News
Ashes of the Singularity Now Available
Plymouth, MI. - October 22, in the year of our Lord
2015 - Stardock announced that its new epic real-time
strategy game, Ashes of the Singularity, is now available for
Early Access on Steam today.
In Ashes of the Singularity, the player builds and commands
massive armies to take control of entire worlds across the
galaxy while defeating opponents with the same goal. Victory is
achieved either through annihilating all enemies or by capturing
and holding key resources that are spread across the planet.
“What makes Ashes of the Singularity special is just the sheer
scale of the game," said Brad Wardell, President & CEO of
Stardock. “This isn't a battle, it's a war. Players are building
and controlling thousands, potentially tens of thousands of
units, fighting on several fronts simultaneously. The war rages
across an entire planet and is part of a greater war spread
across the galaxy."
To accomplish this new level of scale, the game makes use of a
new type of 3D engine called Nitrous. Developed by Oxide Games,
Nitrous was designed specifically for modern, multi-core
hardware requiring a 64-bit OS and DirectX 11 as a minimum. It
is also the first engine to natively support DirectX 12.
“Ashes of the Singularity really shows off what is possible on
modern hardware,” said Dan Baker, principal graphics architect
at Oxide Games. "The rendering method we use in Nitrous is
essentially the same as the techniques CGI in movies have used,
except on modern hardware we can do it in real-time."
Another notable feature of the game is its multi-core AI system,
possibly the first in a real-time strategy game.
"Traditionally, real-time strategy games haven't had very
sophisticated AI," said Wardell. "That's because RTS's normally
have their AI running on one CPU core. In Ashes, the AI splits
up all of its jobs across every core on the player's machine.
Even in Early Access, the AI provides enough of a challenge that
we had to turn down the default difficulty to penalize the AI."
While Ashes of the Singularity has a strong single-player game,
the game also has plenty for multiplayer fans including ranked
matchmaking, a persistent game universe, personal player
metagaming features, and more. While the Early Access version is
now available on Steam, Stardock cautions that it isn't for
everyone.
"We are still fairly early in development," said Wardell. "Only
people with very high end hardware who are experienced strategy
game players should consider joining Early Access. There's still
lots of work to be done such as global player abilities and an
additional playable race, as well as perfecting what is, after
all, a very cutting edge engine. There will be bumps. We very
much are looking for player input."