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

Discussion in 'Projects In Progress' started by Antypodish, May 6, 2022.

  1. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Some of our another track :)

    Sanctuary: Shattered Sun OST - Preparations

     
  2. vintage-retro-indie_78

    vintage-retro-indie_78

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    wow, it is good music, think it'd almost be a movie - soundtrack . . .

    at least, gotta give it top - ratings, it sounds unique, original, and has ' vibe ' of the setting . . . :) :cool:
     
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  3. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Interesting fact, we got well over 1 hr of gameplay tracks composed.
    Plus tracks for other use with their variations and in production.
    Possibly nearing close to 2 hrs of various tracks.
     
  4. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Our artist WIP.
    Laser Arty. This is actual model and animations for our units.





    Also some interview of our management

    Sanctuary: Shattered Sun | Business Questions | Interview with Nine2 & Special_bread

     
  5. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Our team and myself been busy past two weeks with reaching two major mile stones.
    For our team is very exciting times.

    The expected outcome is to be in form YT vid, which atm is still in works.

    Until then, for now having quick dev update on the progress.

    Sanctuary: Shattered Sun Dev Progress Interview w/nine2 & Special_Bread March 2023


    And some quick screenshot update on EDA faction base.



     
  6. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    A bit of holiday-ing last week.
    But in the meantime, we got great vid published by StealSpeaks youtuber, with some extra bonus in it.

     
  7. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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  8. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Some extra music track:

    Sanctuary OST - The War Machine
     
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  9. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Size of some units, in comparison to human.





    Now consider this :)

     
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  10. warthos3399

    warthos3399

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    Love the work you and the team are putting into this game, god bless, and rock on!
     
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  11. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Thx @warthos3399, It is amazing to have you here :)

    Our fellow YT StealSpeaks, pumps out many closed demo related content :)
     
  12. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Earlier Generation 3 units fight test and gameplay, from our closed demo, by StealSpeaks Youtuber.

     
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  13. warthos3399

    warthos3399

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    Bro, love what i see. The review and demo is nice!. I actually watched it a few times, to zero in on things, and love the strategy aspect of the game. I have to say, i love the terrain/terrain textures, and the effects are very well done.

    The animation is top notch, nice job to you and the team. This game is going somewhere :)
     
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  14. laurentlavigne

    laurentlavigne

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    Very very cool!

    I was missing a good RTS and I like the visual style of each faction.

    Will the factions be very asymmetrical like zergs and protos?
     
  15. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Possibly not as much at demo release.
    There are significant differences between factions.
    Like for example one of the faction will have bubble shields on units.
    We want more variations between factions, but is hard enough to balance gameplay, at this stage of development.
    So variations thing may come later in development, or by contribution from the community. As we focus heavily on modding aspects.
    Demo however will limit this feature.
     
  16. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Sanctuary: Shattered Sun Dev Progress Interview Nine & Special_Bread October and November 2023

     
  17. laurentlavigne

    laurentlavigne

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    I personally like unbalanced games where I abuse OP configs, but that's because I only play against the computer. Balancing starcraft 1 must have been fun, I liked how OP the zergs are. SC2 blurb about balancing multiplayer:


    How much modding do you have so far?
     
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  18. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Since we did focus on modding from day 1, we can mod major part of the game.

    While we using DOTS in the core, this part of the engine is excluded from modding support. Anything that does heavy lifting. Networking, pathfinding, units movement, projectiles movement, collisions, damage detection, visibility, radars, spatial mapping and of course rendering.

    However, we link DOTS with lua.
    So lua for example can write whole AI behaviour, campaign, economy, damage behaviours, spawning effects and audio, spawning / building / destroying structures and units, giving orders to units, UI behaviour, UI configuration and much more.

    Units, props, projectiles data is stored in lua files. So anyone can modify their parameters before game starts. I.e. health, speed, damage, ranges, visibility etc.

    Models of units, props and projectiles also can be replaced. Since these are based on FBX, animation can be moded too. But current animation support is limited.

    Textures are replaceable.

    Maps are moddable too. However, while we had period, when we released map editor publically, we paused dev on the map editor, as not the priority atm.
    Still maps can be created withouth map editor.

    Effects has significant limitations, as they are complex from modding perspective. While their references can be easily swapped in models, creation of new sfx will be limited as of now. Subject to change. We use Particle System, with sub particles when applicable.

    We do not use VFX Graph.

    Shaders is another limitation from modding perspective.
     
  19. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Yeah that's completely fine for single player. And we indeed will have single player too.

    But we also need to support multiplier. So the challange comes from here.
     
  20. laurentlavigne

    laurentlavigne

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    How did you do that while keeping things performant? Looks like you have tons of unity on-screen.
     
