Stardock has revealed Ashes of the Singularity, a new real-time strategy game and the first game powered by developer Oxide Games’ new Nitrous engine.
Ashes of the Singularity will pit humanity, which has evolved into beings of pure consciousness, in a war for domination of the universe with Haalee, a sentient AI “bent on saving the universe from post-human predation.”
Ashes takes a lot of inspiration from Sins of a Solar Empire and Total Annihilation. However, the game mechanics for planetary conquest are influenced by Company of Heroes.
“In Ashes of the Singularity, players can take command of the forces of either the post-humans or those of Haalee,” said Stardock president and CEO Brad Wardell. “This is a galaxy-wide struggle in which each ‘battle’ wages across the surface of an entire planet. The scope of the conflict is unlike anything players have seen before.”
Stardock explains that players will control thousands of “deadly constructs” in large battles where “control of matter to fuel the expansion of computing power is the only goal.”
War. We guess it never changes.
According to Stardock Ashes of the Singularity is an RTS on a scale “never before seen”, where even the smallest units have their own independent weapons systems and every shot fired has its own, bespoke ballistics model.
“The scale of Ashes required us to create a new type of 3D engine,” said Oxide Games graphics architect Dan Baker. “We wanted to make a game that didn’t just depict a battle but an entire war in real time, with thousands of independent units acting simultaneously.”
Ashes of the Singularity will offer both multiplayer and an epic single-player campaign. Stardock notes league structures, leaderboards, stats and other features will be announced as development continues. This content will be powered by Stardock’s cloud-based Project Tachyon metagaming services (spearheaded by lead architect Adrian Luff, who helped build Blizzard’s Battle.net).
Quote:
Basics
Ashes of the Singularity is a real-time strategy game set in humanity’s not-so-distant future. What it means to be human has changed with the coming of the singularity.
In the post-human economy, sentience is now the most valuable commodity in the universe. The only way to acquire more of that is through the control of computronium – programmable matter – which can extend consciousness to levels we can't even imagine. Worlds are being transformed into this substance and wars are now being fought across the galaxy for control of those worlds.
Each conflict takes place across an entire world. It isn't a skirmish. It's a war. Thousands of units are constantly constructed and sent across the planet with the player directing entire armies, in real time, to capture key resources in an effort to gain total control of the planet.
Economy
Across each planet are stores of metal and radioactives, key ingredients for the construction of units and structures necessary to wage a war across the world. Players build extractors for these resources in areas they control, which generate a constant stream of income of metal or radioactives.
The third key resource is power, which structures require to operate. Power is provided through generators that have been seeded around the world. Players must capture these generators in order to build more structures to further fuel their expansion.
Lastly, there are the computronium generators. Computronium was theorized in 1991 as the ultimate computing material. Since the objective of the post-humans and the Substrate is to increase their sentient ability, control of computronium is their ultimate objective.
Map Control
Each player begins the game with their Seed: their command and control center for that world. A map is broken into many different regions which will feature a generator; capturing this structure grants the player ownership of that region and increases their power reserve. Resources in a given region can only be collected if the player controls that region and and contiguous regions connecting back to their seed.
Don’t fight a battle – win the war
Every unit in Ashes of the Singularity fulfils a role and serves to create a combat system that relies on combined arms. Simply swarming random units together is unlikely to result in victory. However, it can be difficult to micromanage hundreds or thousands of units across entire continents. This is where the meta-unit comes in.
Every unit is aware of every other unit in the meta-unit. Units within a meta-unit work together in a consistent manner that allows players to predict how a given meta-unit will behave. For example, a repair frigate will move to heal the most critically damaged unit in its meta-unit. A short-ranged heavy unit will move to protect a slow-moving, vulnerable ranged unit. Additionally, unit behaviors are linked to the types of unit in their meta-unit, which allows players a certain amount of control over the overall combat tactics their forces adopt.
Winning the Game
Final victory is won when either a player has completely converted a planet to Computronium, or by eliminating the other players be destroying their Seeds.
Skirmish
Compete against the AI on one of the included gameplay maps.
Scenario
Fulfill a special victory condition to complete these maps.
Multiplayer
Test your strategic skill in 1 on 1 matches, free for all or 2 v 2 matches.
Last edited by prudislav on Wed, 9th Mar 2016 22:49; edited 3 times in total
A 16-core Xenon (Or 2x 8-core) would be a interesting test to see just how well DirectX 12 and this game engine can scale, AMD's CPU's are a bit slower than Intel's but it's nice to see that it can overcome some performance limitations when more cores are available to work with, Mantle was a good trial run and hopefully DirectX 12 will continue to show similar results though it might take some time before the API becomes the standard and overtakes D3D9 and D3D11.
(More so with AMD's GPU's using more CPU overhead than Nvidia.)
Here are the games we think Ashes of the Singularity will appeal to:
People who liked Total Annihilation (this game is most similar to TA)
People who like Company of Heroes (the maps are region based)
People who like Kohan (you can combine your units into a single big unit that works together)
People who like Sins of a Solar Empire (we have sometimes described this as Sins on a planet)
What’s next:
Windows 10 reviewers will start getting Ashes keys this upcoming week to test DirectX 12 performance.
