Inside the Upcoming Age of Empires III Graphics Engine
By Alice Hill If you only know one thing about me, know this: I love computer games and especially Age of Empires. There was a time when I played "Age" at least two times a day religiously, and I swear that the basic resource management and strategy needed to win, made working in the business world easier to navigate. But what is truly astounding is the fact that Age of Empires 2 is over 6 years old. No game I can think of has that kind of lasting power - sure you think fondly about Super Mario and I love Duke Nukem, but this game is still in heavy rotation with the Half Life players and others online.
That is why I almost fainted when I saw screen shots of Age III. (Click here for an index of beautiful shots.) Here's also an interview Gamespot did with head programmer Dave Pottinger on the new Age III graphics engine. Read on:
GameSpot: What were the design goals behind the new engine, besides "it should look really good"? What kind of gameplay did you envision the engine to support? Are there specific gameplay features, like weather effects, environmental deformation, modeled physics for units getting knocked back by cannons, and so on, that the team found itself building tech for into the new engine?
Dave Pottinger: Simple. We told the team to make the best-looking PC game ever. A simple statement that was anything but simple to execute. When we started Age 3, we knew that we had some really cool gameplay ideas to try out. How do you not have that after doing real-time strategy games for 10 years? But, we wanted to recapture some of the initial "holy crap" visual appeal that we got when we showed Age 1 for the first time. Going high-end with the graphics was an easy way to do that. It hadn't been done before in our genre, we had a lot of guys who were crazy excited to do it, and it was hugely bold. So bold, in fact, that we've had a lot of internal discussions about whether it was smart to shoot that high. In the end, the fans will tell us whether we've made the right choice with the graphical direction. We're certainly happy with the current results.
Gameplay-wise, yes, the graphics do drive the gameplay, and vice versa. We try to leverage opportunities in each all of the time. A good example would be cutting down trees. We put physics in for a bunch of things like building destructions and rag-doll effects. But one afternoon a programmer grabbed me and showed me how cool it looked when we put physics on the trees as they fell. It was a perfect extension. Throw in a tiny little camera shake as the tree hits, and the effect is great. It extends the other way, too. Since the trees are physics-enabled, an errant cannonball can hit them and knock them down. Stuff like that is just cool.
GS: When did the team begin working on the game, approximately? Does this represent the evolutionary growth of the existing Age of Mythology engine, or did you end up more or less starting from scratch? Are there any specific lessons the team has taken from previous games, like Age of Mythology or the original Age of Empires 2D series, that are being incorporated into the new game's development?
DP: We started with about seven people right after Age of Mythology shipped. We're up to considerably more than that right now. Apart from a couple of prototype teams, most of our studio is working on Age 3. We started with the Age of Mythology engine. That was nice because we had built-in fallbacks. Age of Mythology was a tough development cycle because we rewrote everything. We were adding core functions to the Age of Mythology engine right up until ship. (Who really wants to work on localization code early?) It was liberating to start with that stuff behind us.
By now, though, so much of the Age of Mythology engine has been replaced that the code base feels very different. We've certainly tried to carry all of the knowledge we've collected over the years into the new code. If there was one thing that we learned from Age of Mythology, it was to really finish features every time we do them. Age 3 has been a smoother development because we've taken that extra bit of time with the various development tasks to try to keep things sane. It helps a lot, particularly since Ensemble is a massively iterative game company. We throw stuff out all of the time. If 25 percent of the gameplay code that I've written for Age 3 is still there when we ship, I'll be very surprised. So, you can imagine how tempting it is just to slap something quick in the code and move on. We've found that just creates too many problems down the road." Source: gamespot
You're right about Age of Empires holding up over time--I still play both verions. My only worry about a new AoE is that it might go the way of other RTS games by making resources infinite and by having heaping gobs of units on the battlefield. I like having limited resources and/or low populations, because every decision matters. Ever try a pop limit of 25 in AoE II? Every unit and building becomes more significant, because you don't have a lot of resources to spend. Technology is also more interesting under those conditions, as you have to commit to certain tech paths.
At any rate, AoE III is sure to look good, if the screenshots are any indication.
" I played "Age" at least two times a day religiously, and I swear that the basic resource management and strategy needed to win, made working in the business world easier to navigate."
You know, a few business or law classes might have served you, and your readers, with a fascinating bit of insight into an unusual commodity: reality.
I never said I didn't take business classes or training, just said that playing "Age" helped me understand resource management in very fast-paced situations. There was a study done recently that said the same thing, and the concept is certainly not new. If you are great chess player you train your mind to think steps ahead and anticipate - it's the same thing.
By Alice Hill