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Island Dog
Island Dog
Join Date 06/2003
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Gamasutra: Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion Postmortem

October 9, 2012 12:51:41 PM from JoeUser ForumsJoeUser Forums

Gamasutra has a postmortem article up on Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion.  This was written by Stardock’s Chris Bray and Blair Fraser from Ironclad. 

“Even after two expansions, the teams felt the definitive version of the game had not yet been realized. With Ironclad Games working on the forthcoming Sins of a Dark Age, Stardock took a greater role in the development of the stand-alone expansion Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion to do just that.

Sins: Rebellion was developed with a small team over 13 months, including about a week of crunch (mostly individual late nights clustered around the various beta and final releases.) Stardock's staffing peaked at 11 developers, as shown below.”

http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/179030/postmortem_stardock_entertainment_.php

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Island Dog
Timmaigh
Join Date 05/2009
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Reply #1 October 9, 2012 2:56:54 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

Nice article this. It really is a great game and its good to hear it went smooth and well for both Stardock and Ironclad. Hopefully this would mean potential Sins 2 to show up sooner rather than later. 

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Island Dog
SlammerIV
Join Date 11/2011
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Reply #2 October 10, 2012 12:04:08 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

As a young amateur game programmer myself, I found this article to be extremely fascinating. The account of the development process was quite enlightening. Finding those desync bugs sounded invigoratingly difficult. I have thought about the difficulties of deterministic multiplayer, setting the floating point control word and all that delightful complexity, so I can get a dim picture of the task you guys faced. I was surprised that so few people worked on the development team. I guess it is possible to produce a AAA title without a $100 million budget and a 50-80 member development team.

Also, I agree that digital distribution is the way to go for the initial release. Later on, when the game has stabilized, you can release a phisical version for those who want it, like you have done with the collector's edition.

I am also happy, like Timmaigh above, that Rebellion has done so well, as this means plenty of money for the eventual development of Sins II, in a few year perhaps.

Nice job!

P.S. If you are free to reveal it, did you use a shadow mapping method for the shadows? Cascaded? Or perhaps a more optimized solution, because you only see shadows that fall on ships, so a naive shadow map would waste a ton of memory on empty space...hm...

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Island Dog
GoaFan77
Join Date 10/2008
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Reply #3 October 10, 2012 12:51:09 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

Quoting SlammerIV,
reply 2
P.S. If you are free to reveal it, did you use a shadow mapping method for the shadows? Cascaded? Or perhaps a more optimized solution, because you only see shadows that fall on ships, so a naive shadow map would waste a ton of memory on empty space...hm...

I can't tell you how they programed it, but as a modder I can tell you there is no specific shadow map texture, just a normal map. And from close inspection of models, you'll see the shadow "pixels" are bigger than the individual pixels of the texture, leading to a checker board of similar shaded squares, probably done so the shadow wouldn't have to be determined for every single pixel.

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Island Dog
SlammerIV
Join Date 11/2011
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Reply #4 October 10, 2012 11:24:19 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

Quoting GoaFan77,
reply 3
I can't tell you how they programed it, but as a modder I can tell you there is no specific shadow map texture, just a normal map. And from close inspection of models, you'll see the shadow "pixels" are bigger than the individual pixels of the texture, leading to a checker board of similar shaded squares, probably done so the shadow wouldn't have to be determined for every single pixel.

It sounds like you are implying that the shadow map is stored somewhere, or associated with models like textures and mesh data. The shadow map is created and updated at runtime. I don't have Rebellion (but I plan on getting it!), but from what you say, it sounds like they did use a shadow mapping technique. I am pretty sure that adding shadow maps only impacted (to a significant degree) the GPU's workload and VRAM usage. That's a pretty good deal when you are up against a 2GB main memory limit.

Edit: As far as I know, shadow mapping is the most popular shadowing technique. Shadow volumes and other exotic methods are pretty rare.

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RiddleKing
Join Date 04/2006
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Reply #5 October 11, 2012 11:04:07 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

Sins team is very small compared to others games rolling out and i really don't think they are fully utilising there building and equiptment. I really em not impressed with this single core engine after 5 years down the road. How do they expect to be competitive in the future and why do they continue to think they are an indie developer after rebellions sucess?

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Ibnpatuta
Join Date 09/2011
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Reply #6 October 11, 2012 8:08:06 PM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

I really hope that the huge profits from the original Sins, its expansions, and Rebellion will go toward a massive and awesome Sins 2 with multicore support, 64 bit, and generally better everything.

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RiddleKing
Join Date 04/2006
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Reply #7 October 12, 2012 7:14:22 AM
from Sins of a Solar Empire ForumsSins of a Solar Empire Forums

Quoting Ibnpatuta,
reply 7
I really hope that the huge profits from the original Sins, its expansions, and Rebellion will go toward a massive and awesome Sins 2 with multicore support, 64 bit, and generally better everything.

 

I think we have to be very specific about multi-core because starcraft 2 performs badly on low end machines but games with frostbite 2 or gas powered games own engine for supreme commander 2 perform very well because there Quad based. Running a game on 2 cores is outdate, out of fashion and if they are going to be going multicore then they better well unleash the incredible bandwidth with a Quad core engine. I can't stand having a quad machine thats limited by its clock speed and have sins convince me it sucks and makes me want a new machine while in fact its a damn well powerful machine. 

 

Edit:

Generals 2 looks like the more cost effective investment for me. i won't buy a sins game and have to go through this disgusting feeling that my comp is not good enough. Word is the frostbite engine can support up to 16 threads-thats just awesome so that game will scale with every cpu upgrade and PC i assemble. Amazing.

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