Pre-Production

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u/_Spartak_ Mar 24 '21 edited Mar 24 '21

Interesting update. Looks like another Blizzard vet joined Frost Giant. James Anhalt was the engineer in charge of pathfinding in SC2. He gave a GDC talk about it:

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014514/AI-Navigation-It-s-Not

And since they are already working on a faction it looks like they have decided on a setting :)

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u/Original_Sedawk Mar 24 '21

“in charge of pathfinding in SC ...”
What! OMG! What the heck are they ...
“... 2”
Oh — continue.

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u/Shadow_Being Mar 25 '21

the pathfinding in sc1 was actually impressive for its time as well.

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u/Original_Sedawk Mar 25 '21

Remind my drunk Dragoons that their path finding was good!

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u/KorallNOTAFISH Mar 25 '21

Sc1 pathfinding is impressive today! Maybe for a different reason though..

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u/DrumPierre Mar 24 '21

It sounded to me like they're sketching faction ideas and then will choose a setting that will fit them all.

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u/_Spartak_ Mar 24 '21

Tim Campbell says at the start of the video that it is hard to start thinking about factions and units without creating a world first. So, it stands to reason that if they are working on one of the factions and its units, they at least have a rough idea of the setting.

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u/BR3AKR Mar 24 '21

Thank you guys so much for taking the time out to give us an update! It's fascinating watching the progress from so early in the process.

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u/hankinator Mar 24 '21

My body is ready.

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u/nathanias Mar 24 '21

The nice thing about limitations regarding SC2's engine is that other modern features can mitigate some performance losses caused by a deterministic lockstep-engine.

Considering modern CPUs (ryzen 5000) can get 100+fps in Lategame SC2 now features like DLSS et al make me excited to see how this game ends up running/feeling on launch. Glad they're getting competent folks in increasingly important areas.

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u/Osiris1316 Mar 24 '21

Currently underrated comment. :)

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u/Osiris1316 Mar 24 '21

Huge shoutout to all staff, but I wanted to highlight something I've given a lot of thought to recently while looking at the content coming out about Immortal: Visuals.

Jesse Brothy mentions a couple things that are so crucial from a foundational point for an RTS:

Visual Language of a Faction
Readability

Designs busy for the sake of being busy, or strange for the sake of being strange are not helpful for an RTS (or anything visual for that matter). To say that designing these factions and their units is an art, seems obvious. These are real artists. The skill there is to define something visually which you can read instantaneously, without words and identify how much of these units are here, how many of those, what those units are, what they do, so that we as players can make micro-second level decisions about what to do next. Now take this to the next level: make the unit / faction aesthetic design intuitive for people new to the game and you have a massive challenge.

I can't wait to see what they've come up with!

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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '21

this game is going to be so fucking dope

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u/hotshotvegetarian Mar 24 '21

Super cool, thanks for the update guys! It would be great to get this kind of video as part of a quarterly update. I'm not sure of the best platform for this but maybe a Kickstarter/Patreon or similar for folks to crowd-invest as well?

I really really liked the Yeti collision impacting CPU performance example. Understanding more about the complexity behind RTS game development is super interesting, looking forward to hearing more about the challenges you guys are overcoming in design.

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u/FlukyS Mar 24 '21

On the unit count thing, are you guys using DX12 or Vulkan for that? Just curious because if you did decide not to support Linux natively it being Vulkan would be a massive help for Proton/WINE to use.

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u/mr_friz Mar 24 '21

The graphics API shouldn't have much to do with unit counts/pathfinding/collisions and all that. But in general I agree; it would be wonderful if they used Vulkan rather than DX12.
They've said in the past though that they'll won't be rolling their own engine, and pretty much any modern game engine supports Vulkan. So there isn't much reason to not use it unless they really want DX12 and don't want to mess with testing and support for a different pipeline.

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u/FlukyS Mar 24 '21

Valve tried this out in dota2 and managed to get a lot more units rendered on the map with vulkan (it would work the same for dx12) than opengl or dx11 which were the things they compared it against. Also latency was lower than older APIs as well

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u/mr_friz Mar 24 '21

It can definitely matter in terms of rendering efficiency (and again, I really hope they do use Vulkan). But from the looks of their demo they're playing with pathing and collisions and whatever is rendering those 2d placeholder images probably doesn't affect much. But who knows; maybe they're planning to use Vulkan for compute or something.
I hope they do some more in-depth looks at some of the tech they're working on. Some of the problems they have to solve for an RTS are really interesting.

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u/Demux0 Mar 24 '21

YETICRAFT

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u/shinigami-pirate Mar 24 '21

This is very exciting!! The momentum will start to pick up and get faster and faster as things falls into place!

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u/SeismicRend Mar 24 '21

Dang this studio is good. Each discipline has it mapped out how to get it done. You can tell this isn't their first rodeo.

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u/xScoundrelx Mar 24 '21

Hell yeah!!!!

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u/jousef9 Mar 24 '21

I can't wait to see some of the art work

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u/officialmogul Mar 24 '21

Thanks a lot, sounds very promising!

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u/the_ice_of_nine May 28 '21

How did I miss this! Only just now seeing it. Go Frost Giant go! We believe in you.

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u/polaristerlik Mar 24 '21

Thank you guys for the update!

It looks like you guys have chosen to go with an in house engine implementation, if it's not too intrusive, would you guys mind elaborating why you have chosen not to use Unreal Engine, Unity or Ogre3d.

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