Whats Next?

[rudy]

No, I don't take your comments personally.

But to be successful in the marketplace, you always have to improve.

And to draw in new players, and to make some money for themselves, they will have to improve the graphics to stay competitive.

There's not much of a future in relying on a very small niche market of players who still like to play Sid Meiers Gettysburg.

[Saddletank]

The thing is, there isn't any other game in this marketplace. SoW has no competitors, nothing else comes even close to doing what NSD is doing. I feel that SoW is light years ahead of Total Wars offerings for battlefield RTS games, regardless of (and maybe BECAUSE OF) how different they look. TW is 90% eyecandy (and quite useless it is too) and 10% gameplay. I'd much rather have a game with 90% gameplay and 10% graphics thanks very much.

I personally am fine with the graphics and to be honest when the cannons start to roar and the muskets rattle the last thing I even notice is how good or how poor the sprites look.

To get battles of 35,000+ men a side you have to draw the line somewhere and if an improved set of smoother more fluid moving sprites meant we had to make do with 15,000 men a side I think that would be a backwards move and the wrong decision. Heck, if we could get 75,000 men a side I'd make do with even simpler looking units, semi-abstracted.

Huge battles fought over huge battlefields with clever (and edging towards realistic/historical) command and control gameplay is the way to go, no-one else is in this same league.

[Jack ONeill]

All,

I agree with Brother Tank. (and yes, I'll get you those march music files at some point soon.)
There is NO other Game OR Game Engine like this out there anywhere. The basic game is marvelous, AND when all you need to do is a little (sic) modding, you can have a completely different era to fight on your computer. I have currently the American Civil War, the American Revolutionary War, The Napoleonic Wars AND the Lace Wars, (War of the Spanish Succession, War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War), ALL running on my computer at the same time. AND all this is accomplished with a little work, a tweak here and there, and ZANG! New, different game. This is THE Game Engine of the Decade. IMHO, of course. But, what do I know? I'm just a begonia........

Jack O'Neill B)

[rudy]

Well that sure brought out the fanboys.

No need to get all ruffled and defensive.

I'm not saying the graphics are bad. And yes it is a wonderful game.

But do you realize how old the game engine is now?

If you're happy with a small graphics tweak every two years or so, good for you.

Like improving the graphics for horses, so that they look like real horses instead of rejects from the glue factory. That one only took about 10 years to implement.

But take a look at what's coming down the game pipeline. I admit it's MP, but equivalent graphics can be applied to a game system such as this one.

www. warofrights. com

[Marching Thru Georgia]

rudy wrote:

But take a look at what's coming down the game pipeline. I admit it's MP, but equivalent graphics can be applied to a game system such as this one.

Yes that is very pretty scenery, but I didn't see any men on the field. How many units can the engine handle? What sort of AI is being written? Recreating TW won't be much of an accomplishment.

My rig is an i7-3770K running at 4.9GHz with 16GB of low latency memory and a AMD 7970 with the GPU overclocked to 1200MHz. When I load the full Eckmuhl OOB, 300,000 men or 37,500 SOW sprites the fighting grinds to a halt. That's with the antiquated SOW graphics at 'Best'. I can fight a battle with 200k men, though. Will I be able to fight a similar sized battle with a credible AI using the CryEngine?

[rudy]

"Will I be able to fight a similar sized battle with a credible AI using the CryEngine?"

Of course you'll be able to.

Did I tell you I sell real estate in Cuba?

"That's with the antiquated SOW graphics"

That's the point. It is antiquated.

Time for an upgrade into the future.

[Jim]

I pulled up vanilla NTW. The full strength infantry battalion has 120 troops, cavalry 45. You can have a maximum of 20 battalions in your 'army'. So an all infantry army would have 2400 models x 2 armies = a max of 4800 model soldiers.

The base sprite ratio of GB is 1:4 so 4800 sprites = 19,200 troops or roughly one CS corps. The engine as currently configured can handle around 120K troops at 1:4 = 40K sprites. It is not just the sprite ratio, the AI has to run on the troops as well so the load relationship is not linear. The AI load of ~600 battalions is why Eckmuhl does not run even at a 1:10 sprite ratio.

We have made some additional performance gains that should show up in the new generation "Next Battle". It is much too early in development to lay out any specific numbers but the early returns are promising. Of course we may take it all back with more sophisticated AI routines so the end result is a ways off yet.

-Jim

[KG_Soldier]

It's not about the looks (which I find just fine), it's about the guts, Rudy.

SOW is as fine a computer wargame as has ever been made.

That's the bottom line.

[Jack ONeill]

Rudy,

Be careful who you call a fanboy. I've played both games. If you want to play an arcade game, play TW. If you want to play a game that actually makes you think, play SOW. Guess which one I STILL play. Enough said.

Jack B)

[Flanyboy]

Rudy it's not all about graphics. Gameplay is huge and lets face it the retro gaming movement proves you don't need huge 3D budgets to get a good crowd of players playing your games.

I think it's worth pointing out that most of these AAA games that spend movie like budgets on 3D graphics are bleeding cash right now. With a few exceptions AAA's are really hurting. They have pigeon holed themselves into providing mind blowing graphics but as a result the massive budgets that has created has meant the sales figures required to just break even are astronomical.

I'm not saying graphics are not important but trying to compete with the TW series really isn't an option, I mean unless Sega wants to send over a check for ten, twenty, thirty million dollars?

Also fwiw I really think the map textures in the Brandy Station release were a significant step forward, maybe they don't match Rome TW 2 but they are a pretty huge improvement over the way the maps looked in SOW even as recently as the Chancellorsville release, at least that was my impression when I joined the team and started testing Brandy Station.