Age of Empires III Q&A - Technology Overview

Simply by virtue of its announcement, Age of Empires III instantly became one of the most anticipated PC games of 2005. It's no secret that the first Age of Empires games are two of the most successful and popular real-time strategy games ever made. However, Age of Empires II is almost 6 years old at this point, an eternity in computing terms. While developer Ensemble Studios released the successful Age of Mythology in 2002, fans still yearned for a return to the Age of Empires series. And with Age of Empires III, they'll get it, as the first screenshots of the game to be released so far are nothing less than astounding. For the details on the impressive technology behind Age of Empires III, we caught up with Dave Pottinger, the lead programmer of the game and the director of technology at Ensemble Studios.

Age of Empires III will take place in the New World. It will also have plenty of new, high-end graphical features.

GameSpot: What were the design goals behind the new engine, besides "it should look really good"? What kind of gameplay did you envision the engine to support? Are there specific gameplay features, like weather effects, environmental deformation, modeled physics for units getting knocked back by cannons, and so on, that the team found itself building tech for into the new engine?

Dave Pottinger: Simple. We told the team to make the best-looking PC game ever. A simple statement that was anything but simple to execute. When we started Age 3, we knew that we had some really cool gameplay ideas to try out. How do you not have that after doing real-time strategy games for 10 years? But, we wanted to recapture some of the initial "holy crap" visual appeal that we got when we showed Age 1 for the first time. Going high-end with the graphics was an easy way to do that. It hadn't been done before in our genre, we had a lot of guys who were crazy excited to do it, and it was hugely bold. So bold, in fact, that we've had a lot of internal discussions about whether it was smart to shoot that high. In the end, the fans will tell us whether we've made the right choice with the graphical direction. We're certainly happy with the current results.

Gameplay-wise, yes, the graphics do drive the gameplay, and vice versa. We try to leverage opportunities in each all of the time. A good example would be cutting down trees. We put physics in for a bunch of things like building destructions and rag-doll effects. But one afternoon a programmer grabbed me and showed me how cool it looked when we put physics on the trees as they fell. It was a perfect extension. Throw in a tiny little camera shake as the tree hits, and the effect is great. It extends the other way, too. Since the trees are physics-enabled, an errant cannonball can hit them and knock them down. Stuff like that is just cool.

GS: When did the team begin working on the game, approximately? Does this represent the evolutionary growth of the existing Age of Mythology engine, or did you end up more or less starting from scratch? Are there any specific lessons the team has taken from previous games, like Age of Mythology or the original Age of Empires 2D series, that are being incorporated into the new game's development?

DP: We started with about seven people right after Age of Mythology shipped. We're up to considerably more than that right now. Apart from a couple of prototype teams, most of our studio is working on Age 3. We started with the Age of Mythology engine. That was nice because we had built-in fallbacks. Age of Mythology was a tough development cycle because we rewrote everything. We were adding core functions to the Age of Mythology engine right up until ship. (Who really wants to work on localization code early?) It was liberating to start with that stuff behind us.

By now, though, so much of the Age of Mythology engine has been replaced that the code base feels very different. We've certainly tried to carry all of the knowledge we've collected over the years into the new code. If there was one thing that we learned from Age of Mythology, it was to really finish features every time we do them. Age 3 has been a smoother development because we've taken that extra bit of time with the various development tasks to try to keep things sane. It helps a lot, particularly since Ensemble is a massively iterative game company. We throw stuff out all of the time. If 25 percent of the gameplay code that I've written for Age 3 is still there when we ship, I'll be very surprised. So, you can imagine how tempting it is just to slap something quick in the code and move on. We've found that just creates too many problems down the road.

And, yes, we worked on localization early this time.

GS: The game really looks good, even this far out, so we'll go ahead and ask: What are some of the really cool technical features that are being built in the game? Pixel shaders? Vertex shaders? Environmental bump-mapping?

DP: Yes, yes, and yes. The single biggest graphical feature is probably the move to high dynamic range lighting. That allows us to have scenes that look much more natural because, in layman's terms, we have more dials to make the lights brighter. That results in a world where you can really feel the sunshine and the heat. Lighting is a subtle beast. It's one of those things that doesn't necessarily jump out at you. If it's good, it just feels right. The best compliment someone can pay to our game's lighting is to say, "Wow. That looks real."

The level of detail is almost astounding. Look carefully--those are turtles sunning themselves on those logs.

GS: What kind of system requirements are you aiming at, both in terms of minimum requirements and optimum requirements? Will you need any specific kind of hardware, such as a hardware transform-and-lighting-capable video card? How will the game scale down for older machines? Any plans to build special support for current and/or next-generation hardware features?

DP: Our games have always sold a bazillion copies, so we definitely focus on hitting a wide hardware market. Our games sell for years, so we have to be smart about what we support, both in terms of what we ship on day one to what's going to be coming out in the future.

Age 3 will support fixed-function cards, all the way up to the newer shader model 3.0 cards. Obviously, the better your machine, the nicer your game will look. I would easily expect that the game has enough high-end graphical features that most folks won't be able to crank it all the way up right away. The hardware still has a bit of catching up to do.