So today some lovely PR folks contacted me and asked, “Hey, do you wanna try the tech demo Star Swarm from Oxide Games?” “DO I?!” I quickly replied, and was sent a key. ;) I therefore took the demo through its paces, paces so intense that Open Broadcaster Software had trouble keeping up at times, so you’ll notice some pauses here and there, and I do apologize for that. With around 6,000-7,000 units flittering about at once though, it’s not really much of a surprise. I therefore hope you’ll enjoy the show, and join me in the excitement of seeing an actual game made out of this thing. ;) Thanks for watching!
Hey Brian! Thanks for sharing. Looks great. I have no idea how they’ll marry game play to that. I can’t even handle Sins of a Solar Empire with, maybe, 50 units in a melee. Flying a single fighter or commanding a single cap would be really cool though.
The only really unfortunate thing from the video is about 90% of hangs would occur when you’d say “LOOK AT THAT!” :P
Cheers!
Hahaha, yeah, that’s kinda funny.
I’m not sure they can make a controllable game at that scale. One of the reasons people look at games from the 90s with such fondness is that that era happened to be at the sweet spot where computing capability was just powerful enough to give us games of ideal scale. When computers got faster and more memory, the games got bigger and more complex and left the sweet spot behind.
If they were going to make a playable game from this, it would pretty much have to be something involving control of the capital ships, and possibly smaller ships grouped into large units. I think if you were a fighter thrown into the middle of this you wouldn’t have much fun, even if you took over a new fighter every time one was shot out from under you; the scale of the battle is such that I don’t think you’d ever feel like you were making a difference.
Though I suppose they could put you in a super powered fighter and make Dynasty Warriors In Space.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU4Nzc
Looks like Mantle only currently works on a select set of AMD’s most recent cards so far. So even if you bought the right brand, you might not have bought the right card.