Games [WIP] Sanctuary (on Steam) - Inspired by Total Annihilations, Supcom, Zero-k games (DOTS, HDRP)

Hi guys from team and myself of:

Sanctuary Shattered Sun
https://www.sanctuaryshatteredsun.com/

We are live on steam too
Steam
(coming soon)​

Past last decade, many RTS fans were noticing, stagnation in RTS genere.
Relatively few RTS game were released, with set high standards and modern graphics fidelity.
Our team recognizes that and it is working hard, on modern spiritual successor of Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander and Zero-k like series of games.


Impression Art with our in game models.

We build modern RTS game, with large scale battles in mind, which are placed in far future, where earth has been devastated by human activities. While people suffered of bad life quality on Earth, they decided to build a new home.

The new home become Dyson sphere, called Sanctuary, which wraps the Sun and allowed to thrive, thanks to its immense contained energy. Yet the cost was great. Most of solar system were consumed, to build such super structure. Help of machines and highly advanced AI was needed, to support such endeavor.
Yet the conflict between three factions was escalated, when earth's moon crashed into Dyson sphere ...

With that in mind, I would like to present our recent trailer, which is an interview thanks to Gyle.

The vid covers many aspect of our current project progress, but yet more to do and even more to come.

Our main goals are, which we are implementing:
- To refresh stagnated RTS genre.
- To support many thousands of units.
- Multiplier, for which we have our custom netcode.
- Moding support for models, textures, maps and scripting using lua.
- Provide 60FPS experience.

Along with our code base, which utilizes heavily DOTS thx to our programmers, our team modelers, artists, musician, etc. create custom assets.



While our task is none trivial, we are strong and positive about delivering the project, whenever it will be ready. But we are aware, it is still long journey for us.

Tatsu and Gyle presenting our awesome bits of gameplay.

For anyone interested with more details, we have website with dev logs, youtube channel and discord as well, where people actively participate.



If anyone has any questions, please do not hesitate to ask here, or to reach our discord.

 

We are excited to announce that we have just released our

Sanctuary Shattered Sun
on
Steam
(Coming Soon)
​

I would love to say BIG thank you for the support from the Unity given to date.
You are amazing!!!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1699050/Sanctuary_Shattered_Sun/

This is a massive mile stone for us.

 

Some in dev footage.

 

AWESOME

 

Looks good! The reference to Total Annihilation brought back memories of launching base-killing assaults starting with nukes, followed by air, and then a wall of krogoths.

 

Yeah
I loved playing TA. Quite good old times spending together with friends, nocking out each other.
I remember playing moded version, with tons of additional units.
And of course Big Berthas, Chainsaws, Airplanes with nukes. Tons of fun

 

3 factions logos



Some units up close.

 

For that 80% of the visible space is green ground texture, you really should look into some good grass rendering and such

 

We do consider if we want grass or not.
We will have vegetation in general.
However grass is quite different challange to bite.

For first, is rarely the case, when camera will be so up close to the ground. Usually during gameplay, player will operate in strategic view, for majority of the time. Or at least at the distance of viewing multiple units.

Then there is aspect of grass obstructing decals. Grass should be "destroyable".
Additional aspect is grass behaviour, when units moves through it. Ideally some tracks would need to be left on the grass.

I would need to ask our shader magician, what his thoughts are on the grass in general.

 

Grass planes might not be a good idea but doing a grass shader or compute shader thing on a big plane
Without anything It feels just like a tiling texture on the ground. Same could be done with small rocks, it is the biggest element on your screen at all times

 

Grass is very challenging subject, for both performance and quality, while angle of view can be anything from First Person to top view. Shader based grass also comes with performance hit on large screens, where quality of grass also can degrade, when trying to run game smoothly.

 

Some of our artworks

 

One of our soundtracks.
We have our audio artist.

Ocean of Steel

 

Some time lapse map creation process for Sanctuary
https://discord.com/channels/781554164307591219/896390803113517088/896425771843858452

We have also custom map editor, which is stil in dev, but already publicly accessible.
https://discord.com/channels/781554164307591219/833635272654192640/927844541300625449

 

Some early VFX and Shields WIP

 

Some units WIP / Art

 

Another of our soundtrack.

This is one is quite deep and heavy I would say.

The Pieces Are In Place

 

Awesome!

 

I will bring more soon
Thx for a support.

 

WIP on upcoming props trees, with some wind in crowns.

 

Our units wrecks.
Nothing but shaders magic.





And some units during design process.

 

Some of our new custom VFX WIP.

 

Vid update on trees impostor system

 

WIP VFX compilation vid.

 

Some of our arts guys sketches work.

 

Some of our Chosen faction units / structures.
From WIP state to the in game implementation.

 

Progress on VFX.

 

Nice - my favorite is probably at 4:29, how fragments are falling through/with the smoke like that, for me it enhances the sense of scale (i.e. a large building, the pieces tumbling down having significant weight). Also the aurora-ish layer in the sky at 5:04 is great. It's VFX as in VFX graph ?

 

@polemical, I am glad you are enjoying our VFX
We will have more to come sometime soon.

