- Dec 14, 1999
- 22.074
- 262.958
Why the Clausewitz engine?
First of all, what was once the AGEOD team, is since a few years, before Paradox bought the company, a much smaller team, due to lack of sales. With a smaller team you lose some expertise and also can’t focus on all aspects of a game. With just two programmers, improving and updating an engine, while at the same time developing a game, is just not feasible, without severly reducing the scope of the game, or impact the quality of the engine.
Engines usually have nothing to do with actual game-mechanics, as that is game itself that dictates how combat works, how economy works, and other things. An engine handles things like rendering maps, showing sprites, communicate over network, save/load data, take care of interface, show tooltips etc.
With a switch over to Clausewitz for AGEOD we gain the benefit of
a) support for multi-core, running quicker.
b) optimized graphical code to use the graphics cards instead of slowing down the CPU.
c) Having a large team of competent programmers working on the tech, while the AGEOD team focuses on gameplay and history. Thus benefiting from the best of two teams.
Why pausable real-time?
The original design for NCP2 was to make it a turn-based game, but during the development, we realized that to get a proper simulation of Napoleonic warfare we get a huge advantage by keeping the pause-rts. The pace of Napoleonic warfare is so fluid and quick that real-time offers a better representation.
Since different countries have different speed of their armies in this type of warfare, a turn-based solution would not make it feel correct. The real time solution is also better for playerws when the war is assymetric or when you have variable periods of no activity compared to other nations.
First of all, what was once the AGEOD team, is since a few years, before Paradox bought the company, a much smaller team, due to lack of sales. With a smaller team you lose some expertise and also can’t focus on all aspects of a game. With just two programmers, improving and updating an engine, while at the same time developing a game, is just not feasible, without severly reducing the scope of the game, or impact the quality of the engine.
Engines usually have nothing to do with actual game-mechanics, as that is game itself that dictates how combat works, how economy works, and other things. An engine handles things like rendering maps, showing sprites, communicate over network, save/load data, take care of interface, show tooltips etc.
With a switch over to Clausewitz for AGEOD we gain the benefit of
a) support for multi-core, running quicker.
b) optimized graphical code to use the graphics cards instead of slowing down the CPU.
c) Having a large team of competent programmers working on the tech, while the AGEOD team focuses on gameplay and history. Thus benefiting from the best of two teams.
Why pausable real-time?
The original design for NCP2 was to make it a turn-based game, but during the development, we realized that to get a proper simulation of Napoleonic warfare we get a huge advantage by keeping the pause-rts. The pace of Napoleonic warfare is so fluid and quick that real-time offers a better representation.
Since different countries have different speed of their armies in this type of warfare, a turn-based solution would not make it feel correct. The real time solution is also better for playerws when the war is assymetric or when you have variable periods of no activity compared to other nations.