Mark Skaggs interviewed!

Tuesday 11th February, 2003 · 0 comments
Posted by Mats0174, .

No you are not reading a double post, Mark SKaggs has indeed been interviewed again....

Here's the well-known snippit:

? Q: Any performance hurdles with all the new graphics technology in this title?

A: Definitely, that was always an issue. With Red Alert we usually had a couple of hundred objects on a map, and now we're talking thousands of 3D objects with the new game. We had to spend a lot of time doing optimizations to get it to run well on a mid-spec machine, which is an 800 MHz PC with 20MB of RAM and a GeForce 2 [video card], but at the same time make sure it would look great on a 3GHz machine with a gig of RAM and a GeForce 4.

In Red Alert II we couldn't really change the engine very much or increase the art technology - the voxel units and the bitmapped sprites and so on. But on Generals we had some pretty good ideas to improve the game play and we finally had the ability to rewrite an RTS (real-time strategy) engine from scratch. We call the new engine Sage, and it's redesigned from the gound up. There's one bit of code called W3D that was in development for a long time, that's the rendering code, and that actually came out of Renegade and some other products, but all the rest is from scratch. The networking code is all new, the AI (artificial intelligence) is new, and it was just a giant chore. We were probably a little na?ve about what was going to be necessary for all of this when we started out, but we had some really good people and we got it done.

And here is the inteview!