I work at Stardock and those of you who follow my journals know I’m pretty opinionated (see “Kudos to Good old Games”, “Happy about Steam”, “Don’t blame the pirates”). So let me give my 2 cents on why the young studio, Ironclad Games is already so successful. I’m not speaking for them. This is just my opinion on what makes a new studio successful.
The founders of Ironclad Games are industry veterans. They worked on Homeworld: Cataclysm and other pretty well known projects over the years. When they got together, they decided to focus on something they were very passionate about and very familiar with first: Space strategy.
This is the key distinction that I know others in our industry are familiar with: FOCUS. Sins of a Solar Empire is a PC game. Period. It made no compromises. They didn’t spend money on things that would have diminishing returns like cut scenes (the cut scenes in Sins were made by Stardock largely for marketing reasons). As a result, the game was a lot less expensive to make than other games while delivering an incredible gaming experience.
I’m the designer of Galactic Civilizations and I will say this: Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity is a better game than Galactic Civilizations. It has better game mechanics. It is more fun single player. It has multiplayer. It has a vastly better user interface. It has a more cohesive experience.
Obviously, the games do have a different set of appeal (and when I get back to some future GalCiv sequel I’ll happily steal a lot of ideas from Sins but that’ll be some years from now). But what Ironclad did with Sins of a Solar Empire was, imo, revolutionary.
Let me walk you through a few of the innovations in Sins of a Solar Empire:
1. The Empire Tree. A user can control their entire empire from this simple tree. In a world where “skill” is often measured by how fast one can click, the Empire Tree brings STRATEGY back to the real-time genre imo.
The Empire Tree in Sins. Expand the tree to the detail you want.
2. Adaptive UI. The adaptive UI got its start in games like Galactic Civilizations and Supreme Commander. But nothing yet has come close to matching what Sins of a Solar Empire does.
For those of you not familiar with Sins of a Solar Empire who have wondered how a game made by less than a half-dozen guys could sell a million or so copies the adaptive UI really provides a clue imo:
I can be looking at this and with the mouse wheel roll out to this next picture:
Notice how some ships are icons and others are not. It’s not “all or nothing” ala GalCiv or Supreme Commander. The interface intelligently figures out when something is “too small” and turns it into an icon.
If that was all Sins did, it would still be very impressive but it goes further:
If you keep zooming out, the user interface changes again to provide an instantly readable display (hint: the side with more dots on it is probably in the best shape in that system).
Remember, this is happening in a fluid motion. We’re not changing screens here. This all happens in one continuous motion.
Imagine how different things might have been done, however, if Ironclad had been worried about console controls during its development? It committed to a platform – in this case the PC – and used its inherent strengths to make a better game.
3. Knowing when to say “when”.
As any game developer can tell you, it’s not hard, if you have art assets (which obviously Ironclad does) to have incredible graphics. This is the battle that occurs in nearly every game studio in the PC world: Pixel Shader 2? Pixel Shader 3? Pixel Shader 4? The most gratifying choice is always the most powerful option but it means a lot fewer people will be able to play your game.
In addition, in a world of 32-bit gaming (every major PC game out there is a 32-bit game – even if it runs on your 64-bit machine) you get 2 gigs to play with. Total. That’s it. Even your 12GB Windows 7 box won’t benefit a given game because that game can only address 2 gigs. Hence, that super fancy first person shooter with gorgeous graphics may only have 8 guys in a room because otherwise it’ll go over the limit.
Knowing when to say when can make all the difference in the world in terms of gameplay. Choosing gameplay over “art” is a very unappreciated choice often times. Ironclad made the tough choices with Sins. They kept the texture sizes reasonable so that more ships could be in the game.
This tiny constructor ship looks great despite having to have a relatively small texture size in order to allow the game to have thousands of units in play at once. In an age where screenshots rule the day, how many large studios would have been able to make the tough call of choosing unshowable gameplay over screenshot love?
Conclusion
The continued success of Sins of a Solar Empire helps demonstrate the point here: If you want to found a successful game studio, do it because you want to make great GAMES. Don’t try to rationalize what you’re doing as some type of “high art” or for ways to commoditize the “product” you’re making. Make a game. Make a great game. If you do so, you will succeed, just ask Ironclad Games.
I'm positive I've seen a post on this board where someone (I thought it was Frogboy) said that todays games demand so much graphics memory because of the 2GB Win32 limit. Which meant to me that the graphics cards memory were used in addition to the 2GB RAM.
The 2 GB limit is imposed by Windows itself for 32-bit. In reality, the hardware is capable of addressing up to 4GB because the registers are 32-bit (i.e. 2^32 = 4 GB). Due to memory the OS kernel allocates for itself and a few other reasons, it's constrained to 2 GB.
That said, all of this has little to do with the GPU and graphics rendering performance. The GPU has it's own memory (VRAM), which isn't usually addressable from the CPU side of things. The GPU usually also allocates a certain amount of system RAM for it's own use (GART), which is much, much slower than VRAM but useful for swapping data out of VRAM when it's full or not currently needed, as well as a place to store data that is updated regularly from the CPU anyway (i.e. streaming data).
2 GB is more than most graphics cards currently have anyway, so being limited to addressing "only" 2GB of system memory has little relevance in terms of graphics performance and capabilities.
Right now, the industry is moving towards procedurally generated content, so things like parameterized tesselation are going to be more important because the GPU generates the added detail on the fly, instead of burdening already constrained GPU VRAM. This combined with more streaming techniques like sparse virtual texturing and clipmapping are going to help alleviate the memory issue. And pretty soon the GPU and CPU are going to be one unit anyway, kind of like how floating point units used to be off die.
