List in this thread what things you think MP needs before release. I'll try to update this post with your feedback (or at least, the ones I think are doable).

I'll  start:

1. HOST migration. Scheduled for Beta 1. Host quits, game should continue.
2. Surrender option where you concede the game go to stat screen.
3. Nicer stat screen with line graphs and more data.
4. Ability to mute chat easily

Medium Settings: 2560x1440:

DirectX 11:  23.7fps

DirectX 12: 39.6fps

What's your score? (I use JING to take my screenshots).

The terrain in Ashes of the Singularity is procedurally generated. This opens the door to randomly generated maps in the future despite being so large and so detailed.

Greetings! This will serve as raw content for the GAME page on the Ashes website.

Backstory

You can read that here: https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/game/backstory

The FAQ

You can read that here: https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/game/faq

Update to FAQ:

Alpha Info

Q: What should we expect in the Early Access version?

A:  We have full AI now and maps that support up to 6 players.  We expect to keep increasing the player count as time goes on as long as most player's machines can handle it (there are a lot of units to track).  We also support up to 6 players in multiplayer with, again, the goal to increase that as far as the hardware/Internet will allow us to go.

Q: What are the system requirements?

A: For early access we have:

Absolute Minimum:

• 64-bit Windows 7 / 8 / 10 OS
• Quad Core CPU
• 8 GB Memory
• 2 GB DirectX 11 Video Card
• 1600x900 Display Resolution
• High-speed Internet Connection

We Recommend:

• 64-bit Windows 7 / 8 / 10 OS
• i7 (or equivalent) CPU
• 16 GB Memory
• Nvidia GTX 970 or AMD R9 390 equivalent Video Card
• 1920x1080 Display Resolution
• High-speed Internet Connection

For final release, we expect to be able to bring the video card memory requirement down to 1 GB but otherwise, the rest will remain the same. 

Gameplay

Ashes of the Singularity is a real-time multiplayer strategy game set in the distant future in which humanity has expanded into the stars and is now in conflict for control of key planets in our galaxy.

You begin with a single headquarters called a Nexus and a construction unit called an Engineer.  The world is broken up into regions, each containing resources. Your objective is to annihilate any enemies on the world or take control of special regions containing Turinium until you can reach a critical mass of it. 

The Resources

There are two primary resources:

• Metal. This is the raw construction material for buildings and units.
• Radioactives. This is the raw fuel you use for advanced units and advanced buildings.

In addition there are two other resources in the game:

• Turinium. Some regions don’t contain a power generator but instead, a Turinium generator.  The player who controls the most of these will begin accumulating Turninium. If enough is collected, they win.
• Quantas. This is an artificial resource produced by Quantum Relays that the player constructs. They are spent on improving overall technology and making use of orbital global base abilities.

Starting Conditions

When the game begins, the player starts with a home base called a Nexus and a single Engineer.  The world is broken up into regions, each with its own power generator.  These power generators are protected by neutral guardian units, more of which appear as time goes on.  Taking control of a region grants the resources of that region to you, provided that you control all the regions between it and your Nexus.  Using these resources, you construct various types of factories that can construct various kinds of units. 

Economics

Your economy is driven by acquiring metal and radioactives. A region you control will typically have either metal or radioactive deposits. Each one will provide 1 of its corresponding resource.  If you place an extractor on that deposit, it will double the output.  If you build an amplifier on the power generator, it will double the output of the entire region.

As you construct units and buildings, resources are subtracted from your inventory.  Much of the player’s skill boils down to managing these two resources to ensure that they are not over-spending or allowing resources to be wasted.  Through technology, you can increase the maximum inventory of resources to use during times of peek production.

Resources: Income, Balance and maximum inventory displayed.

Combat

Players construct a wide variety of units depending on their circumstances.  Air units can provide radar and visual coverage, bomb strategic targets, or maintain air superiority.  Ground units can be from small (50m long) frigates to gigantic, nearly kilometer long dreadnoughts.  The planets being fought over have relatively low gravity, allowing both sides to employ units that hover, which allows them to navigate around each other in 3 dimensions.

Units tend to be differentiated based on weapon range, rate of fire, and damage capability. 

Building Armies

Ashes introduces the concept of a Meta unit.  When a player forms an army, all of the units in that army behave as if they are a single unit. Selecting one will select all of them.  Each unit is aware of every other unit in its army and automatically engages enemies and protects allies based on the needs of the army.  When someone forms an army, each child unit is effectively just part of a single big unit that can and should be controlled as such.

Veterancy

Dreadnoughts are units you care about.  As they survive battles they gain experience, which allows them to level up and gain new abilities.  A high level Dreadnought may be substantially more powerful than one that has been newly produced. Hence, if one is in trouble, you will want to retrieve it.

