Reverse-Engineering a Frame of "Supreme Commander"

An anonymous reader writes: When Supreme Commander was released 8 years ago, it redefined the RTS genre, with its real-time strategic zoom and its epic battles involving several thousands of units at once, while bringing a whole generation of PCs to their knees. Today an article revisits the process of rendering a frame of the game by reverse-engineering the API calls made to the GPU. All the techniques and algorithms are explained in detail, many of them still used in current video games.

Comments

It redefined the RTS genre??

[Anonymous Coward]

How young are you? It was Total Annihilation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (a close to 20 year old game) with nicer graphics.
Total Annihilation made the RTS world what it is. It was one of the very few Real Time STRATEGY games, in a world of misnamed Real Time TACTICAL games. You look at Star Craft and it is entirely about tactics.

Re:It redefined the RTS genre??

[CaseCrash]

I guess it would be stupid to say "Did you even read the article?" on slashdot.

"Total Annihilation" are literally the first two words in the article.

Re:What I remembered of Supreme Commander...

[Eloking]

I'm surprised that you summarize this awesome game like this. Except for a few small and open map, you can't really use this strategy (and it's easily countered by any equally skilled player).

My personal favorite was always a map called Drake's Ravine (http://supcom.wikia.com/wiki/Drake%27s_Ravine). Basically two elevated base separated by a huge ravine that favour defense and where you need to control that ravine and it's resource to gain an edge. Again a skilled player the game almost always reach end-game where the one with the most nuke and huge experimental killer machine wins.

RTS...

[EmeraldBot]

C&C was my bread and butter series, Red Alert 2 and Generals are among my favorite games of all time. Red Alert 2 in particular was pretty well balanced multiplayer, and I'm sure there's still a community out there playing it competitively.

Warzone 2100 is a game you must check out too sometime, it's got an extremely interesting history behind it. Once a Playstation (not Playstation 2 or Playstation 3, just Playstation) game, it became an open-source PC game after the devs gave out the source code; I can't recall another game that's ever gone that route. Although it's in a bit of a slump in terms of development right now, it's got a small but dedicated community that's doing some fascinating work. In particular, since the game makes it so easy to change out the AI for an opposing side, it's got some extraordinary AI addons that actually play really well, and I haven't seen another RTS with the same focus on AI. I highly recommend you check it out if you ever feel bored on a weekend or so; it's definitely worth it.