Moon Posted February 14, 1999 Share Posted February 14, 1999 I know EXACTLY why I would not want CM to be real-time, but I was wondering: what were the actual reasons why BTS has chosen the "mixed" approach of orders phase / action phase? In the existing 3D model, it appears to me that it would have been easy to have a completely real-time based simulation... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Big Time Software Posted February 15, 1999 Share Posted February 15, 1999 Actually the 3D engine, or any engine for that matter, has nothing to do with the game engine in ANY game. Graphics are just graphics after all. 3D has a much larger impact on interface, which can in turn affect gameplay. In general realtime ANYTHING is MUCH harder to do, and even harder to get right, than turnbased programming and design. Every calculation in a 3D game counts against frame rate, so this puts shackles on the designers (if you think we have to be careful with our mixed system...). Worse, there is no way to precalculate information (like LOS points), which is a coding trick to save on calculation times during gameplay. Instead, everything has to be looked at THAT very moment, and therefore everything has to be calculated each time, which further screws with frame rate. Then toss in the fact that the user can interact with the game at any point in almost any way and you see that this is a real mess to deal with. So... besides thinking that realtime does NOT allow for strategic planning, there are hundreds of gameplay reasons why are going to stay away from RT. If you wonder why CC3 has such a strict limit on unit counts, map sizes, and "realism", look no further than its realtime nature. If CC3 was at CM's scope, or was in 3D, you probably would have to buy the fastest system out there to even have a hope of running it Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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