Greetings! I hope you had a Merry Christmas.
Preliminaries
http://youtu.be/QIWyf8Hyjbg
(note that the video demo of “Star Swarm” was from November, it looks even better now, we were able to throw that together in basically a month or so with Nitrous).
Now…
I have a confession to make. For the past year I’ve been seeing other people. Don’t get me wrong, I still love Stardock. It’s what I still spend most of my time on. But as the next couple of years are going to make apparent, the game industry has entered a new age. The age of 64bit, multi-core games has finally arrived. And I’m lucky enough to be able to work with and help some of the best talent in our industry convert the potential of this age into actual new games.
Two gaming genres in particular are poised to leap ahead thanks to having more memory and more cores available to developers:
(1) Strategy games. Strategy games hit the 32-bit memory limit a decade ago. That’s because unlike a first person shooter, we have to keep the entire game world and all units in memory all the time. As a result, strategy games have had to get simpler and simpler in order to be visually competitive.
(2) Role Playing Games. Role playing games, in order to be visually competitive, have had to switch to being in first-person mode. But with 64-bit and multiple cores combined with a new engine that utilizes them we can create living breathing worlds of massive scope and depth.
How we got started
About 18 months ago I was talking to friends of mine who had developed the engine for Civilization V. Everyone in our industry is painfully familiar with hard limit of 32-bit memory and the old DirectX 9 age limitations.
Unlike my friends, there was nothing I could do on my own about it. I couldn’t write a 3D engine to save my life. But they had been giving the problem a lot of thought. The problem they faced was that starting a new company that would take multiple years to create a new 3D engine was very risky. How would you explain to people why you didn’t just license Unreal or Unity or something else?
This is where combining our capabilities together has made something wonderful happen. As the CEO of Stardock and principle stock holder, I have the opportunity to still take risks. Except, in my mind, I didn’t see it is a big risk because I knew the people involved.
Oxide is born
So a little over a year ago, in secret, we started a company called Oxide Games. Our mission: to build a next-generation 3D engine that can handle thousands of high fidelity objects on screen simultaneously. The goal would be to be able to show a battle from say Lord of the Rings with the same fidelity and same quantity of units but in real-time.
The rendering system would be different as well. Since we were starting from scratch with multiple cores, 64-bit and DirectX 11 as basic requirements, the team could design an engine that rendered the same way that CGI in movies are rendered except in this case, in real-time. As a result (and you really have to see it to believe it) the actual visuals look…different than what you may be used to seeing in a game. Even in the Star Swarm demo, which is a very simple, quickly made example, the movement, the lighting, etc. look like a movie scene rather than a computer game. There is no particle effect system. Instead, every laser blast, every light, every effect is an object.
Click on this to see a larger version. Notice how things look blurred? That’s not me moving the camera. It’s motion and it’s not a post-processor effect.
With SWARM (i.e. every core gets used) you can do cool things like have moving turrets on every ship in the universe with their own physics. Look closely at this shot.
The team in action
To give you a better background on the amazing engineering talent at Oxide check this page out: http://www.oxidegames.com/about.
For instance, Dan Baker was the guy who led the effort at Microsoft on HLSL for DirectX 10 which is what our industry uses now. Tim Kipp has developed 3D procedural engines for Microsoft, Firaxis and the military. You’ll be hearing a lot about procedural based content generation in the next few years. If 64-bit/Multicore is today’s revolution, procedural generation is the one on deck. Marc Meyer is the guy who largely invented the technology that many of us in the industry have borrowed from in terms of how to create dynamic user interfaces in games. As someone who’s passionate about user interfaces (don’t confuse UI design with the underlying tech that makes them possible) I can tell you that what Marc has done is crucial for game developers. Historically, making UI in games has been a huge pain. Marc’s work is making UI creation a treat. Brian Wade was my counterpart at Firaxis. He was the lead developer on Civilization V and is specialized in AI engineering (what AI do at Stardock is slightly different in that I’m responsible for the engineering and the design, at Firaxis their AI structure was a bit different). Brian is a much much better developer than I am.
Last Fall, Stardock announced that Derek Paxton was taking over day-to-day leadership of Stardock Entertainment. Now you know why. Derek’s amazing talent as the head of the studio allows me to work on projects like Oxide. For the next 2+ years, I’ll be the “interim CEO” of the company while we take Nitrous and turn it into something that can be licensed to third parties (we’re not remotely ready for licensing yet) as well as make it into something that Stardock and its studio network are able to utilize to make truly awesome new games.
