It seems that RTS and civ games are gaining popularity, and Ambrosia has nothing to offer in that area. I (and I'm sure others) think that a Civ-RTS based on any of the EV's, maybe sketchfighter, or other games would be great. Oh, and Deimos or Mars Rising. Those games were awesome. The setting would make a great RTS.

Any comments?

Ambrosia doesn't make games, just publishes them.

If RTS stands for Real Time Strategy, then Ares may be the cup of tea for you.

I tried Ares, thinking it was what I was looking for, but it wasn't quite what's known as Real Time Strategy. I'm talking about stuff like Age of Empires, Empire at War, Supreme commander, etc.

I know I would prefer an original backstory for such a game, not just recycled something else.

RTS? Try Darwinia. It took me a while to categorize, but it is a simplistic RTS... or something close to it.

Darwinia, Ares, and the soon-to-be-finished/ported/etc Multiwinia are all RTS games. Multiwinia especially I think will be a hit. Stay tuned!

That is not entirely true. Ambrosia does make a few games. The Escape Velocity series was done in-house, for instance. Though it does seem that ASW has moved more towards Mac utilities in recent years, what with WTS, SnapzProX, iToner, &c.

That being said, others have suggested Ares, Darwinia, and the forthcoming Multiwinia. You might also try DEFCON, which really can be a real time strategy game.

xander

Matt Burch wrote the engine and the original scenario, Peter Cartwright wrote the scenario for EV Override, and the people at ATMOS created the scenario of EV Nova; none of them are Ambrosia employees. Ambrosia managed the projects and published the finished games, but in all three cases they were begun independently before being picked up by Ambrosia.

Ok I'll try Darwinia. I thought it was a game about a disease or something.

Well, it is about a virus... but a computer virus. Many RTS elements in it. Awesome concept, awesome story, awesome execution. Just awesome.

Not Nova, I believe.
Although it's true they used to make games. The old arcade games with hard-to-spell names like Apeiron and Maelstrom and Chiral for instance.


The coding is not too awesome from what I've heard.

It's the Uplink code that is horrible.

Darwinia is supposedly a lot cleaner.

Yeah, and when a toddler with a messy room puts away a couple of puzzles and some legos, the room is a lot cleaner, too. That doesn't mean that the room is actually clean.

xander

So...what kinda "clean" are you talking about? (I'm not an adult like many here).

I hate both equally and for different reasons. Uplink has certain elements that were omitted in comparison to Darwinia (certain core items such as how it handles SDL). but Darwinia is far from clean in my opinion. Uplink's code was something I could start editing nearly immediately, and I could probably do anything with it I wanted if I put enough time into it.

As for Darwinia, it took me a while to start out editing it (I mostly did core elements rather than gameplay though) and am still poking around the code. Then again, that might have something to do with the fact that I kinda want to finish Onlink first. Meh.

Also, lo Rickton. I lost my old login. Oh well!

All "clean" means with relation to code is that the code follows good style and is easy to understand for somebody unfamiliar with the code already (aka, anybody who didn't write it). Think of it like a desk. Somebody's desk may be ordered chaos, something only the desk's normal user can understand, or it could be very neat, and anybody could sit down and find where the stapler is.

I'd say that Uplink was ordered chaos on the top, clean in the middle, and unordered chaos at the bottom level. Darwinia and Defcon are more consistent

It is rather a mess. And by a mess I mean total disaster in some places. Did the Darwinia dev kit come out yet? I'll have to do a comparison myself sometime. I imagine it's based on similar 'foundations'?

Well also in terms of Introversion products it also means that the code is badly-written, inefficient and clunky.
I'm not even a C++ programmer and some of the examples I've been shown are obvious even to me that it's no good.
One example being in Darwinia (I believe it's Darwinia anyway) the game is rendered twice every time it's rendered...I'm sure Miah can give more examples if he really wants.

It is actually NeoThermic that came to that conclusion, by watching the OpenGL calls being made. The map is rendered twice -- once for what is to the east of the wrap point, and once for what is to the west.

xander