ECTS 2002PeriMeter first impressions

At ECTS 2002, we visited with 1C Company, the Russian developer of the award-winning flight simulation IL-2 Sturmovik and the promising WWII RTS, which is still currently in development. Unfortunately, neither WWII RTS nor the upcoming expansion pack for IL-2 were on display at ECTS. Fortunately, we were able to watch the company's new futuristic strategy game, PeriMeter, in motion.

PeriMeter will be an unorthodox real-time strategy game that won't use traditional resource gathering. Instead, the most important resource in the game is flat land. Players will have a few basic vehicles available to them at the start, including the brigadier, a tractorlike unit that outlines the area they wish to terraform and then flattens out hills and depressions enough to let players build structures, since buildings (like energy cores, your only source of energy in the game) can be built only on flat land. Once players have terraformed enough land, they can build a main base, called a "frame," on it. Frames are huge cities enclosed in transparent domes--a close look at them reveals a futuristic metropolis with tiny skyscrapers and various vehicles moving about. PeriMeter can casily spare this sort of detail, since it's one of the first games ever to push a million polygons in a single frame of animation. And the game features fully real-time deformation on its terrain. In one impressive demonstration, we watched a valley get carved into the side of a mountain by an industrious brigadier.

Of course, there seems to be more to PeriMeter than a simple, cheap gimmick. The game will also allow players considerable freedom in creating their armies, since it will let players begin the game with access to three basic units: soldiers, officers, and technicians. Each of these three basic units can be combined with another unit to create a more sophisticated and specialized military unit. And sneaky players can simply sneak a brigadier into their neighbors' territory and dig up their oppponents' backyards, rendering them unable to build a large enough base to defend themselves.

PeriMeter is currently scheduled for release in the first half of 2003.