A Plea to CA for a new engine instead of a soon next Total War game. DX12 may deal the cards anew for Rome 2.

[Rittsy]

Also possible. Either way, same outcome for Total War.

[Dago Red]

You should include a 3rd option Al Q. "Neither, after Rome II's disaster I only want them to fix the current game." Or something to that effect.


I dont want either. Rome II was the game I waited 10 years for. They need to FIX THIS game, before I even think about buying another CA game again. Rome was the real deal, there is nothing left of interest. If they spend a major expansion revamping this dullard of a game and get the AI working, then I would consider buying another CA game if something about it truly interested me, but I'm long past just buying them to try them.

In fact, I feel like protesting threads of this nature, because we shouldn't even spend 1 minute considering taking a next step when we're still trying to pull ourselves back up with what we have, bloody, after this bludgeoning.

[Riekopo]

I don't believe that excuse at all. CA really need to build a brand new graphics engine specifically for Total War that can do everything they need it to do. It's unbelievable they're still using a 32 bit engine. It should also be easily moddable.

[panzerschreck]

Yes, they definitly need a new engine to be able to give us back the epic battles we liked, in rome 2, most of the players can play with 4000 or 6000 men on the battlefield at all, that's ridiculous, that's not the total war I like.

GIVE US BACK THE UNIT MULTIPLIER TOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[alQamar]

Hi I extended my OP with a Q&A section and will of course bring in frequently or important questions you give me in this thread.


Well kriss all that you said, yes but honestly it is an abnomination to see a successor of a game having plenty less features than the predecessor because of a legacy reason (and some design decisions). A game needs evolution. TW evolution is limited if with the current engine.

[krisslanza]

Hi I extended my OP with a Q&A section and will of course bring in frequently or important questions you give me in this thread.


Well kriss all that you said, yes but honestly it is an abnomination to see a successor of a game having plenty less features than the predecessor because of a legacy reason (and some design decisions). A game needs evolution. TW evolution is limited if with the current engine.

I actually don't think there's really that many missing "features". Just many of them have been changed into something else entirely. Family trees are gone, but that was explained on why it's not in.

[SKSlave]

I made a thread like this before when there were still hordes of dunderheaded fan boys on the forums. Needless to say my request didn't go down well. I think our plea for a new engine will fall on deaf ears; they have attracted a larger crowd now and all they have to do is recycle some assets and animations and ship out the next game. I think TW is dead guys.

[wangrin]

I think the biggest problem with warscape engine are tied now to performance issue, eg. memory and multiprocessor.
It seems that CA is limited in memory budget due to warscape engine architecture (32 bits I suppose).
This is a very big problem because TW focuse a lot on visual aspect, something that is "RAM consuming".

If using warscape for new game means to cut or limit even more features, they really should begin to work on a new engine.


Warscape was not a bad engine, it has proved to be quite modular, allowing to change parts of it, like new battlemap system from two different maps (land and sea) to a new combined one working for land as well as sea battles (but with some pathfinding issues as well as strange behaviours such as "land ship"...).


Porting warscape engine to a 64 bits architecture is not necessarily worth, mostly because it was probably optimize for 32 bits and porting it probably means the "new" engine would not be optimize for 64 bits architecture.
On the other hand, creating a new engine from scratch need a lot of money, time and good programmers.

But CA speaking about "memory budget" limits "ring" like a warning for warscape engine future.
And it's a warning too for modders, because we could have very big problems when it will be time to create overhaul mods, adding new models and even new animations... we could hit a wall here.

It look like warscape is reaching the end of its cycle.
CA is in the "cash cow" stage... somthing that could be eventually compare to a BCG matrix.

Growth-share matrix

1. Stars (=high growth, high market share)
   
   • use large amounts of cash and are leaders in the business so they should also generate large amounts of cash.
   • frequently roughly in balance on net cash flow. However if needed any attempt should be made to hold share, because the rewards will be a cash cow if market share is kept.
   
   
2. Cash Cows (=low growth, high market share)
   
   • profits and cash generation should be high , and because of the low growth, investments needed should be low. Keep profits high
   • Foundation of a company
   
   
3. Dogs (=low growth, low market share)
   
   • avoid and minimize the number of dogs in a company.
   • beware of expensive ‘turn around plans’.
   • deliver cash, otherwise liquidate
   
   
4. Question Marks (= high growth, low market share)
   
   • have the worst cash characteristics of all, because high demands and low returns due to low market share
   • if nothing is done to change the market share, question marks will simply absorb great amounts of cash and later, as the growth stops, a dog.
   • either invest heavily or sell off or invest nothing and generate whatever cash it can. Increase market share or deliver cash
   
   

BCG matrix

[alQamar]

Exactly and as I am educated not only in computing but also business the next happen after being a cash cow TW will logically drop to a poor dog according to this BCG matrix aslong they do not invest the money earned and do relaunch of TW with a new engine.
This is a business rule regardless some dislike this and disagree.

[A Barbarian]

A new engine is desperately needed. Primarily because if u want to make proper use of multiple CPU cores u need to design the engine from the ground up with that design feature in mind. Warscape was designed around 1 CPU core. And the result is a horrible CPU bottleneck, especially in battles since a lot of the core functionality like animations is still tied strictly to a single CPU core.

