Forged Alliance Forever

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-06-19T01:28:23+02:00

IceDreamer wrote:
... Why not just ask Chris? Also, SupCom is his dearest and greatest baby, and he's known about FAF for a long, long time. Perhaps if you can make him realise how serious this community is now, he can untie some knots... Bring on the source code!

Chance of Wargaming/Nordic collaborative effort? 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%, but not nil.

Really great imput, bro. What do you expect him to do as the owners of the game won't co-operate?

Statistics: Posted by Dr_Doolittle — 19 Jun 2014, 01:28

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-06-18T22:34:21+02:00

D4E_Omit wrote:
IceDreamer wrote:Not necessarily. A lot of people, me included, think that Nordic have the right to create a new 'Supreme Commander' title, but that Wargaming gained ownership of the MOHO engine when they bought GPG out. As there are rumours that CT is working on a TA2, I am also of the opinion that they are actively using the MOHO engine, or at least something based heavily on it, to do this. Since TA2 will be a AAA title, that puts the chances of them working with Nordic to give us a hand practically nil. The engine is too powerful to become abandoned just yet

Well the chances of TA2 are pretty low, I have chris taylor on my skype and he seemed surprised about supreme commander still being alive But now to the point, there is a 90% chance wargaming has the MOHO engine. I have contacted them and will wait to see if I get a response.

... Why not just ask Chris? Also, SupCom is his dearest and greatest baby, and he's known about FAF for a long, long time. Perhaps if you can make him realise how serious this community is now, he can untie some knots... Bring on the source code!

Chance of Wargaming/Nordic collaborative effort? 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%, but not nil.

Statistics: Posted by IceDreamer — 18 Jun 2014, 22:34

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-06-18T20:43:46+02:00

Pretty sure he knows very well about FAF as seen here http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1 ... es/c813k96

Statistics: Posted by Aulex — 18 Jun 2014, 20:43

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-06-18T20:19:55+02:00

IceDreamer wrote:
Not necessarily. A lot of people, me included, think that Nordic have the right to create a new 'Supreme Commander' title, but that Wargaming gained ownership of the MOHO engine when they bought GPG out. As there are rumours that CT is working on a TA2, I am also of the opinion that they are actively using the MOHO engine, or at least something based heavily on it, to do this. Since TA2 will be a AAA title, that puts the chances of them working with Nordic to give us a hand practically nil. The engine is too powerful to become abandoned just yet

Well the chances of TA2 are pretty low, I have chris taylor on my skype and he seemed surprised about supreme commander still being alive But now to the point, there is a 90% chance wargaming has the MOHO engine. I have contacted them and will wait to see if I get a response.

Statistics: Posted by D4E_Omit — 18 Jun 2014, 20:19

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-06-17T03:47:14+02:00

SE has nothing. Their influence extends to Supreme Commander 2 and no further. They could potentially kick up a fuss over a "Supreme Commander 3" but Nordic can publish an expansion similar to FA, or another standalone title using the name, with no problem. Well, they could if they had the engine anyway.

Supreme Commander doesn't even appear in SE's official list of Intellectual Properties. They won't kick up a fuss at all.

Statistics: Posted by IceDreamer — 17 Jun 2014, 03:47

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-06-17T01:40:11+02:00

IceDreamer wrote:
Not necessarily. A lot of people, me included, think that Nordic have the right to create a new 'Supreme Commander' title, ...

Square Enix owns the IP and trademark for Supreme Commander. Nordic Games can create a spiritual successor, but will most likely not be allowed to use any of the SupCom art without the approval (i.e. give money) from Square Enix.

Statistics: Posted by The Mak — 17 Jun 2014, 01:40

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-06-17T00:05:59+02:00

Not necessarily. A lot of people, me included, think that Nordic have the right to create a new 'Supreme Commander' title, but that Wargaming gained ownership of the MOHO engine when they bought GPG out. As there are rumours that CT is working on a TA2, I am also of the opinion that they are actively using the MOHO engine, or at least something based heavily on it, to do this. Since TA2 will be a AAA title, that puts the chances of them working with Nordic to give us a hand practically nil. The engine is too powerful to become abandoned just yet

Statistics: Posted by IceDreamer — 17 Jun 2014, 00:05

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-06-16T16:12:36+02:00

Nordic games bought THQ rights. So they have game engine? ^^

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/34990-thq-lives-again

Statistics: Posted by Dr_Doolittle — 16 Jun 2014, 16:12

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-05-10T07:07:29+02:00

We should also bring up the point that these fixes could be updated in the steam version of the game. So it would help them too.

Statistics: Posted by Zyneak — 10 May 2014, 07:07

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-05-10T04:58:29+02:00

IceDreamer wrote:
So at minimum we'd need to get three unrelated companies to engage in communication to figure out who owns what and how much can be freed up for us. [...]

If they all agree to give up what's needed it's not really necessary to figure out who owns what.

If me, my uncle and my dad each own some tools in a box and someone else wants to borrow the entire box while we don't know who owns what tool... if we all agree to lend it out anyway... it doesn't matter.

Statistics: Posted by E8400-CV — 10 May 2014, 04:58

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-05-09T23:49:32+02:00

Sheeo wrote:
I really dislike the term 'multi core support'. There's really no such thing... You can have multiple threads or a single one, and you can be slower even though you use multiple threads. Just booting ForgedAlliance.exe will tell you that it actually spawns 21 threads. This means that it already has 'multi core support', since those threads can theoretically be executed on any logical processor. Depending on your operating system and the scheduling algorithms used, it may prefer to run them on the same core or not. You really don't know unless you test, and quite frankly it's irrelevant for performance.

the point is to divide the work done in the busiest thread into many threads. we are talking about the "simulation thread".
all other threads are irrelevant when talking about multi-core support.

most of the 20-odd threads of FA.exe are usually sleeping. in that case it does not matter on how many cores they are
executed.

multi-core and multi-thread are largely synonymous. in this instance, multi-core is the better term, since it expresses the
fact that computations happen in parallel. oftentimes multiple threads are just used for convenience to have many execution
states and you are waiting on events (which is most probably the case with those FA threads that have 0% cpu utilization).

