Waterloo Screenshots #2

[pakfront]

Good points, Saddletank.

I wonder if have a single sprite have two or more men in the image rather than just one is a possible solution? That should not affect the FPS, as you are still only drawing one quad/two triangles for each sprite. Would look a little odd when they turn or you orbit the camera though.

[tim]

I can see what you are saying and having been a tabletop gamer am aware of the dilemma. We had to make a decision on Gettysburg and will have to do same with Waterloo. I'm not the person who will make that decision. The work done will be used or recycled. Sometimes things have to be redone or even scrapped - we are used to that during the process of making a game. Not everything we did for Gettysburg made it into the game. At this stage all I can say is that nothing is set in stone.

Pakfront - I don't think the two sprites would work as when revolving round them they would spin out of line I think. May experiment with it...

[Saddletank]

I'm sure you guys will work things out to a good compromise. One of the better aspects of SoW is the ability to play huge battles of 50,000+ a side on the average home computer so I can't see a better way than to keep some kind of man:sprite ratio. Either way I can't think of a better team to have this problem to resolve.

[Jim]

We will do what we can to balance out all of the needs for CPU and GPU cycles. One example of progress is that for the original release of GB, the performance requirement was that a combat with 40,000 troops (Longstreet's attack) had to be playable. This needed 10,000 soldier sprites at 1:4.

We have made performance improvements that were integrated with various patches. Our current draft performance standard for Waterloo is that a battle with 200,000 troops in combat must be playable (WL, ~7 PM). At 1:4, this works out to 50,000 soldier sprites. This is a five-fold increase in performance from the original release of GB. Our pilot testing give us reasonable confidence that we can ship with this level of performance. Exactly how we will get there will be shaped by many choices coming up during the development process.

-Jim

[Gunfreak]

When will we get WIPs of troops?

[Jim]

Absolutely.

-Jim