64 bit or 32 bit probably doesn't matter that much. Rome 2 doesn't even use half the amount of RAM possible atm.

And Trish and Craig (even though he was a modder once) have about 0 knowledge about technical engine details in my experience. Everything they say is pretty much worthless in that respect, imho.

[omzdog]

And Trish and Craig (even though he was a modder once) have about 0 knowledge about technical engine details in my experience. Everything they say is pretty much worthless in that respect, imho.

Corporations don't usually select employees on technique knowledge of their product or process, but ideological obedience to their message.
The company is working just the way its meant to, inhumane money factory.
Its the people that come from outside and put a nice smiley face on that that we can be critical of.
You'd at least expect them to have the decency to admit basic truisms, but internalization of that message runs deep.
And so the next release will reference the 'award winning franchise fresh from Rome 2'.

[alQamar]

Thanks barb good post. BUT why they "constantly" talk about memory limits then? Do you really think this is just am excusion and they have no clue. I like doubting this.

[Wicked Moose]

Very very much yes.
Maybe irrelevant, but I am still amazed how in the 10 years from RTW to RTW2 so much attention was payed to improved graphics (up to facial animations? I hardly ever looked at faces of soldiers. If they make a MTW3 you won't even see most of the faces because of the helmets, unneccesary feature i think) and so little attention went to bigger battle scale. In vanilla RTW2 you still play with 20 units of 150 men =/
So again, maybe irrelevant in this thread (I'm not a programmer) but if the roots for these things are in the engine, then please CA, shift your budget a bit from graphics to performance/upscaling the game without a big performance penalty when youmakes a new engine.

[caratacus]

Very very much yes.
Maybe irrelevant, but I am still amazed how in the 10 years from RTW to RTW2 so much attention was payed to improved graphics (up to facial animations? I hardly ever looked at faces of soldiers. If they make a MTW3 you won't even see most of the faces because of the helmets, unneccesary feature i think) and so little attention went to bigger battle scale. In vanilla RTW2 you still play with 20 units of 150 men =/
So again, maybe irrelevant in this thread (I'm not a programmer) but if the roots for these things are in the engine, then please CA, shift your budget a bit from graphics to performance/upscaling the game without a big performance penalty when youmakes a new engine.

The trend in video games is towards realism, players expect footballers to look like their sports stars, they want their Combat Marines to look like something from a WW2 movie. CA are no different in this respect, its what sells games to the mass market.

However the downside of creating advanced graphics is the huge demand that places on a PC's hardware. It doesn't matter so much when you talking about a First Person Shooter with only a few characters and the scenery which focuses around them. But when you have a game which is a Battle Sim, involving hundreds of of characters set onto a large open landscape, performance issues become especially profound, An attempt to cope with this and the poor AI in cities has been to scale down the size of units and eliminate city defenses. Whilst the attempt to create realistic animations using the stop motion copying of only individual movements, relates poorly to formation engagements, creating a fast paced blobby mess.

CA may have been naive to think that the majority of players would only really care about appearance of the game or instead they themselves don't value their own game, which is a unique battle Sim (maybe both). The extra budget and time use to make RTW2 was evidently allocated on graphics improvement and creating a new games engine was afforded a low priority, which I agree should have been put before the former. Now if a new game engine was created 2 years from now for TW, its combination with improved graphics displayed on another generation of PCs would create an awesome game, it just won't be based on Rome. If creating a good realistic Roman based Total War game really did matter to these people, they wouldn't have attempted it until that time, I won't say anymore.

[Enterprise24]

If CA release 64bit binary , I believe game will have much better performance.

[alQamar]

Award winning. .. you refer to those?

DISCLAIMER:

Please note this is an unofficial meme and is not endorsed by SEGA or the Creative Assembly in any way. For more information on Total War, please visit www.totalwar.com

[omzdog]

Ya those awards, gotten before the games release, that no doubt litter the walls of every dev office and Sega management taking up space for what could also be a perfectly good white wall with just as much functionality.

[azbestor]

64 bit is not necessary faster. But, if Warscape was made by CA, they should have source files somewhere. Recompiling existent files for 64-bit support shouldn't be that much problem, right?. Optimization? If previous game runs like it should with huge armies on both sides (shogun2) and equivalent in Rome2 is simply choking, it's clear, that optimization was one of least things, they've cared for. After patch 3(I think), every patch makes game slower for me.

@Krisslanza:
Recently I've reinstalled windows 7 twice, without redownloading steam. Just reinstall system without touching steam folder, then install steam in it's old folder. It may require some restarting of steam an/or whole system, but it works.

[=Vastator=]

Obviously voted yes, but, let's face the truth: CA doesn't give a about fan opinions (we have seen it in Rome II, and considering the last Q&A...).
Plus, the engine/performance/optimization department is the most incompetent of all.

So, at the end, we have only to laugh (or cry).

[VINC.XXIII]

Plus, the engine/performance/optimization department is the most incompetent of all.

I could forgive those, if the leading designer had made something good about concepts...I means the guy who decided about removing the family tree, change the political system and even more decided about the alien transport fleets. This dude...hemmm...