That said, it sounds like Elemental is based around a less bleeding edge set of rendering techniques, which is probably smart from a sales standpoint as it will run on more computers.
Certainly not what I expected to find as a first-time visitor to the Dev Journals fora, but it's a pretty pleasant surprise. One thing that I don't think you can rule out is the close relationship that Ironclad shares with their community. As you might gather, I'm pretty new to the forums altogether, but I've already seen more instances than I can count on one hand where the devs are actively seeking input on new considerations, as well as giving some genuine thought to the suggestions and comments of the regular folks here. It may or may not factor into your original train of thought that IC has really buckled down on the fundamentals that make Sins such a great game, but having a close-knit involvement like that certainly sets them pretty far ahead of the curve when it comes to being a good development studio. That reputation alone would certainly compel me to consider other IC titles in the future, especially useful for those niche titles that some people wouldn't have immediate interest in.
Ironclad is a sucess because, they choosed to create a game based on a market.
Many game developers try to create a game to everyone, a game that "everyone" will like to play.
This make the games not reach their full potential.
People have very different tastes and its impossible to fit on all those tastes, so in the end you will need to make changes to get close to what you was wanting at the first place.
Yes, some guys that like sins of solar empire, would like those games (the ones made to everyone), but they would prefer way more a game made just to their market (sins or solar empire), and would be more likely to give their support (buy, or at least tell about how good the game is with other guys) and buy expansions.
Also there are some potential gamers that dont play games, or just play few games, because they dont like the "made to everyone" games.
That problem is even bigger on mmorpg, the problem is so big that are some players that complain when ONE game is not how they like. Many players complained when they saw that darkfall was going to have open pvp in every area. The problem is that darkfall is just one game, there is thousands of mmorpg without open pvp in every area, if they dont like open pvp they can just play the others games, and there are many mmorps to choose because 99% of the mmorpgs doenst have totally open pvp.
Because of that "made to everyone", they havent made yet, a 100% open RvR mmorpg game yet, where you play to do the RvR battles and RvR is just not a part of the game (big or not) RvR is the game (an example is world war 2 online, but this game is a mmofps not a mmorpg)
Haha thats where spore failed it was good at first but its really a shame that it didn't have much depth to it, it looks real good just seeing the parts of it before it came out but know since i got it i barly play it. It was made for everyone which was a grave misstake which was a shame really could have been something great but it wasn't.
I have gotten out of mmos and into the smaller multiplayer games like starcraft and some fps ones. mmos where great for a time but it doesn't really have much else to it with out there being other players.
Homeworld was fun as all hell nice to know that these guys made it, wonder what there working on next because i will end up buying it.
I've wanted to make a game, but I get bored too easily when trying to learn programming. However, this is my idea of a game which I've had since the late 90's when I played Red Alert and OO7 GoldenEye: Combine the RTS and FPS genres. Have it where each individual soldier is played by an individual person FPS style but the commands are given by various ranks of commanding officers who view the board in RTS style. If Ironclad or any other capable person or group wishes to steal it from me, go ahead - I just want to see it made. If something like this already exists, then please point it out because that would also be cool.
Battlefield 2 had a FPS/RTS style mix. I loved that game.
no way bf2 is an RTS you only have one commander... and they are not needed anyways Bad company 2 pwns
You could try
http://www.empiresmod.com/
Being slightly confused...i googled it. And I made a mistake. Its Battlezone 2. Not Battlefield. My memory failed me, its been years and years since I played it. And only b/c its wont run anymore of the cd I had.
I am really happy to see Ironclad succeed. They made a fantastic UI with great visuals to back it up. My only major complaint is the game offers very little replay value for the single player. After the inital rush of several games is over and the player learns the AI tricks the gameplay basically becomes overly repetitive ( some random events could add greatly to the dynamic feel of the game ). Despite this, I still support and applaud Ironclad's attempt at merging 4X and rts elements into a finely crafted game. I'm sure the multiplayers are enjoying the full potential this game has to offer.
You should try mods to enhance the single player experience. The AI might not be improved in most of them, but just having new options avaliable does a lot to increase the replay value in my opinion.
Ah good point. Any particular mod that stands above the rest?
The relevant mods can be found in the modding section of this forum.
There are several that stand out, and several that show good potential.
I would definately look at the Star Wars, Stargate, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and Distant Stars Mods. Several of these build on other mods that include new planet types, stars, graphics/effects enhancements, etc.
Note that the 2GB per-process address space limit mentioned here can be increased to 3GB if the program is marked as /LARGEADDRESSAWARE and the system is booted with the /3GB switch in boot.ini. It can be even increased to full 4GB if a 32-bit program marked /LARGEADDRESSAWARE is run on a 64-bit system.
This feature was created with the Enterprise Server edition of NT 4 back in 1997, and no it has nothing to do with PAE, which allow addressing more than 4GB total of physical memory but do NOT increase the per-process address space limit. There is AWE that was designed to be used under PAE which allow bank-switching, but programs specifically have to be designed to use it which takes much more work than making a program /LARGEADDRESSAWARE.
"This feature was created with the Enterprise Server edition of NT 4 back in 1997"
And extended to all editions of Windows with XP. Before XP using /3GB under non-Enterprise/Advanced Server editions of Windows would only cause the kernel address space to be reduced, making it effectively useless.
So...in other words you're a "Idea Pirate"!!!!! Quick...someone go tell the MPAA!!!
J/K
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