Sheeo wrote:
Some things need to be executed sequentially. A lot of things in this game, since you need the simulation to be deterministic. What this means for instance is that it isn't trivial to just simulate all collisions in parallel--you'll run into concurrency issues.

By all means I'm in for making the game faster, but please, let's do it with informed people and let's not lie and say it's easy. (I'm looking at you, Zyneak).

it is certainly not trivial, but FA by its very nature supports parallel simulation:

the majority of the entities (like tanks and projectiles) have a limited subset of other entities which influence their behaviour.
a tank in one corner of the map is not dependent on a tank in the other corner of the map and thus the execution order between
them is irrelevant. at the end of the tick the result would be exactly the same, whether tank A or tank B is simulated first.
in other words, if you look at all simulation inputs for tank A, none of them comes from tank B and vice versa.
what you can do now is subdivide the battlefield in multiple zones. for 2 zones that are not adjacent to each other the independence should apply to all entities. adjacent zones must be simulated in sequence.
in a nutshell, simulate first all white squares of a chess board and then all black squares. for the simplified example assume
no tanks can shoot diagonally.
in a sense, there is a speed of light on a FA battlefield and thus there are entity groups for which mutual sequence of simulation does not matter for infinitesimal timespans (i.e. single simulation steps).

not trivial, not difficult either.

Statistics: Posted by rootbeer23 — 09 May 2014, 23:49

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-05-09T23:17:47+02:00

Krapougnak wrote:
As far as I understand what Pilot said SE and Nordic only own the publishing rights of SCFA and SupCom2 so it seems that going to Chris Taylor himself and Wargaming company is the better option to get to the engine rights.

Also Square Enix owns the IP for Supreme Commander.
Go here
Use Supreme Commander as the search term.
Should be the first one on the list (Serial Number: 78325032)

So any new SupCom games can only be initiated by them, otherwise we will need another spiritual successor.

I am also remembering something I read that they lost the source code for FA. I think it was something about transferred it to THQ and when they went looking for it they found the disk to be corrupt. This was during the time when THQ was having their auction of the company assets. I believe as a publisher you need a copy of the source code, since it is your business to sell copies of the game. In the event of your master copy going bad, you may need to rebuild the game to be able to sell it.

The game engine also uses third party entities in it. For instance, all the video and audio files utilize a proprietary format that is licensed by SEGA, who were the first publisher of SupCom Vanilla but dropped out. These are not going to be provided if we can get the source code and thus need to be rebuilt with other tools. For all we know, the performance issues may be due to some third party modules that are part of the game engine, but not written by GPG.

Statistics: Posted by The Mak — 09 May 2014, 23:17

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-05-09T19:51:52+02:00

Dr_Doolittle wrote:
Sheeo wrote:Certainly going through the code and improving where improvements can be made would be good, but "multi core" is not a golden nugget that will just make the game super fast. There are certainly more ways to make the game run better.

Just tell me, what ways are those and are those better ways?

I didn't mention any inherently 'better' ways.

One place to start optimizing, that we can do right now though, would obviously be the lua code. Nobody's even bothered trying to run the proling tools that moho ships with (/lua/system/profile.lua) and actually getting a grip of what's computationally expensive sim-lua side. Lot's of optimizations can be done in that code, and there's a lot of it.

Dr_Doolittle wrote:
The main problem of this game is it not having multi core support. It's even more important than balance. It's the reason why lots of gamers were not able to play this game and hated it because it's a damn slideshow.

I really dislike the term 'multi core support'. There's really no such thing... You can have multiple threads or a single one, and you can be slower even though you use multiple threads. Just booting ForgedAlliance.exe will tell you that it actually spawns 21 threads. This means that it already has 'multi core support', since those threads can theoretically be executed on any logical processor. Depending on your operating system and the scheduling algorithms used, it may prefer to run them on the same core or not. You really don't know unless you test, and quite frankly it's irrelevant for performance.

Some things need to be executed sequentially. A lot of things in this game, since you need the simulation to be deterministic. What this means for instance is that it isn't trivial to just simulate all collisions in parallel--you'll run into concurrency issues.

By all means I'm in for making the game faster, but please, let's do it with informed people and let's not lie and say it's easy. (I'm looking at you, Zyneak).

Statistics: Posted by Sheeo — 09 May 2014, 19:51

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-05-09T18:28:18+02:00

rxnnxs wrote:
p.s.: Zyneak, it is really great that you speak up and offer this to us. if there is a chance that you or a team is still willing to do this when nordic games and others that own some rights (IP or whatever from FA/SC) will hand us over what is needed to get it done and even if that is in a couple of months or years, then that would be really really awesome! time will tell, and until then we are here and keep it running!

Thank you very much. I would also like to say, the chance they would use the same engine to build any games now, is slim to none.

They most likely aren't using that same engine for anything nowadays. So it should be possible to get the source , maybe...

Statistics: Posted by Zyneak — 09 May 2014, 18:28

Re: Game engine & Nordic Games

2014-05-09T16:08:38+02:00

As far as I understand what Pilot said SE and Nordic only own the publishing rights of SCFA and SupCom2 so it seems that going to Chris Taylor himself and Wargaming company is the better option to get to the engine rights.

Statistics: Posted by Krapougnak — 09 May 2014, 16:08