![]() So we have to carefully pick what we do first. Support for Substance Painter (we currently modify our materials by hand)Ī way for designers to modify terrain easily (we currently have to edit files by hand)Īll of this is doable. ![]() Some sort of particle editor (we do this by hand and C++ right now)Ī tool that converts FBX files into OXModels (we have a special build of the game that converts them for us)Ī UI editor (we currently modify this by hand) You can see to see what Sins modders do and to see some of the great Sins mods.Įasy way to manage mods in game (we have to mess with the directories on the disk ourselves) For Ashes, we’ll need to create a new Forge tool. With Sins of a Solar Empire, we have the Galaxy Forge. This is where we need to work with modders. But we would also like to have a turtle based victory path as well where they can build something that slowly spreads across the land. We have none of these in development but think “doomsday weapons” This will come in the form of Juggernauts with 3 per race. The new T3s will be available as a free DLC to existing players.Īshes currently has no T4s. I’d like to see these out in the Spring time. We also have two new T3s per race in development. We may eventually change the way T3s upgrade where you don’t pick their upgrade when they level up but rather they get a general bonus with their specific coolness chosen at the macro level as techs. Let’s break these down into the areas that are on our radar:Īs part of a future tech tree update, we will want to let players do a lot of interesting things with the different T3s. The relative budgets of each game translate into more green wins.īut I’m still going to do it since I’ve worked closely with the developers of the other games over the years (Stardock was GPG’s publisher, Blizzard’s contracted expansion pack maker for StarCraft: Retribution, and we’re friends with the UberE team). Third, many of the weaknesses of a given game are either design choices or budget choices. Second, yes, it’s even dumber to argue that competing games are objectively better than your own game. No one will agree on this so I’ll just give you what I think it will have and as always, my opinion is subject to change based on persuasive arguments from players and this is all just my opinion obviously:įirst, yes, it’s totally inappropriate for me to even engage in a public comparison like this. From here to thereįirst, we have to decide what the ultimate Ashes RTS needs to have. Content is expensive and we live in an age where someone can just buy Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance for $5 on a Steam sale which has years of added content. But we’ll talk about the modding in the next section.Īnd this is the biggest challenge for us. But we still need a lot of core RTS features: The ugly fact is, the RTS market is small and you can’t spend a huge amount on an RTS up front if it’s new IP.Įscalation was a big step in the right direction for serious RTS players and lets us move the base game into being an introduction to the genre. With a fraction of the budget of Planetary Annihilation and around 1/17th the budget of Supreme Commander, it’s a tough haul to compete. The original release of Ashes was an impressive, albeit limited RTS. The short version is that having a core neutral GPU engine is very hard to develop and Nitrous is the first and so far only one we know of that has shipped a game that does it (though Frostbite might be there). PC World investigated this claim earlier this year. go here.īroadly speaking, a next-generation RTS that wants to compete with Ashes will have to develop an engine to do it. If you’re interested in the technical breakdown. I wrote about this earlier this year for IGN. That’s why until Ashes of the Singularity, it had been many years since someone has made a new one. But we’ve already done the hard stuff first. There are a lot of things we have to do to get from where we are today to where we want to be. We want Ashes to become the ultimate RTS game Let’s break things down into bite sized chunks to understand what we have today. ![]() That’s where I want us to eventually get in terms of battlefield flexibility.Ĭheck these screenshot from a mod of Total Annihilation: It’s a huge naval map with bits of islands in it. In Total Annihilation there’s a map called Caldera’s rim. ![]()
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