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Reverse-Engineering a Frame of "Supreme Commander"

Posted by timothy on from the piece-by-piece-bit-by-bit dept.

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.

2 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. It redefined the RTS genre?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:It redefined the RTS genre?? by CaseCrash · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

      --
      No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."