Ashes: How you can help make the most epic RTS ever

Screenshot from the map editor. I expect within a year we’ll have randomized map generation.

Early Access is near

We are getting close to making Ashes available on early access. 

Personally, I’d have preferred to wait until January for doing that but there is a very small number of Steam keys we can use for our Founder’s Program and we’re are basically out.  If you want to join the Founder’s Program, time is just about out.  You can do that here: https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/store?utm_source=website&utm_medium=home&utm_content=BECOMEAFOUNDER&utm_campaign=Ashes%2BFounders%2BBenchmark

We will be handing out additional Steam keys to the Founders shortly. It’s just a question of when we can get more Steam keys to give out.  Expect them before the end of the month.

Yes, we need your help. BIG TIME.

It’s a shame that marketing types throw around “revolutionary” so often. I’ve gotten pretty cynical when I hear that phrase.  But Ashes is pretty revolutionary and as a practical matter, it can’t succeed without the help of technically sophisticated early adopters.  So let’s take a look at what we’re doing:

• This is the first native 64-bit RTS.   Ashes requires a few gigabytes of memory to run.   And this has a lot of interesting implications.  When I was young, we worried about algorithms (we called it the big O).  But you know what slows games down now? Memory allocations.  The CPUs are now so fast that the performance bottleneck is the relatively slow speed of memory.    How bad? We got a 10% boost by making sure our memory SIMMS (or whatever they’re called now) are not in contiguous banks on the motherboard. (i.e. if you have 4 memory slots and 2 SIMMS, don’t put them next to each other).   So we’ll need a lot of help on the ramifications of 64-bit RTS gaming.
  
  tl;dr: There are unknown ramifications of dealing with so much memory in real-time.
  
• DirectX 12.  This is the first native DirectX 12 game.  What does native mean? It means that the engine makes asynchronous calls to the GPU. That’s my definition anyway.  There will be lots of “DirectX 12” games in the future where they use some minor feature of it.  As a gamer, if I’m not getting a big perf boost from DirectX 12 then it’s not really a native DirectX 12 game.  But DirectX 12 is brand new and the drivers are still very rough.   To be clear: DirectX 11 is just fine on this game, particularly if you have NVIDIA (AMD is absolutely amazing on DirectX 12, I think their Mantle work has really paid off).
  
  tl;dr: This is the first DirectX 12 game. The drivers are new. We need technically sophisticated players to work with us and, NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft and Intel to optimize this stuff.

The AMD Nano is the most awesomeness video card ever. It’s as fast as a Fury, faster than the NVIDIA 980. Look how small it is! Mark my words: This size is the future of video cards. In a year, they’ll all be this size using HBM type memory.

• Epic, World-Wide Battle Scale.  Those of you in the Founder’s Alpha have got a glimpse of this.  On a small map, you really can finish the game in like half an hour.  But the really big maps? The map in the screenshot above is only medium sized.  For 1.0, we’ll support up to “large” but we have “huge” and “epic” planned for the future.  But when we say we want to have thousands of units, we mean it.  And we mean thousands of units, on screen, each with its own series of guns with their own firing solutions all running on your 5K monitor at 60FPS with the fidelity you’d see in a movie.  That’s a big promise to make.  We want you to feel like you’re righting a world-wide war.  But consider the bugs: (1) Pathfinding (2) units getting stuck (3) When should a unit attack another unit versus hold its ground? (4) What level of micromanagement is fun?
  
  tl;dr: We need your help to identify bad pathing and dumb unit behaviors.
  
• First Multi-Core RTS AI.  I am writing this from the Stardock East building in Towson Maryland.  Possibly never again will a game come together with the concentration of veteran strategy game talent in the same building.   The architect of the new AI is Brian Wade who was the lead developer of Civilization V.  But also here in the building to share AI strategies and architecture help include me (Galactic Civilizations I/II), Soren Johnson  (Civilization IV), Jon Shafer (Civilization V), Andrew Zoboki (Grey Goo), Tim Kipp (Systems lead of Civilization V), Dan Baker (led the HLSL work on DirectX 10 at Microsoft, graphics lead of Civilization V).   That’s just a few of the people you’ll find in this 6,500 square foot space.  
  
