Preview Scourge of War � Gettysburg Preview

[Jason]

<p>With <a href="http://www.scourgeofwar.com/" target="_blank"><strong>Scourge of War - Gettysburg</strong></a>, the first offering from Take Command veterans NorbSoftDev, nearing its release date, TCancer took a preview build out for a ride.</p><blockquote><p>Like its predecessor, SOWGB features a unique chain of command system. You can play the game on exactly the level that suits you best, and are allowed to take command of everything from a single Regiment (a few hundred men) to full Corps (very large formations of 8.000 to 20.000 men). Commanding a Brigade is easy, a Division is already much harder, but Corps consists of such a huge number of units that commanding on this level poses special difficulties: you can jump directly into the shoes of Generals Lee or Meade, but don't expect it will be an easy job.  </p></blockquote><p><a href="http://www.tacticularcancer.com/content.php?id=62">Read the full article here. </a> </p><div style="text-align: center"><a href="http://www.christian-wendt.org/TCANCER/SOWGB_PREVIEW/FULL/SOWGB07.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.christian-wendt.org/TCANCER/SOWGB_PREVIEW/REDUCED/SOWGB07.jpg" alt=" " width="252" height="158" /></a> </div>

 

[Turbografx]

Neat, can't wait. I loved the TC series.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Awesome. Is it out yet?

 

[Jason]

No. They're expecting to have it out by the end of the month.

 

[Fuck_The_Banks]

It's very nearly done.
If this game is even half as awesome as TC2M, it will be a must-have

 

[Jason]

As we draw to a close...

Only two items remain between us and a Gold Master. We had an MP test tonight using the demo and it all went very smoothly. There were a couple of minor bugs, but at this point I am confident in the stability of this release and very loath to change anything. I cannot count the number of times that an innocent change made at the end of a dev cycle had unintended results.

We started working on this soon after we released the last patch for MadMinute at the end of 2006. So that's a little over 3 years of a development cycle. This past year we really stepped it up and we're ready to be done.

I wrote an article a while back about what the day is like developing an Indie title, not much has changed. I put in 48 hours a week at my day job and work 9pm-? on this title. It takes a lot of dedication to finish something like this, from yourself as well as those people around you. One really nice thing we did for this game was to share the profits with the team. Since it's not just me making the sacrifice, it's only fair that the other guys that make the same sacrifice also get some profits. So anyone that stuck it out, will get a little cut of the pie. It's only fair. Besides, our families deserve a little reward too as they only got to see our backs for the past 3+ years.

Read on for a post mortem/development history of the game.

 

[Fuck_The_Banks]

Demo is up via a link in the game forums...
http://www.norbsoftware.com/Portal/inde ... 3075#13102

 

[Burning Bridges]

A tip for all people who download the demo now:

Set uniforms to medium. They will only look different when you zoom in very close, but they need much less memory.

The highres uniforms need insane amounts of RAM. It may not be a problem in the demo but in the larger scenarios I had crashes and jerky behavior.

these are the settings I settled with in the end:

http://www.global-explorer.de/20100327/1.jpg
http://www.global-explorer.de/20100327/2.jpg

 

[Fuck_The_Banks]

Thanks for the heads-up GE.
I can imagine rendering all those high res uniforms will eat huge amounts of memory in some of the later scenarios....

 

[Burning Bridges]

Sometimes they wouldn't even load. If you get crashes during loading, you are out of memory. I guess they went a little bit overboard with the texture resolution, so it's better to reduce them. Only closeup views benefit from the highres uniforms, but I trade a smoother gameplay for that any day.

It took me some time to figure that out so it might help.