Technology and Gameplay Are Partners

DOS games

Windows games with sprites

Windows 32-bit games 3D graphics

64-bit

Multi-Core

Multi-GPU

A Genre Is Born

CPU processing

Graphics capability

Memory

CPU processing: Single core

Graphics capability: DirectX 9.0c

Memory: 32-bit (2GB of memory)

First Generation RTSs

Figure 1: Power Monger. As you can see, the graphics are photorealistic. I said photorealistic!

Figure 2: For the first time, you had a game where there could be dozens of units with several you could control and send on different missions. It was amazing.

I remember when I first played Wolfenstein 3D. It was the first game I played where you saw the world in first person in real-time. For me, gaming would never be the same.Wolfenstein 3D demonstrated what could be done by fully utilizing the technology of the day. In their case, DOS with a 640K of memory, 320x200 graphics, and a 16-bit processor (80286 or better).New technology drives innovation in game design. So far, PC gamers have gone through roughly 3 major generations of game technology:Over the past year, we’ve begun to transition to a 4th generation:What games will do with 4th generation game engines remains to be seen. Today I’m going to talk about how these generations have affected Real-Time Strategy Games.Younger IGN readers may not realize just how popular real-time strategy games once were. In the mid-90s, every major developer was competing in that market. Microsoft vs. Activision vs. EA. It’s hard to imagine now, but RTS games were a big enough market that the big guys competed in.The march of progress was dramatic and constant too: Dune 2, Warcraft, Command & Conquer, Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Supreme Commander, Sins of a Solar Empire…Until, well, it stopped marching.New games in the genre kept coming out, but they often felt like re-runs of existing games with slightly more polished graphics. Why play game X when game Y, that was 5 years older, was pretty much the same game with essentially the same graphics?How did this happen? To understand that, we have to get a better idea of what makes RTS games tick, and why they have have such high system requirements. You might know all this but trust me, most people don’t. Not a week goes by that I don’t see some gamer complaining about a strategy game having higher requirements than a new first person shooter even though “the graphics in FPSX are way better!”Without getting too technical, video games are largely constrained by 3 things:And strategy games? Well, they’re the worst. Strategy games have to keep the entire world in memory. They have to deal with not 32 units. Not 64 units. But hundreds of units which may be of many different types. And the computer AI? People still complain about monsters not ducking behind cover. Imagine having to write an AI to handle a worldwide economy, fight a multi-front war and plot an airstrike all in less than 20 milliseconds of CPU time.For PC games the past 10 years those limits have not changed.Go ahead and check the hardware requirements of your games on Steam. Unless they are pretty new, they will look like the above. If you’re young, you may not see this as a big deal. But if you’re old - like really old, like Dan Stapleton or Steve Butts old - you know that once upon a time, PC gaming tech grew at a huge pace during the 90s.The idea that we’d be stuck with basically the same platform for a decade would have been crazy. If that had happened in the 90s, we’d all be using OS/2 now.To understand just how old some of the limitations are, DirectX 9.0c came out in 2004. To put it in perspective, that’s when Spider-Man 2 came out. I mean the Toby Maguire Spider-Man 2 not the Amazing Spider-Man 2. That’s pre-iPhone. Imagine if the iPhone hardware had stayed the same since 2007 let alone 2004.There’s plenty blame to go around for this situation. Mainly, I’m going to blame whoever decided that DirectX 10 would require Windows Vista. That decision ranks right up there with putting lead in our gas (yes, we used to do that). The bottom line is that until a critical mass of people left Windows XP, we were stuck with DirectX 9.0c which was devastating for real-time strategy games.To have a really good understanding of how important PC tech has been to real-time strategy games let’s take a brief detour down memory lane.Depending on who you talk to, the first RTS was either Dune II or Power Monger. In either case, it was the very early 90s and the Intel 486DX CPU was now fast enough that we could make DOS games that might have dozens of units running around at once on a map.This might not seem like a big deal now but back in 1992, the idea of having a bunch of guys moving around at the same time in real time was huge. A player could select their units and send them somewhere to shoot or blow up something. It was the greatest thing ever…By today’s standards, these games were very limited:They could only use up to 640K of memory (and not really even that – QEMM386.sys ram mouse)They were limited to 320x200 resolution (about the size of a large Windows icon today)The processing power was limited to a single threaded, single core CPU that is so slow by today’s standards that we can’t even give it a benchmark number.The graphics were 2D sprites.This is where Dune II, Warcraft and later Command & Conquer (DOS version) show up on the scene. The game mechanics had to be very simple. Very. Very. Simple. That simplicity led to disciplined game designs. Every unit, every sprite, every feature had to justify its existence because it had to fit in 640K of memory.To put memory into perspective, first generation RTSs had to fully run in half the memory space that Notepad.exe requires today.