Dawn of War 2

Of course all the innovation in the world won’t help if the game looks like crap, but that’s not a problem DoW2’s going to suffer. The detail in the settings and character models has been beefed up to take advantage of the Essence Engine, and the environment is fully in sync with the Havok physics engine. But what does this mean for gameplay?

Well, here’s a short description of one part of the demo we saw: your squad is pinned down by advancing Orks. They can’t push you out of cover, but there are too many of them to overcome. The air is full of the vapour trails from rocket-powered bolt rounds from your Marines’ bolters, and shell casings fall and tinkle over the stony ground. Then, with a scream of jump jets the cavalry arrives – Assault Marines drop in amongst the Orks, their jets scattering them amongst the rubble, their chainswords hewing them down in swathes of blood and gore. As the assault intensifies, rockets fire, flames roar, buildings collapse, and bodies are strewn about the ruins. Or, as we wrote in our notes on the day: “Physics + destructible environments + flamers = WIN.”

Of course, adapting the mechanics of Company of Heroes into a world where close combat is the ultimate arbiter of victory presented some serious challenges to the programmers.

“Our biggest challenge is pathfinding. CoH was all about destructible environments and ranged combat; but melee really changes that,” says Jeff Hill, one of the project’s programmers. “You get a large unit and small units fighting hand to hand, and you end up with some really odd pathing.”

Pathfinding of course feeds into unit AI, and Relic is doing its best to imbue units with some hefty thinking power. “We’re trying to make units intelligent, in the way they search for cover, set up weapons, or even where they aim while they walk in a squad,” he went on to say, “choosing intelligent points to watch and cover each other.”



But for each advance in squad AI and environmental physics, comes a new challenge. “Intelligence is a difficult problem,” Jeff said with a sigh. “There are a lot of numerical issues with how a unit works out what is good cover and not. Make the numbers too loose and a unit will cross the map to hunker down at the best cover, or a unit can constantly get caught moving from one wall to another, setting up their weapons, and then deciding that the first wall was best.”

But there have also been some elegant solutions to be found in the new approach. Knock-back in CoH was purely physics-based, but since 40k is so much more over the top, the programmers have had to code in new parameters for knock back that can be applied on a per weapon basis, and with variables covering height, speed and distance of ground covered. Not only does this make for cool explosions and unique effects for each weapon, but in one instance in the demo, when a ship in orbit fired on the surface to annihilate a whole bunch of Orks, nearby greenskins floated into the air as if gravity itself were being ruptured, and then were blasted away – something the programmers had never even envisioned when they gave the new knock-back code over to the designers.