There totally needs to be a Star Wars episode 1-3 rts game made with this.
My god, a true Star Wars Rebellion remake with this engine would make me cry with happiness.
It's interesting because it's actually pretty hard to take a good screenshot because it's like taking a photo of things moving. Things get blurred.
Great presentation. The adventurous spirit of this project is exciting. Life is all about breaking boundaries.
If you don't mind I'd like to make a suggestion for a game. I like the concept of spore, but I didn't like how they did the game. What didn't help I was visualizing a 4x real time stradegy game. I think Galactic civilizations has better ship customization. I would like to see the tribal stage combined with the prehistoric era from empire earth and virtual village. I would like to see the civilization stage more like empire earth 3, rise of nations, or civilization world from facebook. I would like to see the space stage more like distant worlds, sins of a solar empire, and starcraft.
Some other differences I would make is give the cell stage fish.
In the creature stage I would have an option to make humans. I would make it easier to make good aliens. I would give you a better option to make aliens at least in the creature stage. I figure you have a lot of alien options laying around In the tribal stage if you make friends with another species instead of conquering them those other species should also show up in the civilization stage,
I think the clothing options should at least change to fit the era. I think you should keep the Galactic civilizations ship option. Always making it better of course. I think the vehicle, boat, and airplane customization doesn't make a lot of sense on the game in spore. You either don't need to customize these things, or if you are going to customize these things you need to have it change depending on the technology.
I would like to see multiple abilities and tech trees just like galactic civilizations, but this would be based on a range of variables instead of giving to specific civilizations. The reason you would do this is because the game works on this kind of customization. Above all things remember we need tech research.
You could also have random events. The alignment of the species would be affected based on the choices made similar to galactic civilizations.
This is really what I was hoping spore was when I bought it. You of course could improve on this idea if you made this for oxide. This could be one of the games for this. I don't know why anybody didn't come up with this game. It would have been the perfect game to compete against spore.
I totally understand why you guys play other peoples games. This is a good idea to know what you are up against.
Very nice update here. The thought of all ships having turrets is making me drool.
Once there's a solid space RTS based on the Nitrous engine out, odds are you will, at the very least, be able to count on me and a couple of others going to that game and making a Star Wars mod for it. It wouldn't be surprising if there would a Clone Wars component heh heh.
So Brad, if I can get a little nosy here, how does the regular Oxide code implementation compare with the Mantle integrated Oxide implementation? Is Oxide already taking advantage of most of the low level API stuff, or does Mantle improve on it significantly?
I've seen the hype around Mantle in the last couple of months, i.e. the press releases, preliminary benchmarks, performance incrase claims, etc..
With that in mind, what is your personal experience/impressions of Mantle so far? And how does the AMD hardware performance seem to compare to Nvidia & Intel graphics hardware with Mantle in play?
Also, any thoughts on the AMD TrueAudio thing? As a developer, what are your impressions? Does Oxide see any of the hyped CPU load savings/performance bumps with TrueAudio? Or have y'all not worked with TrueAudio much as of yet?
Is it technically possible to reduce blur? No offense, but the way blur is used now, made me allergic to that effect. Notably if I can't turn it off - I'm kinda suspicious when I see it, because I think devs are trying to hide something behind it. Especially when they really are.
It's really nice to know someone finally decided to do something with technical limitations, I hope others will keep up and won't stumble (again!) on rather primitive steps of just adding more polygons and texture of better quality, and call it advancement, while keeping everything else on decade (or more) old principles. "This character's left boob has one hundred thousand million of polygons and ultrauberHD texture". Well, unless it's left boob simulator, I don't think that's correct distribution of available resources for a game.
As for your engine (why Nitrous, why not to keep edible names, like Lasagna? ), I really want to see games of scale of Space Rangers, Supreme Commander, little touch of Cities XL (yeah, I like it, sorry), and, of course, Sins of a Solar Empire, all on steroids, preferably combined into one grand universe, made on it. Just imagening being able to zoom onto planet from Galaxy view, SoaSE style, and then, zooming further, into atmosphere, through clouds, and see cities developed on planet's surface, under your struct guidance and by your plans.
There must be lights burning brighter, somewhere
Got to be birds flying higher in the sky more blue
If I can dream of better land
Where all my brothers walk hand in hand
Tell me why, oh why, oh why can't my dream come true...
...because it is being made by Oxide.
Posting here to keep tabs on this. Just made my holidays Brad!
Oxide Lasagna still sounds better.