In the meantime, another our soundtrack. enjoy

Sanctuary OST - Earth Defence Alliance

 

I have realised, I didn't answer your last question.

No we do not use VFX Graph. We decided not to use it in our project, so it can be moddable, as much as possible. VFX Graph constraints us in tha goal.

We use Unity Particle System (PS) , with some clever combination of animated sprites from our VFX and shader magicians, so number of particles per effect is around hand full to dozen. This way we can play hundred of different effects at once.

We also use DOTS in conjunction with PS, for which we found suitable implementation.

Units tracks on the ground, smoke, explosions, etc, all are based on PS.

 

damn, that's so awesome ! Supreme Commander was so clean, i so much loved that game !

i'm trying to develop a side basic RTS game which is supose in my mind to support near of 300 unit on the battlefield. But i occur than the rigidbody (need for trigger and collider) take so much in term of perfomance that my FPS is so low.

maybe do you have some advice about it ?

 

Most likely DOTS is something you want to use for large scale RTS like games, where DOTS is highly suitable for such applications.

Alternatively, you can try use custom physics for RTS. RTS games use simplified physics. RTS doesn't need to use accuracy of FPS games. For example by creating spatial custom spatial maps.
Again, DOTS' jobs and burst are minimum, that you need will need to get best out the of performance.
Then if possible, consider using entities too.

 

Some playing with VFX

 

Our Sanctuary team had an interview with Chris Taylor, who amazingly endorses our endeavor into this project.

For whom don't know who Chris Taylor is:

Spoiler

"Chris Taylor is a Canadian video game designer best known for Total Annihilation and the Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander series and co-founding the former studio, Gas Powered Games."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Taylor_(video_game_designer)

Saying that, we have still tons and tons of work, before even thinking to get rest.

 

Having some tracks / wheels trails

 

Projects looks very nice, I wish you the best of sales when you release.

Are you doing it full time guys ?

 

Thx @koirat for an oncouraging words.

Yes, we work on it full time.

 

More concept arts

 

Next our soundtrack

Ambush

 

We got more work done on trees.

We have developing custom DOTS system for props supporting impostors, with custom shader.
We testing here 26k trees.
Obviously we focusing on RTS like applications, rather than first person camera type of games.

Main challenge over existing props systems on Asset Store for example, we need these props to be interactable at run time. We need be able to create them, destroy them and maybe even move them. Plus collision detection.

Or props related works currently focusing on improving visuals and performance of trees.

 

As our team works hard on the game and features, here some food for though from our artists

 

I was recording other day, some test mechanics.
Like projectiles, explosions, wrecks, etc.

Battle of Gen1x2000 vs Gen3x400 tanks

Obviously there are tons of work still ahead, but we moving forward.

Music changes in respect to the peace, or battle state. It uses our Sanctuary dedicated made sound tracks.

Current in game sfx are using Unity native audio API. None DOTS.
It still require further work, but it does supports audio grouping and LOD like mechanics, to prevent playing 1000s of same sounds in one area. A bit smoke an mirrors here and there
SFX also changes in respects to the camera position and distance, to audio source.

I am mostly happy how it turns out for an ear, with not so much spent time on it, while audio was my area of the implementation.

For VFX we are using Unity native API of particle systems.
We are able to support 100s of explosions and projectile trails.
As well, as land tracks.

As for rendering, we stay with HDRP with custom shaders. No hybrid renderer.
That implements skinned mesh shader.

We use my custom animation system. Which still is WIP.

While as it is extremely critical for gameplay, we atm have disabled spatial formation of units.
So they look a bit clumped.
We need improve and refine our formation algorithms.

We have lots of internal works atm. for the core mechanics, which unfortunately doesn't produce much of new gameplay vids. But it need to be done, so we can hit our goal of smooth large scale gameplay, while we trying also to support lua modding

Mind if curious, our team atm. is less than 20 people.
That gives a space for only handful of DOTS devs, among other great members of the team, with different specializations.

 

Love the work you and the guys are doing, looks great bro!

 

Hey, it looks great!

You can tell me what algorithm you used for ai navigation?

 

Hey, and thx.
It is flowfield for pathfinding.
Does that answer your question?

 

Ah, thank you, but could you clarify the mechanism of execution flows if you don't mind,
are you creating a high-resolution grid or using voxels?

I just also do a similar genre, but with planets and have big problems with navigation in spherical worlds
As it turned out, this is quite a difficult task, considering that I can't use unity based realisation because of network code(((

 

Definitely not any voxels.
It is just a grid, with cells, pointing into the destination, from other directions.

We describe concept of our flowfield in our blog post.
https://www.sanctuary-rts.com/post/pathfinding-1

 

Try to implement first A*

Also simplistic approach, is to use Great Circle.
Seem bottom of my old post
https://forum.unity.com/threads/wip...ype-dots-making-creature.773210/#post-5582083

 

Another soundtrack of ours.

Remembrance

 

Hmm, thanks
I tried to use A* for large chunks, and then generate flowfield with high accuracy for the selected chunks - and it seems to be a really working solution

It remains only to overcome the problem of correctly calculating the path between chunks, as well as the imposition of a grid on a sphere

Also thanks for the links to the articles too!