  21. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    We use couple of tricks.
    But mainly we are using Lua JIT, which is much faster than lets say moonsharp for example.
    Plus accessing data via pointers between lua and engine.
    On side note of algorithm AI itself, you don't need to execute every method every single frame.
    We can spread load, even if single threaded.
    We still experience that lua have very little impact on our performance as of our tests, in comparison to C# engine and rendering.
     
  22. laurentlavigne

    laurentlavigne

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    jitLUA and pointer - nice pro tip! Do you find that using DOTS actually makes your life easier when passing data like that? I'd think that OOP would make this more difficult to keep track of what data goes where.
    Are decision made per groups of units? It looks like your navigation uses potential maps.
     
  23. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Our requirements is to have lua for easier modding support.
    We still need DOTS for heavy lifting. As I have mentioned, i.e. pathfinding.
    Yet it doesn't mean life easier :)

    There are numerous challenges here however.
    Not as simple and for sure more than one solution is valid, as we discovered.

    All units for example are entities.
    But it doesn't mean necessarily that we keep all data on entities. We just to have more there in fact.
    Largely yes, specially in such we can keep chunks relatively small and user paralel jobs. But not for all data we use entities.
    Various of data we keep on native arrays, or other native collections.
    We use here jobs and burst where applicable. We have eliminated large parts of OOP which we had at some point, which interfaced with lua JIT.

    To communicate with entities, we use persistent IDs to grab tracked entities.
    We have bridge mechanics for native data to-from lua. It was quite of work and required various of iterations.
    But we got this stable now. No desyncs, specially we also have client / host with both lua, running on the same machnie. Unless client PC connects to the host PC. Then client don't need to run host on the same machine. But host must.

    We provide from lua to engine list of units that will be given orders (on demand). For example move order.
    Then we send order as one commands. Engine handles units IDs and matches corresponding entities.
    Rest of pathfinding complexity is handled by DOTS. We still can use lua, as data driven approach, to change various behaviours. I.e. units speed.

    Interesting side note is, we opted-out from certain spatial maps designs. It happens that brute force by iterating through number of entities is much faster in certain cases, than trying specialize entities. This works for us, but may not necessarily work for others. Saying that, we still use various spatial methods. Fog Of War, collisions, radars still requires some form of partitioning. Here we utilize Implicit Grid approach in various places.
     
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  24. laurentlavigne

    laurentlavigne

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    Interesting. I guess SIMD Brute force beats clever tricks. Make sure you test on CPU with no AVX.
     
  25. officialfonee

    officialfonee

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    Ironically, SIMD is only portion of the benefits. If you just follow data-oriented design and keep it modular, the CPU can just do so much more. Plus, you get a bunch of things that are stupidly parallelizable.

    Also, something that is pretty cool is Burst compiles paths for those without AVX support. It's just very difficult to find consumer PC's these days without AVX. I think it's less than 1%. Anything after AVX2 is when you really start caring. Only around 4-6% lack AVX2 and I think my numbers are a little outdated.
     
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  26. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    FoeE have already explained in details. :)
    While SIMD plays a role for sure, the jobs design is where things matter. For example eliminating branching, or FOR loops when possible.

    Interestingly, as per profiling, trygonometric functions doesn't show much of impact, in comparison to other more complex systems.

    Burst seems optimises these functions very well.
     
  27. laurentlavigne

    laurentlavigne

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    That's nice, I thought later intel and earlier AMD lacked AVX, talk about outdated ;)

    I wishlisted your game.
     
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  28. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    We perhaps more about looking into effect of CPU architecture, where Performance and Effiecent cores are trend. But so far, I haven't observed any significant issues, or performance downsides. Or even upsides. It looks it is just working as expected.

    But to be Frank, I haven't run much test with these I mind.

    Thats amazing, thx. :)
     
  29. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    We are featured on one of Youtubers perafilozof
    Sanctuary Shattered Sun new gameplay in 2024 | Grand Scale Sci-fi RTS like Supreme Commander


    We are also preparing for PAX in USA.
    Sanctuary: Shattered Sun Dev Progress Interview Nine & Special_Bread Dec 2023 and Jan 2024


    Plus, we had cross-pollination series continuation: Amazing time and fun gamplay session with one of Zero-k devs
    GoogleFrog
    Sanctuary plays Zero-K | Cross-Pollination Series
     
  30. warthos3399

    warthos3399

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    Congrats bro!
     
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  31. Antypodish

    Antypodish

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    Thx mate :)
    While we have had pass some critical milestones. Yet we still have few major ones to come over next months. We want launch Kickstarter. TBA. Then Early Access on Steam. And finally release. I would say rougly, about 2 years road map to stay on safe side.
     
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  32. warthos3399

    warthos3399

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    You guys will do great just hang in there, its a great game with a AAA feel/look to it.

    Nice job guys, best to you :)
     
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