I received a copy of the newsletter you have to subscribe to on the main DG website. Strangely I seem to have been one of the few people who successfully received it for some reason so I posted it up on the DG forums and I have copied it here too. Click the pictures to enlarge them................
May 9, 2006
Greetings Storm Eagle Fans!
We are hard at work finishing up the Campaign game for our upcoming debut release “Distant Guns: The Russo-Japanese War 1904-05”! Our decision to delay the game until the Campaign game was complete is paying BIG dividends in the features area. We have implemented many upgrades to the Distant Guns engine that were originally slated for the phase two release (an upcoming, un-named titled) to be released late summer/fall 2006. Dramatic improvements in the memory footprint requirements, ship damage, viewing features like “Binocular View”, and especially the huge increase in frames per second (“fps”) render speed of the Distant Guns graphics engine!
What does that mean to you the gamer? It means more of the 3D graphics features are available to machines with older 3D graphics cards! It also means that if you have one of the most current video cards, you can experience even more than ever before. Imagine playing the latest installment of Distant Guns on a 1920 x 1200 pixel monitor.
Here are a few screen shots to wet your whistle with:
1. The boys from Vladivostok close in on a British merchant (Glasgow) off the coast of northern Japan, early winter evening, 1904. With no Japanese warships in sight, the merchant will have to surrender when the cruisers approach to within 5000 meters.
2. A binocular view of the Glasgow from the Russian cruiser Rossiya.
3. The view from the Glasgow. It won't be long now.
4. Dusk lighting on the Russian cruisers as they close on Glasgow.
5. Immediately after Glasgow surrenders, a Japanese task force plots an attempt to intercept the Russians before they cause a great deal of trouble in Japanese shipping lanes. Almost all those flags around Japan are unarmed, unescorted merchant ships. The orange overlay shows where the shipping lanes run, and the routes change over time as ports change ownership on the mainland. You can toggle the overlay and merchant display using the f9 key. Merchants are not selectable, and you can not issue orders to them. Note that quiet a few of them are British, with a scattering of German and American ships. The Russians, of course, can see the shipping lanes but not the ships. They have to find them the hard way, hoping not to run into anything nasty along the way.
6. Another campaign game map overlay: showing territorial ownership in September of 1904. The Japanese navy has done a good job of protecting the shipping lanes, and their army has just entered Liaoyang. Note that with the shipping overlay turned off, you can't see all those merchants. They're still out there.
Sincerely,
Norm Koger – Maestro