Orbitals

As players accumulate resources, they will be able to construct orbitals, which gives the player access to global abilities. These abilities include, but are not limited to:

• Engineering call-down.  Only the Nexus can construct Engineers, which is fine early on, but as the player expands across the world the Nexus gets further and further away from the front lines. Players can spend Quantas to call down an Engineer.
• Teleport.  In addition, players can construct buildings that will automatically send units to a designated destination by spending enough Quantas. This allows players to flank the enemy (though their units are extremely vulnerable when teleporting) by transporting to a distant location location on the planet.
• Orbital Strike. Players can bring down wrath from above by spending enough Quantas, eliminating vulnerable units in a large swath of destruction.
• Orbital Shield. Players can proactively protect their units by projecting a shield onto their units to block an Orbital Strike.

Ascendancy

In addition to individual planetary wars, there is a larger galactic war taking place in this part of the galaxy for control of key worlds.  Controlling worlds provides resources and advantages that you can use in future conquests. However, this works for your enemy as well.

Victory

If you can destroy an opponent’s Nexus, they are eliminated.  If you (or your team) has eliminated all opponents, you win.  If you (or your team) controls enough Turinium, you also win. 

I had a 2 hour game of Ashes.  This quickie video summarizes things.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8051911/Ashes-BradIsBitter.mp4

There haven't been a lot of RTS's released in recent years. But there have been some.

In this thread, let's talk about what you think they did right and what they did wrong and what Ashes can learn from them.

 Examples:

Game #1: Planetary Annihilation

Game #2: Grey Goo

Game #3: Acts of Aggression

Please discuss below.

Thanks!

Screenshots are hard.   What looks good in motion doesn’t necessarily look good standing still.

So what is the hype about Ashes of the Singularity about? These are just giant land ships right?

What the big deal isn’t the detail you can have on a single unit.  Homeworld was doing that years ago.  What DirectX 12 makes really practical is that you can have thousands of these units in this detail.

Let’s take a look at these two screenshots:

This is the Hyperion zoomed in.  I could zoom in further but you will get pixilation at some point since DirectX 12 doesn’t make texture size disappear.

The point of this screenshot (click on the thumbnail to see a bigger version) is to look at how the light is affecting the unit and its parts. This unit has a series of guns, each with its own firing solution, it has its own personal line of sight. But let’s focus on the lighting of it.  This image hasn’t been photoshopped. It’s just a print screen.  You get the detail without the noise and you can have thousands of these.

Now, let’s zoom out:

You’ll want to click on this to see more what I mean. But notice how clean the unit remains zoomed out. It’s not noisy. It’s still crisp, distinct.   There’s no such thing as full-screen antialiasing in this game because it’s not doing deferred rendering. It’s rendered much the same way a movie CGI scene would be. 

Not to be confused with the art style or art quality

Now, someone might say they don’t think these shots look good.  That’s an artistic call.  The rendering system won’t save a game from bad art or just bad taste.  It has nothing to do with realism. What it does mean is that your objects are rendered like physical objects and not like scenes in a video game.

Ashes of the Singularity’s Alpha will be going onto Steam early access next week for those who are really really brave and have high end hardware.

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

We’ve been working like crazy to improve stability while at the same time adding in lots of new features and UI improvements.  The next build, 0.55, is due out next week.

If you haven’t joined the Founder’s Program, it is going to be ending in the next couple weeks.  At that point, Founders will start to receive additional keys to give to friends to help build up a proto-multiplayer community.

To join the Founder's program go here: https://www.ashesofthesingularity.com/store

- by Brad Wardell

Galactic Civilizations III is one of the first of the “new generation” of natively 64-bit, DirectX 11 games.  More importantly, it is both critically acclaimed and a best seller meaning that the hardware requirements of this game, while non-trivial, are not so high as to prevent it from being commercially successful.

We got the Steam hardware results on tens of thousands of Galactic Civilizations III players. Let’s take a look.

So what do they have?

Operating System

1. Windows 7 (42%)
2. Windows 8.1 (28%)
3. Windows 10 (25%)
4. Other (trivial)

Number of cores

1. 4 cores (76%)
2. 2 cores (15%)
3. 6 cores (7%)
4. Other (trivial)

CPU vendor

1. Intel (84%)
2. AMD (16%)

GPU vendor

1. Nvidia (68%)
2. AMD (23%)
3. Intel (8%)

System RAM

1. >12 GB (53%)
2. 8 GB (35%)
3. 4 GB (5%)
4. other (trivial)

Video memory

1. 2GB (30%)
2. 4GB (23%)
3. 1GB (21%)
4. other (trivial)

Display Resolution

1. 1920x1080  or 1920 x 1200 (63%)
2. 1600x900 or 1680 x 1050 (9%)
3. 1366x768 (6%)
4. 2560x1440 (6%)
5. other (trivial)

Multi-Monitors

1. 25% of players have multiple monitors