Gamers can join the Founders program to get access to the same benchmark (and the game)
Users who have purchased the Founders Lifetime edition will be receiving a second Steam key to give to a friend so that we can get multiplayer testing going.
Moving from Alpha to very early Beta begins mid August (with steam Early Access release).
Full release : somewhere in 2016
Read a bit in their forums. Brad Wardell seems to think that besides walking and hot water, he also invented the concept of strategic zoom and everyone else copied the concept. He also dismisses feedback for features or design, it seems, unless it's feedback that says how great he is. Hope the game turns out good regardless, he seems to want to suport the game for 10 years
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."
While there are still optimizations to be had, Ashes of the Singularity in its pre-beta stage is as – or more – optimized as most released games. What’s the point of optimizing code 6 months after a title is released, after all?
Let's hope "still optimisations to be had" are pretty major, because they're supposedly targeting 1440p/High/4xMSAA on "high end GPUs" (Titan X? ) but right now the benchmark is anything but, being 1080p/Medium/NoAA and still struggling to break 50 on high-end cards. Granted it's a benchmark so it's usually designed to be far more taxing than any real world situation you'd encounter in the final game, but yeah..
Thanks. I was hoping for a rls of the beta so I could benchmark myself.
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."
From the discussion on that Guru3D page the upcoming beta release that will be made available to the normal users will be using D3D11 but I haven't checked if that's anything official or just a rumor.
EDIT: Nah it was just I that misunderstood, what it meant was that the game will be running on non-final code (Well it is a beta but it could be optimized further is probably what the poster meant.) with early D3D12 display driver support or some such.
tried it, looks promising.. but for some reason it constantly locks my view into units I have built and starts following them. I have to press escape to get rid of it every time, very weird. Maybe a bug related to 21:9 reso.
So I did a few overclocking tests with the Ashes of singularity benchmark on my 290X Tri-X new edition running the latest drivers 15.7.1 on Windows 10 (obviously). I posted them on overclock.net aswell.
I ran all the tests at 1080 with default settings, which are, I suppose, what reviewers name high. I use fan settings to keep the GPU at max. temp of 75° and VRM1 80°, to prevent any throttling.
My 3570K runs at 4.5Ghz
Note that there are variances of +-0,3 FPS at reruns. So the results are to take with a little grain of salt.
Here are the results, using the average the benchmark shows at the end.
Spoiler:
First of all there is the obvious CPU bottleneck in DX11. DX12 gives me almost 100% more FPS. More like 95%.
Secondly, overclocking the memory doesnt do it any good. I have never seen any tangible improvement between running 1350 and 1500.
And finally, the CPU bottleneck comes back as soon as I reach about 1125 Mhz. (Staying with 1350 on Mem) From 1020 to 1100 there is an improvement of 5.5 % for 7,8% GPU OC. From 1100 to 1125 there is a 1,3% improvement for 2,2 % OC. And then from 1125 to 1150 there is no improvement whatsoever so I'm assuming my system hits its sweetspot at about 1125MHZ GPU. Everything above that seems to be bottlenecked by the CPU again at which point the difference between DX11 and DX12 is also the highest: 97,3 %.
The test is quite sensitive to overclocks. I've been able to run my 290X at 1150/1500 in anything I threw at it with no artifacting at + 106 mv.
For example, here is a Fire Strike run at 1157/1500, no artifacting:
Ashes of singularity however makes my PC reboot as soon as the test starts. I've been able to run 1150/1350 but there was no way to get it to run 1150/1500 (neither DX11 nor DX12). I suspect this is due to my 580W PSU reaching its limits. This has never happened before in any game. Or maybe there is another explanation I dont know of.
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."
Something about Nvidia asking Oxide to turn off Async Compute for DX12 since it wasn't working correctly for their GPU's so it's on for AMD and off for Nvidia thus giving a (small?) CPU improvement on AMD GPU's
Personally without knowing too well how that function works maybe they could add it as a user option so people who want to test it can toggle it on/off and thus allow feature parity between AMD and Nvidia and have both perform on the same conditions or how to say. (Instead it seems it might have turned into a bit of a argument between Oxide and Nvidia?)
Stardock announced that the alpha of its upcoming massive scale real-time strategy game, Ashes of the Singularity, will launch on Steam Early Access for $39.99 on October 22th. As the press release reads, this 20% discount off the list price of $49.99 will be available for a limited time.
The Early Access version will include several different planets to battle over as the Post-Human faction. Both the single-player AI and multiplayer settings will be available for players to choose from.
Brad Wardell added:
“We are very excited to go into early access. Given how ambitious this game is, we’re going to need all the help we can get from our player base to reach our goal of making this the most epic, large-scale real time strategy game ever.”
Besides being the first 64-bit RTS and being the first to use DirectX 12, Ashes of the Singularity also includes the first asynchronous multi-core real-time AI.
