have 4 player online multiplayer, that's our current plan.
Thank you for your questions. We are truly thankful that you are supporting us. We're a small team of Robot Arena enthusiasts that know there are high expectations for RA III. We also know we won't please everyone, but we certainly want to try.
-Robot Arena III team