[Stammer]

About the 250,000 units and graphics...

Originally Posted by RonanHayes

No it doesnt effect the game, we have a very aggressive Terrain system that handles all of this really well. We have this algorithm to the AI as well.

So realistically you the player will really only every be aware of whats directly around you, and off in the distance everything else is calculated on a far less accurate level.

If you want to look up on terrain rendering have a read of this:

[url:8b5a9]http://www.terrain.dk/[/url:8b5a9]

There are pdf, demos etc. All good and very high quality terrain, that doesnt pop in as you moves along. It has a very nice morph. Now this is just the application its not how it works in game. You must remember that the terrain shown there is around 25,000 meters per pixel. Or terrain is around 2 meters per pixel. So that actually ensures that the morphing isnt even evident. So the level doesnt pop and you dont see the morphing or any other strange artifacts common with other games.

Now with regards to caching.

When you install the game you may have the following structure:

--1944 D-Day
----System
----Fonts
----Modules
------Overlord
----Graphics
----Shaders

When you load the game for the first time, and select your settings. You are effectively telling the game. I want these settings now setup the data to make this as efficient as hell.

So it takes all the textures, all the models etc and caches them with these settings embeded:



--1944 D-Day
----Cache (It creates a Cache Folder, which is all the files optomised)
----System
----Fonts
----Modules
------Overlord
----Graphics
----Shaders

The only time when you will have long loading times again is if you change the graphics settings. Changing these will mean the cache needs to be rebuilt.

Originally Posted by RonanHayes

The game doesnt feature 250,000 units on screen at once, it doesnt even feature 250,000 units in the background. What it does is manages all the units directly around the player, then it groups all the units into the relevant Military groupings, thus reducing the processing from a unit to unit level right up to a battalion level.

Its fast its efficient and its only numbers, which all pocessors handle really well. These structures are also stored as C Structs so they can be loaded directly in. This means that there is no parsing, no odd calculating requried. It simply loads in the information directly and applies it...

If you are going to do something this complicated you may as well spend the time doing it right

For a dev company that doesn't even have a publisher, they really have their shit together.