  The result is that we have a lot of experience in writing computer AI and have longed for the day of being able to have an AI in an RTS that can seamlessly send out jobs to multiple cores (I’ve done that in 4X turn based games mind you but doing it in real time is a very different beast).   You know how this game is still in alpha right? As the Founders have discovered, the AI is already quite lethal. It also doesn’t cheat (at higher levels it gets handicaps but it is actually playing the same game you are).  
  
  tl;dr: We will need you guys to help us on STRATEGIES.  We may have the most experienced AI development team in the industry but we’re not necessarily going to actually good at the game compared to you guys.
  
• Multiplayer. Multiplayer. Multiplayer. We’ll have custom games and ranked games, etc.  But this will be a challenge in a game that will probably have a small MP player base during early access.  So we’ll need you guys to help us set up dates and times to play multiplayer, find bugs, add new options, etc.

Missing Game Mechanics

We are painfully aware that not all the game mechanics and features will be available for early access. This is another reason we would have preferred to wait until January.  The Steam early access page will contain a plea for people NOT to join early access so that only those who really know what they’re getting into are part of it. 

Here are some basic stuff the early access game is missing:

1. Orbitals.  In Starcraft, various units have special abilities that the player is expected to be pretty decent at microing.  That’s fine in a game with limited units.  In Ashes, units do have special abilities but the player isn’t expected to handle them.  Instead, the player has GLOBAL ABILITIES.  You build a particular building and you get access to a cool ability that costs radioactives (one of the resources) to use.  You want to put up a force field on a particular army? You don’t have to hunt for the right unit, instead you, the player, have that ability.   This won’t be in the first early access build. This would be like Starcraft having a beta without special abilities on its units. 
2. The Substrate.  The other race won’t be in the game until next year.   We have the assets (as some of you noticed) but there’s no point putting them in the game until we have a good balance of the PHC (humans).
3. Veterancy.  Not sure if that’s a real word. Anyway, your T3s will get experience and gain levels which allows you to give them new passive abilities and make them generally better. We want you to care about the T3s as these dreadnoughts are the heart of your military.
4. Other Worlds. We will only have Terran and Barren worlds in for early access. We will be adding Ice worlds later but they’re not ready yet.
5. Stability. I’m not going to kid you. It’s buggy. Very buggy. I have yet to get through a game without it crashing.  Autosave works pretty well so I just load it up and continue from there. But it’ll be a good month before it’s relatively stable IMO.

How you can help?

1. If you can record your games and upload them to YouTube as UNLISTED and point us to them, we’ll check them out.  These can be bugs or suggestions or game ideas too.  Generally, we’d prefer reports be in text, on the forum, but if you feel something can only be shown then go ahead.
2. Mockups of what you’d like.  We’re serious about having you guys as part of the team. This is a game we’re truly looking to make together with you.  So don’t just say “I don’t like X” or “I want Y”.  Show it if you can. Even if it’s primitive.  For example, someone says “I want Strategic Zoom like Supreme Commander”.  That’s not going to happen. Not because we don’t love SupCom.  But because such a system won’t work on a game of the scale we’re going for (quantity of units and eventual size of the map). We have to come up with other ways to abstractly show an entire world at war. We want to hear your ideas. We have our own of course but we are excited to listen to other points of view.
3. BUGS BUGS BUGS.   When the game crashes, we get a crash dump sent automatically.  So you don’t have to worry about that.  But compatibility is a different beast.   Tell us your specs. Run dxdiag and post the text to the forum.  Alternatively, get JING (www.jingproject.com) to take screenshots of stuff and share it.

A note about the future

For those of you not familiar with Stardock, let me give you a little background.  We’re privately held. In fact, we might be the longest running independent game studio in the industry of decent size (>100 employees, 23 years).  I founded it while in college long long ago. I still own it today.  I still write code.  All my old colleagues of my generation sold their studios, typically to the generation before me whose companies have long since gone public. 

The reason the above is important is because we’re in this for the long-haul.  That’s why this game is so cutting edge – because we want to keep expanding on it for many years into the future.  It’s why so many wonderful and talented people have joined us these past few years.

We’re free to make the games we want. The games YOU want. That’s what we want to do here.   When you give us feedback and talk to us, you’re talking to US. Directly.  There’s no one in between.  Mind you, I can be a rude, cranky jerk sometimes but if you make a good point, I’ll do my best to make sure we do something about it.

I hope you guys are as excited as we are.  Things are about to start getting very interesting…

WHERE TO POST: https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/forum/1140