Graphics Engine Start

Starting things off, the game being worked on is called Cultura.  In its simplest terms it is an RTS game played in a constant world where you lead a people from the earliest days of the stone age to the early modern era.  The technology spans from fantasy to steampunk to the mundane world.  The entire goal is to build a convincing history and enjoy a world that you help to shape throughout time.

This dev blog deals with everything about the game’s development.

So first, it’s a nice step for me to finally get started on this project as it’s been sitting in my head for quite some time and a lot of far-off ideas about it are floating about that I’d like to do.  The game’s idea is very large; I want players to control the entire development of their society from the earliest days.  Even more I’d like it to be a “losing is fun” type game where even if you lose you can start again on the same map, at the same tech level, and lead a new “off-shoot” society of the one that was just destroyed.  But, we’ll worry about that later.

The first milestone in this project will be getting a graphics engine up and running.  I’m an artificial intelligence guy (and everybody is a core game coder as that’s a more generic speciality) so I prefer not to work on the graphics engine if I can’t help it.  So I’ll be trying out different graphics engines to try to get the first milestone done: render a small patch of terrain on the screen.

On my list of engines I am considering is Torque2d, FIFE, HPL, Ogre3d and Irrlicht.  I’ll initially just be making a 2d isometric game.  A 3d engine is overkill but it does allow me to expand graphics later at no additional cost (that is, I don’t need to dump the engine and get a new one versus modifying the game to use the existing engine but do 3d stuff).  Also, I can throw in 3d effects in a 2d game.  May be useful in the future.

I think that from my initial impressions I may roll with Ogre3d.  It’s in c++, the game is intended to be incredibly CPU intensive in the future, so it’s imperative I start on a good foundation that can scale (but I won’t prematurely optimise of course).  I'll be making the game very 2d at the beginning (textures onto quads or something) and we'll see where to go from there.  I'm trying to keep the focus on gameplay and not graphics.  Once I get the engine building, I’ll try out the tutorials and see how quickly I can get a patch of terrain going and then move on from there.