Demigod from an engineering point of view

By dstaltman on September 17, 2008 7:57:59 PM from

Hey there! I'm Dru Staltman. I serve as the Lead Gameplay Engineer on Demigod. I'm gonna talk briefly about how engineers are helping to build Demigod.

We built Demigod from the technological feat that is Supreme Commander. At Gas Powered Games, we crafted a mega powerful Real Time Strategy engine where robots clashed battling for planets. The game was what the marketing people call revolutionary.

Chris Taylor envisioned a game where you could zoom in and out of the battle field. The Strategic Zoom was born and an engine was built. Enormous battles, giant robots, pew-pew lasers, nukes, and more were all stuffed into Supreme Commander.

For Demigod we took out the robots and added the fleshy bits. Building Demigod on the Supreme Commander engine has been an awesome and exciting challenge for the engineering team. From an entirely new animation system to an entire new way to look at maps to a complete overhaul of how combat works to adding RPG elements to the game, the process of creating the Demigod engine has been fantastic.

We created the game with goals in mind that would stretch every department. Engineering had a monumental task of taking an RTS engine and convert it into an Action RPG body. We have done a fair amount of gutting, building, demolishing, streamlining and rebuilding up to this point in the project.

An RTS engine does a number of things very well (and the Supreme Commander engine was no slouch). A number of these translate perfectly into an RPG. However, an RPG has a new set of requirements to work the way we want it to work.

A great example of how we have changed the core engine is spell casting. In Supreme Commander, we had robots that did not cast spells. That sounds simple but Demigod is a game about casting awesome spells to destroy those that stand before you. This one feature has taken a huge amount of time and effort to get functioning. Adding the vocabulary for units to know they can cast a spell was the start. Units also needed a mana system, which we did not have in Supreme Commander. Throw in the dozens of types of spells you can cast such as area attacks, targeted nukes, attacks on a line, and more. We have ourselves a very robust spell casting system that we built from the ground up for Demigod.

There are so many additions to the engine I cannot possibly list all of them. All the engineers who are working on Demigod are taking the Supreme Commander engine and adding something new, unique and awesome.

0 Karma | 11 Replies

Perhaps it might be easier to list the things that *didn't* change, would probably be shorter!

There are some games that are pretty obvious on the engine similarity with a predecessor, but Demigod isn't one of them. If not for the strategic zoom, it would not be a natural thing to guess it's the Supreme Commander engine

That basically means.. great job

I absolutely loved Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance, and I am very excited for Demigod.

But I have to ask: does Demigod run more smoothly than Supcom?

Nice journal. Nice to hear someone from the engineering team chime in.

Quoting Misaniovent,

reply 2

I absolutely loved Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance, and I am very excited for Demigod.

But I have to ask: does Demigod run more smoothly than Supcom?

It does for me, but it definitely helps that there aren't hundreds of units on screen

This game looks AMAZING! If only it wouldn't melt my system to play it!

About how much of the engine would you say was changed? Say... in a percentage of the overall engine?

i think TB firebolt looks like the overcharge ability in SupCom and that Regulus arrow looks like the Spiderbot Laser cannon which a different color and a arrow going through it in the center

I was actually going to ask, wouldn't using nukes be kind of like casting a several hundred megaton spell? It seems like that'd have been a good base to work from. Good work anyhow though, so far it's shaping up to be a good game technically. I'm eager to see what other awesomeness fits into the game before release.

Speaking about SupCom. Does this mean that the possibilities of LUA scripting are still there too?
I can think of some really fun game modes and mods that would be just awesome to put in.

So, GPG and Stardock, are we going to be able to make what looks to be a great game even greaterererer?

Quoting Misaniovent,

reply 2

But I have to ask: does Demigod run more smoothly than Supcom?

The game runs much better for a number of reasons. The design of the game requires less horsepower than the design of Supreme Commander from the gameplay point of view. We've spent a lot of time working on performance from the very beginning of the project to get it running smoother. And we aren't done with performance tuning yet.

Quoting Kitkun,

reply 6

About how much of the engine would you say was changed? Say... in a percentage of the overall engine?

It's really hard to ballpark this. I'd say something like 50%. Maybe more.

Quoting Feynt,

reply 8

How nukes go off in Supreme Commander is based on a projectile hitting or firing a weapon when a commander dies. Parts of it are very, very similar still. How the damage is calculated and how the visual effects go off is still very similar between Demigod and Supreme Commander. How you determine when to do the nuke and if you can do the nuke is something totally different.

Using a weapon system to handle all the spell casting would be pretty difficult though. Most of our spells have independant animations tied to each spell. Many of our spells do not use projectiles or instant impacts. Many of our spells are channeled abilities that require various gameplay and visual effects to fire at different times.

The weapon system in SupCom was built to handle hundreds of weapons in the world at the same time. Weapons and projectiles have to be pretty lean in functionality because of this. We have way less spells at a time actively being cast at a time so we can do more fancy fancy with them.

Quoting Vextor,

reply 9

Speaking about SupCom. Does this mean that the possibilities of LUA scripting are still there too?
I can think of some really fun game modes and mods that would be just awesome to put in.

So, GPG and Stardock, are we going to be able to make what looks to be a great game even greaterererer?

under the hood it's eerily similar. i actually ported two mods from Forged Alliance over to the beta! it took nigh on 3 minutes to do one, but the other is a tiny bit trickier.

also made a UI mod to constantly show hp, energy, and experience and added regen rates to the HUD. check for a release on forums.gaspowered.

The Forums Are Now Closed!

The content will remain as a historical reference, thank you.

Demigod from an engineering point of view