Nitrous, a next-gen strategy game engine (benchmark available)

[LESS T_T]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/267130/

Welcome to the newest frontier in gaming: battles and scenes at the scale of armies and fleets, all active at once with no trickery around loading screens or off-screen abstractions.

Star Swarm is a real-time demo of Oxide Games’ Nitrous engine, which pits two AI-controlled fleets against each other in a furious space battle. Originally conceived as an internal stress test, Oxide decided to release Star Swarm so that the public can share our vision of what we think the future of gaming can be. The simulation in Star Swarm shows off Nitrous’ ability to have thousands of individual units onscreen at once, each running their own physics, AI, pathfinding, and threat assessments.

Note that Star Swarm is not a deterministic simulation -- the AI and everything else is being computed in real time, so you will get slightly different results from multiple executions even on the same hardware. Unfortunately, achieving 100% determinism with the highly threaded nature of the Nitrous engine is an unrealistic goal.

The Nitrous engine is already in use for three games currently in production: an unannounced title from Oxide Games, Stardock’s Star Control reboot, and Mohawk Games’ upcoming game codenamed Mars. Nitrous is also available for licensing to interested game developers.

You’ve got to see it to believe it. Download Star Swarm for free now to see what your gaming PC can do with the next-generation Nitrous engine.

Key Features

• Up to 10,000+ units onscreen at once – Imagine what kind of games can be made when developers can count on simulating battles and scenes at this scale
• First look at AMD’s Mantle technology – See the performance benefits of AMD’s new API layer for yourself if you have compatible (Graphics Core Next-based) hardware
• Benchmark mode generates performance information – Since Star Swarm is a dynamic simulation rather than a canned demo, run it several times to see what Nitrous’ real-world gaming performance is on your machine
• Film-style rendering – Nitrous uses Object Space Lighting, which renders objects onscreen using the same techniques used by the film industry, including real-time film quality motion blur, on your PC

So, the future tech of strategy games?

Anyone tried this? I didn't dare with my poor laptop.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Stardock’s Star Control reboot

 

[Burning Bridges]

The future of strategy games: an incredibly ugly spaceship, and a thousand flyspeck-sized dots that are supposed to represent something.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Note that Star Swarm is not a deterministic simulation -- the AI and everything else is being computed in real time, so you will get slightly different results from multiple executions even on the same hardware. Unfortunately, achieving 100% determinism with the highly threaded nature of the Nitrous engine is an unrealistic goal.

no comprende. isn't that what sets apart any interactive scene from a movie?

if the computations are indeterministic, does this mean the objects have free will?

or are those computatons just random .. ?

Up to 10,000+ units onscreen at once – Imagine what kind of games can be made when developers can count on simulating battles and scenes at this scale

The same as with any somewhat decent engine? 10,000 doesn't sound that impressive with just a little level of detail.

the future of gaming

Can't help but notice that the the future of gaming engine's star background is still a dumb sphere map. Ogre3D can render a real starfield with 20,000 stars as billboards without problems. In addition to 1000's of scene nodes in the foreground, of course.

But doing something remarkable with all that megaunit goodness is a completely different matter.
As said before, it still looks ugly.

 

[Brotherman Bill]

We beed an engine specializing in TBS's particularly in being quick, flexible and easy to use for even small studios.

 

[pakoito]

indeterministic

Stochastic ffs.

does this mean the objects have free will?

I had an interview once where they told me the best AI was the one that could disguise pure randomness better. Maybe not for an RTS tho.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Stochastic is just another word for random.

My take is that the engine boasts "AI" on individual objects, but they don't interact with each other. They replaced that with random distribution functions that "predict" what could be a plausible action. For example, when two people pass each other on the pavement it is very likely that they will say "hello". According to probability could just as well say hello even though they don't know what the other person did, if they know each other, or what is their personal relationship. This could lead to all kinds of funny situations like two people first saying hello, then kill each other..