sins uses the iron engine by ironclad.

harpo

Is this just graphical engine, or does it concern things like AI, physics and other stuff? And how about Iron engine for example? If you hypothetically collaborated with Ironclad on Sins 2  (and you should). would that game be based purely on Nitrous or some combo of Iron Engine (or its successor) and Nitrous handling graphics?

I am not a programmer, but i am genuinely interested how it works, obviously at certain level of abstraction, so i can actually comprehend it.

EDIT: Anyway, congrats. Looking forward to see some techdemo or something showing its actual capabilities. 

looks neat.

it's a bit puzzling that something being presented as a fit for strategy or RPG games only solves a problem which would make the games less about strategy or role-playing...

it's like saying Total War is a better strategy game if you have to control 10 times as many units in a battle.

I just saw this on GI.

It's the Civ V team combined with Frogboy! That's insanely awesome!

I sure wish Total War games didn't look like crap though. Strategy Games are so far behind first person shooters in graphics quality. 

so.. given the multi core focus, how would the extra cores on amd compare to the intel quads?

*drool*

I'm cautiously optimistic.  There were a lot of disappointments with Civilization V ... I think the biggest buzzkill of the game for me, though, is it doesn't efficiently multi-thread.  In late game on large maps, end turn processing can take over a minute (!) to process, taxing out one core at 100% while my other cores sit idle.  Taking a minute to complete a turn is atrocious ... I was hoping Firaxis would have noticed GalCiv2's notion of processing AI rivals while the human player is taking his/her turn which is why (as Brad has earned the right to boast about) GalCiv2 doesn't have end turn waits (aside from waiting for unit automoves to complete).

Well ...... if the reality lives up to the Theoretical Outline .... this will be an Industry Game Changer on the same scale of change as when the world moved from 32bit to 64 bit. Its not just an enhancement, its a Big Generational Level Change. Lets hope all the current Partners retain enthusiasm, turn theory into practice, and marketing preamble into reality.

Nice one

I think strategy games and complex simulators (like SimCity .... ugh, don't get me started on five ... :/) would both benefit greatly from 64 bit CPUing.  I guess it was too much to hope this new engine could apply to GC3 ... but hopefully it could be a place to test some things out, and maybe a future GC3 expansion could make use of it .... though that would probably not be realistic either, since expansions tend to just use relatively minor enhancements to the original engine.  Maybe the next Elemental expansion/game/iteration/title/buh-wut-do-you-wanna-call-eet?

This engine looks like it will turn the strategy genre on it's head. I'm looking forwards to see this in action, eventually.

Sins 1 eh? Does that mean there's plans for a Sins 2?

Poke a frog hard enough, things leak out

Yea, that's a different thing entirely.  The main problem with most 3D engines is that they still rely on a "main thread".  But Nitrous implements SWARM which is blind to how many cores. It just uses whatever the most free core available. The more cores, the faster.

Exactly.  The difference isn't subtle. It's not like when you see a demo of something and you go "I...think that looks better." It's a much bigger leap.

Let me give you an example:

The Kumquat engine, which is a DirectX 9 engine, can handle something like 3 point lights.  A current, state of the art 3D game can handle say a hundred or so.  The Nitrous engine can handle thousands.  The same is true on 3D objects.  You get above a couple hundred and even a modern rig will start to crawl. But Nitrous can handle tens of thousands.

The reason it can do that is because it inherently uses all the cores on both the CPU and the GPU. It's the result of an engine that's been designed and programmed by people who've been making this stuff for decades being able to begin, from scratch with multicore and 64-bit configs as the starting point. That's the main reason why Intel, AMD, and Nvidia are backing it so publicly.  They've seen it in action.  

When I see my highly detailed minions dieing by the thousands I will laugh.