Computer Game Arena

Team members:
Teo Chin Kiat
Alvin Yap Leong Yin

As it was mentioned during the lectures that it was hoped a variety of different genres can be attempted for this year's game demo, my team decided to look for something that is different from the common First Person Shooter (FPS) games. After looking through the list of games produced by students from the 2004 batch, we noticed that there were not a team that attempted the Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre. Feeling that my team has suffice experience playing RTS games such that we know the basic mechanics of the such games, we decided to search for a game engine that can support this genre.

Our first intention is to look for the an engine that can provide the quality of best selling RTS games like Command & Conquer, Starcraft and Warcraft. The option that came to our mind was Freecraft, an engine developed to provide the functionality similiar to Warcraft 2. However, it was no longer available for download and updates as the makers of Warcraft 2 (Blizzard) decided to put a "Cease and Desist order" on it. Congratulations, Blizzard.

Hence our search for the the game engine continues and we stumbled upon the ORTS (stands for Open Real-Time Strategy) engine that we might be able to work on. This engine provided us with plenty of space for creativity given its support of 3D rendering and network support. However, after several tests and reviews, we decided to abandon the chance to use this engine for our game. The main reason for this is the system requirements for it was exceptionally high, especially when we wanted to run the game on a notebook for presentation. We did a simple run on a test program and it was found that we could approximately run at only 4 frames per second (FPS) rate on the notebook, quite far from the basic need of more than 20 FPS to look good. The second reason was the rendering was taking too much time for my team to complete within a month to the demo date.

Screenshots of our test runs on ORTS

Finally, we stumbled upon the Stratagus game engine that was relatively more lightweight compared to ORTS. System requirements were not as high as ORTS, although the trade off was the less impressive graphics. However, it allow us the same freedom to create the interface and game mechanics, similiar to ORTS. Hence it was decided that this will be the engine we develop upon.

Research | Design | Game Story | Game Manual