Regarding the AI, Brad Wardell had this to say:
“While we expect the game to have a strong multiplayer community, we are adamant that the single player game have intelligent and challenging computer opponents to play against. We have team games with friends versus the AI, free for all, and every other combination in place already to help begin testing this part of the game early. This isn’t one of those games where the AI is an afterthought.”
Ashes of the Singularity is the first game to utilize the Nitrous 3D engine developed by Oxide Games. This new engine includes a new type of rendering system that has more in common with movie CGI effects than games. This new type of rendering is called Object Space Rendering (OSR) and we talked a bit about it in our previous story.
Brad Wardell concluded:
“Nitrous basically does what CGI in movies has done, except in real-time. What was considered the realm of pre-rendered CGI in the 90s is now something we can do on the fly.”
Known Issues & Unimplemented Features
Getting bug reports from the community is a HUGE help to development. With that in mind, here’s a list of some of the big ones we know about, things we could use help tracking down, and features that are just yet-to-be-implemented.
The most useful thing for us (and often the hardest part) is getting clear, simple steps to reproduce a bug. Screenshots and video are great helps too.
Let us know what you find!
Compatibility/Stability
Intermittent crash while browsing your Profile and the Leaderboards (fixed for next patch)
Instability after playing and starting multiple new games (fixed for next patch)
Driver stops responding on Nvidia 860m laptop GPU (we’d love feedback if any 860m users are or are not getting this issue)
Some integrated and older D3D12 hardware which is binding tier 1 is not yet supported in DX12 mode
Stuttering unit movement with some hardware configs
Multiplayer save games don’t always restore properly
Editing EmulateFullscreen in settings.ini will lead to instability when game loses focus
Gameplay
Large armies sometimes split up when pathfinding through narrow areas
Engineer building queues sometimes disappear
Lots of balance work still to be done
UI
Game uses native desktop resolution in fullscreen mode, not the resolution set
Steam Overlay doesn’t support DX12 yet
*therefore Friends Invite functionality is disabled in DX12 until we implement an in-UI solution.
Bringing up the save menu can disable the arrow keys for camera control (entering and exiting the menu again will fix the issue)
Visual
Most Weapon and Destruction FX are placeholder now
Building destruction VFX not always visible for client in multiplayer games
Audio
Dreadnaught VO warning sometimes are heard for other players
Notable Unimplemented Features (this list is not exhaustive)
Additional Global Abilities
New Map Environments
Substrate Faction
Multiple AI opponent ‘Personalities’
Ranked Multiplayer & Matchmaking
Ascendancy War Mode
Double-click to select all of a unit type
Detailed performance and rig info in Benchmark Leaderboards
Tutorial
Text Localization
Those jaw dropping visuals look pretty bad. Only the units look somewhat good. But who plays RTS most of the time zoomed in to fap to awesome textures?!
So far this game seems more like some tech demo that get's regulary used for performance tests.
Meh.
The main feature as I understood it (And the main use of DirectX 12) is the massive scale of the battles with tons of units on screen each having their own (Probably somewhat simplified.) AI routines which with the improved CPU usage and more draw calls made possible via D3D12 is still playable though it will likely be a very demanding game even after release and with AMD and Nvidia having made optimized driver profiles for the game.
Well the technical side of this game might be impressive, or is in the work of being so.
But if the gameplay is not good at release, this is just a glorified tech demo for me. :O
Enthoo Evolv ATX TG // Asus Prime x370 // Ryzen 1700 // Gainward GTX 1080 // 16GB DDR4-3200
Those jaw dropping visuals look pretty bad. Only the units look somewhat good. But who plays RTS most of the time zoomed in to fap to awesome textures?!
Thats one of Brad Retard Wardell's fixations. Jesus Christ that man is rock stupid. I've tried talking some sense into him on their forums, and so did others, but the guy thinks he invented MOBA's and Strategic zoom in strategy games. Jesus Chris almighty. You point out Homeworld did in the 90's and he either pretends he doesn't see or he tries to make it as if that's something else that doesn't count.
So one of his fixations is that he absolutely doesn't want Supreme Commander's strategic zoom, because they don't want players to look at icons as they play. He absolutely doesn't budge on this matter. I thing there're hundreds of posts of people trying to convince him that we need that kind of zoom to be able to play efectively, especially on the huge ass maps he keeps trying to sell us. But there's no chance, he bit the no icons like SupCom bone and he's keeping it.
So he makes core game design decisions based on the fact that he wants you to see the unit textures instead of alowing you to play in the most efficient manner. I've rarely got to see a dumber dude than this one. And he's the big boss, he decides everything. God help us
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It does show the, frankly phenomenal, improvements in performance from DX11 to DX12 though.. that's impressive.
) but right now the benchmark is anything but, being 1080p/Medium/NoAA and still struggling to break 50 on high-end cards. Granted it's a benchmark so it's usually designed to be far more taxing than any real world situation you'd encounter in the final game, but yeah..
