I love Stardock. I really do. But I’ve been seeing someone else for the past year or so…

I don’t know exactly how it started.  But I was talking to friends of mine in the industry and we’ve all been frustrated with the direction of 3D game engines.   The hardware has been there for awhile that would allow us to have some amazing looking visuals and performance for strategy and role playing games but the software just wasn’t there. They’ve been focusing on first person shooters to the point where even RPGs now have to be made as first person shooters in order to have decent visuals (which if you think about it, is ridiculous).

Remember the huge battles in Two Towers and Return of the King? We should be able to have those kinds of visuals in our games. Today. Your modern video card is capable of it. You take 64-bit, DirectX 11 (or Mantle) and a modern video card and you can do amazing things in theory. Unfortunately, the software has tended to focus on first person shooters. In those games, the player only sees a handful of units at the same time.  Ask someone at Nvidia, AMD or Intel and they will tell you how frustrating it’s been to create this amazing hardware only to have it sit there idle most of the time.

So what could we do about that? That’s where I started talking more and more to Dan Baker, Tim Kipp, Brian Wade, Marc Meyer and later Nathan Heazlett.  What would it take to develop a new type of 3D engine that we could use and others could use to power strategy games and role playing  games where you could have thousands and thousands of high fidelity objects on screen at the same time. 

That’s where the idea of Oxide was born.  If we could bring together some of the industry’s top talent, put them in a room and provide them with enough resources, we could create something amazing. We’re calling the engine Nitrous and it’s spectacular. If you look at the the Oxide press release you will see quotes from AMD, Intel and Nvidia in there. They’ve seen it. And soon, so will you.

Today, we are finally ready to tell the world about Oxide. Mainly, we have to because some of the things we’re working are are about to get shown by our partners and people would wonder who and what Oxide was and where it came from.

Most game developers, especially ones involved in graphical game development, know, or can imagine, exactly the kinds of things Oxide is working on. But for everyone else who is reasonably technical, imagine a brand new, built from scratch, 3D engine designed with multicore processors and 64-bit from the ground up. No legacy code. No baggage.  Just pure awesome. 

To learn more about Oxide, visit www.oxidegames.com