I like the idea of Firaxis using this to come up with a strategic turn-based XCOM game. Don't get me wrong, I like the four-to-six sized squad of soldiers taking on the aliens, but haven't you ever wanted to duke it out with a full batallion armed with plasma rifles and grenades?
This is funny though. I laughed.
To be honest, any kind of MASS warfare sounds interesting to me. Let's have a couple of thousand soldiers fighting instead of the ~50 you get in Starcraft 2 or the ~100 you get in supcom 2 (or the ~80 max you get in rome 2). I personally think that kind of mass warfare would open up a lot of new fun game mechanics.
SINS 2 anyone?
That would make a wicked game. Just saying.
I'm really hoping they hold off making Sins 2 until they can build it around a fully functional Nitrous engine.
I still would love to see a game like Sins but with combat more like homeworld. This engine looks like it could achieve that. Individual tracking turrets, large groups of fighter squads in formation, object based weapons (which means you could actually have weapons miss against fast targets and missiles could be intercepted by flak or other missiles!)
Also want to see if this engine can handle large scale ground warfare too. =D
Wow! Seems like you have a lot of talent gathered! Best of luck!
Any chance there is a demo/proof of concept we can play with?
I would buy this ... along with millions of others!
When I saw the video I thought it really looked like Sins as well.
Great news, perhaps now we get over the plateau we've reached in the games we love the most!
I'll only buy it if Jar Jar Binks plays a key role in the story.
First question that pops up in my head is WHY haven't any big developer done this yet?? Only other 64bit/multicore, Dx 11 engine I know of is Frostbite but I don't know its capabilities. I wonder if it works for strategygames since the new C&C was a failure.
You make Nitrous sound like a revolution and I hope it is. At first I thought it was all about having thousands of units onscreen at once (which I'm very skeptical against since I don't think I'd like games with that) but this "objects instead of particleeffects" sounds interesting. Before your post, I had never thought about it nor what the differences were.
To make me understand better what exactly Nitrous can do, I would like to know how Company of Heroes or XCOM: EU would be better if they were made in Nitrous
I don't think it would make a huge difference on XCOM games unless they were real time. Turn Based games can handle a lot more than RTS because it only has to calculate one unit's moves and attacks at a time.
Object based weapons though, that is what is really going to make things better. It's not like it is new, it's been done before but it really makes a lot more things possible. In terms of maybe using this engine for Sins 2 I can see it vastly improving the game.
Potential for directional shields that actually block incoming fire when active. Point Defense guns that can intercept incoming missiles and torpedoes. Turrets that have varying tracking speed, meaning heavier guns may move slower and make it harder to hit smaller, faster craft. Actual evasive maneuvers that work!
Oxide's engine, Nitrous biggest advantage is that it is completely asynchronous in its rendering. The engine is not tied to a thread so the more cores you have, the faster it gets.
The biggest advantage of Mantle is that unlike DirectX, Mantle is truly multicore aware. With DirectX 11, more cores don't buy you nearly as much. That said, Nitrous, even on DirectX, is still two orders of magnitude faster than say a typical DirectX 9 engine.
A Mantle optimized game can show a massive performance gain depending on how many cores the user has on their CPU. Contrary to what I read on some forums, most games remain CPU or video driver bound (i.e. the GPU is waiting to be fed). Mantle lets you get a lot more stuff onto the GPU.
The reason is that it is non-trivial. Stardock internally couldn't build this and we have some extraordinary talent. The GalCiv III engine, written from scratch with DirectX 10/11 in mind, can't touch Nitrous and make no mistake, the GalCiv III engine is very good. But Nitrous is something I've never seen before in my career.
I know I'm not the only one who was dubious at the idea of having a completely core-neutral 3D engine. Who manages the jobs? How do you synchronize tasks? How do you take care of ordering?
In a normal modern 3D engine (and when I say modern I mean, an engine that would normally be written in 2013) you would have a dedicated thread for the job system with a bunch of worker threads that handle executing on that job system. That will get you pretty far and requires DirectX 10/11 to do because it means multiple threads will be touching the GPU.
But Nitrous has no concept of dedicated threads with specified jobs.
Being able to show thousands of units on screen at once is the thing the guys get geeked out at the most. But when it gets demoed, that's not even the thing that catches peoples eyes the most. Instead, it's how things get rendered. The Nitrous engine is basically a real-time version of renderman (i.e. the CGI you see in movies) so the way light and materials work is radically different.
BTW, Star Swarm (the benchmark) is going to go up on Steam this month so all this admitted hyping I'm doing is something you will be able to verify first hand in a few weeks.
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